Joseph Rueter: [00:00:00] So how'd you go from game play to game pro? Oh,
Johannes Ahvenniemi: I made my first dollar.
Nate Kadlac: Welcome to the Hey, Good Game podcast, where we chat with the creators of your favorite games that you secretly play in the cracks of your day.
Aaron Kardell: I'm Aaron Kardall, and I'm here with my cohost, Joseph Reuter. Today, we're excited to speak with Johannes Ahvenniemi, a mobile game industry veteran who worked with well known companies like Seriously Digital and Rovio Entertainment.
With a long history of programming games independently and with a team, his creations range from his own Undernet series, A Zombie Splatter, to working on worldwide hits like Best Fiends and Angry Birds. I also was recently introduced to some of his games in the App Store. That go under the moniker by Sam.[00:01:00]
Highly praised for being a team player and a great mentor. He has been fulfilling lead roles since 2018. Johannes, we're thrilled you're here.
Johannes Ahvenniemi: Thank you. Quite an introduction. I didn't remember all of those things you mentioned, Oh,
Aaron Kardell: we always to ask is our first question. What's your favorite game to play?
Johannes Ahvenniemi: Favorite game to play at the moment. I've been playing Dave the diver quite a bit. That's something I can just pick up on my Steam deck and play. I rarely sit down at a like computer and actually play games on consoles a bit more. I like playing games on console that I can play with my wife. So maybe a bit more story driven.
That's more interesting to her. Also recently finished, not that story driven, but we finished Agent A. That was very nice. It's like a first person point and click escape room game. I've actually [00:02:00] been trying to find more games like that, but it seems like it's a pretty unique, game. Yeah, that, that was really fun.
That's pretty much it. On mobile, not that much. I have a hard time finding good games on mobile and finding the time to actually play them. Feels like I'd rather be working than playing games on mobile. Maybe it feels a bit like work for me.
Joseph Rueter: Love that. Your favorite game to play is on Steam. Do you have others right now?
You're saying you're wanting a Escape room, like a first person escape room, huh?
Johannes Ahvenniemi: Yeah. Yeah. That's something, it's a bit of a hobby of mine and my wife's. We play escape games, both physical and digital, but we actually don't go that often to the rooms. We make this, we do this board games at home and play digital ones and.
We're actually making our own also, we have this, escape puzzle magazine that we're selling [00:03:00] on our own online store. It's a hobby, it's not making much profit, but it's a lot of work and it's fun to make them.
Joseph Rueter: That was my next question. What's the audience base, the total addressable market for first person escape games, digital escape games.
Johannes Ahvenniemi: It's hard to say if there's any. If we talk about the physical ones like the magazines, the market for those I feel are female, plus 30 female, maybe people who would perhaps like a puzzle experience, but they don't perhaps play digital games, or they don't want to go to an escape room that might be very stressful for them with a time limit.
And yeah, they're maybe not familiar with games, but the magazine we hope is a familiar format for them. So they can just pick up the magazine and start enjoying the story that, is connected through completing puzzles. But we were looking for ideas for these magazines by [00:04:00] playing these digital games, and we are fantasizing of one day making also a digital one, but we're wondering if the, audience is actually quite different.
If you can take the audience we have for the magazines to the digital one we eventually make. Might be a tough sell.
Joseph Rueter: Curious to ask about, I don't think I've done a physical escape room. It was, there's something about that seems wrong. I don't want to do that. what do you mean I'm locked in here?
I don't get it. So when you said digital, I was like, Ooh, I wonder if the audience base is bigger in a digital environment. Cause you're not physically constrained.
Johannes Ahvenniemi: Yeah, it definitely is looking at sales numbers on. These steam analytics websites, all the escape games are doing quite a bit of profit And there's not that many of them. It seems like it's something that the market is craving at the moment, but it's not there. But yeah, making a Steam game is a big, [00:05:00] project and it's not something I've ever done before. I've only been working on mobile and web, but maybe someday.
Joseph Rueter: Maybe someday. Cool.
so how did you get into this? I understand maybe a family member provoked your interest in ones and zeros.
Johannes Ahvenniemi: Oh, yes. It was my brother. Like I don't know how he figured it out, how he picked up coding, but I was just looking at what he did. He was, I was like maybe five and I just wanted to do what he was doing.
I couldn't read or write, but I knew how to type on our Amstrad. I don't know the Amstrad. It wasn't our main computer, but it was like a toy that I could play with. I could type in like line, circle and some numbers and get. Stuff appearing on the screen trial and error. I was able to actually draw stuff eventually.
I also wanted to move stuff on the screen. I remember, during this robot circles and lines, and I wanted to move it. So I went to my [00:06:00] dad, he knew something about computers, but maybe not about coding, but I wanted him to help me move the robot. And this very specific request. I remember there was this robot and a box and I wanted the robot.
