I'm someone who is curious about how the world works. Professionally, I work in energy engineering: building energy systems, thermodynamics, and heating and cooling technologies. Most of what I study is invisible, and the work is about putting that understanding into practice in real systems.
What interests me most is the order that emerges when many parts interact: the way heat moves, the way bacteria and plants affect one another in water, the intricate fractals that grow out of simple mathematical rules. They look like stories from unrelated fields, but for me they all start from the same curiosity.
Engineering and Curiosity
Once I understand a phenomenon, I want to build something with it. Reading the theory is rarely enough. My understanding gets deeper when I build the model, write the code, and watch the system run. That's how a simulation of heat transfer in buildings ended up in a game, and how I started describing a small shrimp tank with mathematical models.
Reality is always more complex than a model, and no model explains everything. I find that gap interesting rather than frustrating. There's always something left to explore between what we think we know and what we don't.
Science, Art, and a Little Aquarium
I love jazz and enjoy looking at paintings. Engineering and art are often treated as opposites, but I've never felt the need to keep them apart.
Shrimprium grew out of that. It began as a game about raising little shrimp. Over time I added models of the bacterial nitrogen cycle, plant photosynthesis, dissolved oxygen, inheritance and reproduction, and the movement of light and energy, one by one. Then I added pixel art, jazz, and some of my favourite paintings.
For some people it will simply be a relaxing game for watching shrimp. For others it can be a small lab for poking at the interactions of an ecosystem. I'd like it to work as both.
I also like experiences that let people experiment, fail, and figure things out for themselves instead of following a set answer. Finding a balance in a Shrimprium tank is meant to be that kind of experience.
On Creating Things
I didn't start out as a game developer. I began by building the things I wanted to make, one at a time, using what I knew from engineering and learning the rest as I went: programming, graphics, animation, music, and user experience.
Generative AI has been an important tool along the way. It helped me write code, learn new ways of making things, and attempt ideas I couldn't have managed alone. But deciding what to make, why it should exist, and what form it takes is still my job.
I don't think making something new always means inventing it from scratch. Sometimes it's enough to connect existing knowledge with ideas that seem unrelated, in your own way. Shrimprium is the small world I made like that.
One More Thing
I'm also a father, and raising a child has made it clearer what I care about. I want my child not to be afraid of failure, to feel good about having tried something and thought it through rather than only about doing it well, and to see the world as a place worth exploring.
My reasons for making games aren't so different. I want people to try things freely in a small world, run into outcomes they didn't expect, and enjoy the process, ideally with a calm, pleasant time along the way.
I plan to keep studying engineering, exploring new technologies, enjoying music and art, and making things that interest me. I don't know where that will lead, and that's a big part of why I enjoy it.