Who are Studiozone
Studiozone is an Indie game studio that focuses on developing games and graphic materials, although we mainly strive to work with Open Source software.
Mattias Eriksson founded Studiozone and have been in the 3D industry for as long as 15 years. He have always been fascinated by game development and things that surrounds it.
After working with industry standard software for years in game development, he wanted to start to do something by himself but mainly or if possible only with Open source software.
Then he came up with this idea about start up an indie game studio and do blogging about the tools that we use and come across during our journey.
The goal of the Studiozone website
We do believe it’s possible to create high quality material work with only Open source software, of course it can sometimes be a lot easier with paid software. But we think it’s a matter of how you tackle the tasks you are working on.
By experience we know that all software (paid and open source) have their strengths and weakness, but if you know the software in detail you usually know how to go around their weakness.
This is something we think people tends to forget regarding about the Open source technology, they usually think these tools or software have limitations that you can’t or is very difficult to work with.
That is one of many reasons why we think if we do a blog about our journey, it can increase understanding and acceptance for companies to use Open Source technology as a professional alternative.
Software that we use at Studiozone
As we mention before, Studiozone are mainly focus to only uses Open Source in our production pipeline. There is a lot of Open source software to get hands on but in our case this is most common Open source software we use.
Operative System
Ubuntu 20.04
2D Tools
Krita
Gimp
Inkscape
3D Tools
Blender
Meshroom
MeshLab
Instant Meshes
Dev. Tools
Studio Code
Godot Engine
GCC 9.3.0
Python 3.8.5
Other Tools
Subversion Edge
XWiki
Rocket.Chat
LibreOffice
We do have experience in other paid tools from our previous employer. But we do not use them in our production. Although we can use them if any of our clients wants to have materials in these formats.
Adobe
Photoshop
Illustrator
Substance Designer
Substance Painter
Game Engines
Unreal Engine
Unity 3D
Quixel
Mixer
Autodesk
Maya
Our members
Mattias Eriksson
Position: Founder of Studiozone
Background: Programmer / Technical Artist
Interest: Star Trek, Marvel TV/Movies, Fantasy Books, Music and Fishing
His role at Studiozone
Mattias Eriksson is involved in almost everything. For example programming, planning, graphics design and what content we will post on the Studiozone site.
He also do a lot of research on Open source software or other technical solution that can be useful for the studio.
His background
Mattias has a Bachelor Degree in Computer Graphic Science as education background and been working in 3D Industries as long as 15 years. Before that he was working as programmer for about 8 years.
He got interest for computer when he was 10 years old. Start to program (Basic) and doing art on his Commodore 64.
Career
He started his professional career as programmer (Java, Python Oracle, SQL and TCL) at an IT consult company in Sweden. After few year he had to change professional due IT industry crashed in Sweden.
Later he had a small company at his side during his main work (nothing to do with programming or graphics). He did some homepages in PHP with MySQL database and advertisement leaflet for minor clients.
Mattias decided later to educate into 3D computer graphics in university level. Then he found gscept in Skellefteå (Luleå University) and applied to the university.
After 3 years he took the Bachelor Degree and moved to Japan, Tokyo. There he study Japanese for 2 years and then got employed by a Japanese design studio BBDS. And there he still works.
Because he had programming experience since before, was he able quickly to become a Technical Artist for BBDS in Japan Tokyo. By all this time he have been involve in many game projects like “The Evil Within 2”, “NieR:Automata”, “Gunslinger Stratos 2” and more.
Meantime he made a lot of technical inhouse solutions for BBDS, for example doing scripts for Maya or for Photoshop that helps their production pipeline. Furthermore he also setup and maintained SVN, XWiki, Chat server for internal use to help the communication and data sharing in the studio.
Mattias was later involved in two of BBDS own games as shader programmer (HLSL – Unity 3D) and AI Designer (Blueprints – Unreal Engine).