To move to the box, slide up and slide to the right over the box. So nothing crazy, nothing, not animations or anything, but yeah, like I remember him reading this Amstrad manual or something and trying to figure it out, but he couldn't really help me, but my brother then helped me a bit when I moved on to QBasic, I continued with lines and stuff there, but there he taught me how to clear the screen, do a loop with go to and variables, and that's all I needed to actually animate stuff I was drawing.
Yeah, then I guess I learned about inputs and I could interact with the stuff and. Yeah, then I never stopped, kept making games and coding and still learning every day.
Joseph Rueter: That's fantastic. I made a [00:07:00] Mario do what you were describing, but I just use A and B. I just,
Johannes Ahvenniemi: I also played Mario as a kid. A lot of good games have always been there for me.
Aaron Kardell: You had me at a QBasic. I love to hear that you got started there. A lot of good memories. Was that, what kind of device was a QBasic on? I
Johannes Ahvenniemi: need to 3, 8, 6, like 33 megahertz computer. And every time my brother got like a proper computer, I got, his old computer as a toy at First RA in that.
Joseph Rueter: So how'd you go from game play to Game Pro?
okay, let's make money doing this. Oh,
Johannes Ahvenniemi: I made my first dollar or Euro here in Finland making flash games. It took me a while to get there. Like I was making games with C and Java and anything but flash because flash had this weird, didn't feel like a [00:08:00] real programming language or That was for script kiddies, not for real programmers.
But then one day I just swallowed my pride. I realized that there's actually distribution channels for flash games. You can put ads in them and I just made a few and actually made a few dollars with them. And I guess that's when I became a professional. Of course I was studying and It wasn't full time and I couldn't quite live of it.
But That's how I made my first dollars. And then I guess that took me then to like real game job when I joined Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds, they were making Web versions of Angry Birds and they were making them in Flash. So now that I had experience in Flash, I applied for a job and luckily got in.
It was during the crazy growth period of Rovio when they went from I don't know, 10 employees to 800 in a couple of years. So I was somewhere there in the [00:09:00] mix. And that was a very nice place, actually. I really liked my time there.
Joseph Rueter: The last time I played Angry Birds, it was with a golf club. At one of these golf simulators, where you could dial up.
My kids picked it. let's play Angry Birds! And so you get like the animation on the screen and you hit a ball as if you were launching it, right? So they've taken that and gone all kinds of places. What are some of the core things you learned moving into a paid role there, and It being a role that had a lot of scaling happening around you.
Johannes Ahvenniemi: Teamwork up until then, I had worked with one friend who was the artist for the games or some of the games I was making, but now there was a team, there was hierarchies, I couldn't just. do what I wanted. I had to, it wasn't a problem. It was like surprising that it was easy. I could just do what was asked from me [00:10:00] and that was enough, but it was a lot of fun to work with the people, learn to work with other people and other disciplines.
There were designers, producers, managers, and more managers. And at some point it got pretty crazy with the levels of management that were over here. I think that also made it even more fun because it brought our small team together. We were like this small team inside this massive structure of hierarchies and we're Oppressed by the hierarchy and it really brought us together.
we're still bonding together with the people I worked with back then. And that's already how long ago? I'm tempted to say 10, but it's more, it's 15 or something. Okay. Yeah. Must be quite a while ago. It was a lot of fun.
Aaron Kardell: So we've got an international audience here. Can you just give us a little bit of a backdrop on the game industry in Finland?
I know, as we were talking about that earlier, it was, quite impressive, just [00:11:00] all the companies there.
Johannes Ahvenniemi: Yeah, Finland is doing pretty good with the games we have. first of all, we have Rovio with the Angry Birds, and I think that's. One of the things that really kicked off the industry, we had other stuff before that we have Remedy, we have Housemarque.
They're more AAA, very old established companies that have done great games and still doing great stuff. And then we had Assembly. What is it like a convention where people come with their computers and play games together and they always had competitions for coders who made, makes the best demos or the best games and somehow, and then we have Nokia, a lot of, software engineers.
We're coming from Nokia also during the big growth of Rovio. So suddenly we had these passionate people who had been doing this stuff from since they were a child, we had Nokia people with the experience of running a big company and. And then we had this super massive [00:12:00] successful game, Angry Birds, and it all came together at Rovio.
Like suddenly it was a massive company. Everyone was working there. And then it started shrinking down and people left Rovio for other new companies and they would continue this, growth. But then there's also Supercell, which actually did not come from Rovio. That was people who decided. Not to go to Rovio.
A lot of people from Digital Chocolate back in the days when that closed down went to Rovio and the other people went to Super, from Supercell. And they're obviously doing really well still, Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, 8A, Brawl Stars doing really well nowadays. Yeah, they keep improving their game all the time.
Then we have, MetaCore, which started the new merge boom in the mobile space. There's, which is actually owned by Supercell mostly, or it's like a, yeah. Supercell [00:13:00] investing company. We have a small giant games owned by Zynga and they make the puzzles and empires or empires and puzzles. That's a huge hit.
Big hit games, and also seriously, which I've worked at after Rovio.
Aaron Kardell: Briefly tell us a little bit more about your time at Seriously.
Johannes Ahvenniemi: My time at Seriously, I joined Seriously at a quite early stage of the company. Some people left Rovio to form this new puzzle company. They approached me. And I agreed to join.
It was a very exciting opportunity. I did working at Rovio, but it was exciting to think that I could get to work on a smaller team on an important project and like really untap my potential. So I joined them and it was quite right. We published best VNs very quickly. Quickly and the game, it did really well.
It was early enough before there were so many of the match games, match [00:14:00] three games, it got a bit before the boom really took off and the game did well, the company did well. Eventually it was acquired by Playtica from Israel. I left the company around that time. I, the company had grown. I really liked.
People there. I liked working there. I met my wife there. She was there until the end, but I left a bit earlier to fulfill again, my own passions, because I really started to feel I've been working at companies now for a while. I used to do my own stuff and I've been doing stuff for others, but I have so many ideas that I want to try out now.
And. Yeah, I really, had to get this, do the stuff I had on my mind. So decided to leave and start doing my own stuff for a while.
Joseph Rueter: Great. What was the first one you're like, ah, I'm out of my own. Ah, it's the first swing.
Johannes Ahvenniemi: The first thing I did was actually, I got the idea at seriously. It was the [00:15:00] time when playable ads.
Started being a thing. I was looking at the playable ads and the quality of the ads was just awful in my opinion like We had a company making a playable ad for best fiends and it was a pre recorded video Where the user would like tap on the screen and the video would change into a new video Faking as if you've done some interaction and it's whoa I could do better.
I could do better. I also, because I've been doing on the side, my own engines and like low level stuff and like really grassroots level stuff of game development, I felt like there was a gap in the market for someone who can make playable ads because everyone was using unity and I felt like no one even knew how to make games anymore.
Without using unity and playable ads could not be made with unity because was too big, too heavy. That had to be a very small [00:16:00] light to start immediately, so I figured. I could make an engine where I could quickly create playable ads and sell them to companies. So I would become a company that creates playable apps.
And my specialty was that I replicated all the core parts of Unity, like 2D rendering, 3D rendering, particles, UI layout, animations. mainly those and physics. I replicated them in my engine in the same format. So I could import a whole project from unity, close the gap between a game that has been made in unity and a playable ad that can't be made with unity.
So I would go to companies and say Hey, I can export your game onto this much smaller engine. No need to redo all UI layouts and level designs. It will all run into ad. And when you want to tweak the ad, when you want to iterate on it, you can still use [00:17:00] Unity to do that. You don't need a new tool. You can create or tweak the ad.
In the familiar tools, I would say it went pretty well. The tool was functional. I even got a client, but I was really bad at marketing still. Like I, I didn't, I couldn't just go to companies and say Hey, I have this amazing tool. I didn't know who to go to. And. But there was one company I did approach and they were interested, they are, they were Lightnir.
They had this game called Hammer Jump, which was a small success in the hypercasual space. It was their most successful game and they wanted a playable ad for that, and they had tried many other playable ad companies. So I got to see what the problem was with them, like why did they not Want to use them.
Why did they want something else? And I could offer that and I could then focus my marketing on that. So I felt it was a pretty good business, but then a better opportunity came up. So I put that on hold.
Aaron Kardell: [00:18:00] on the surface, that sounds like a killer idea. And I don't know much about playable ads or how they're created today, but I can say just anecdotally, when I've seen some of these mobile ads, it's fascinating to me, like how.
Complex the ads themselves are that you can get so far along and playing some of these levels. And you're like, wait, I'm still in an ad, So that sounds like a smart idea. Yeah.
Johannes Ahvenniemi: And the, quality has gone up a lot. So now, I don't really think I have a competitive edge anymore. If I went with my tool now, they would be like, yeah, we already have this partner who does this for us.
yeah, now it would be too late.
Aaron Kardell: When you say a better opportunity came up, was this the, opportunity to co found a company? And, that was, I believe, Papakaya?
Johannes Ahvenniemi: Indeed. I was approached by Drusilla Hollanda, who was a former Supercell [00:19:00] game lead. She was the Super, game lead on Hay Day. And She had heard, someone had recommended me to her.
She had a deal with Supercell that she would get the funding from Supercell to start a new company if she finds the founding team. And it seemed like a very, first of all, it was very, I was flattered that someone from Supercell wanted me on, their team, but yeah, getting to work closer to Supercell, which is it's.
Everyone thinks very highly of Supercell in Finland, especially. It's like the dream place for everyone to work at. At the same time, it would be a startup. So I wouldn't be part of a bigger structure. I could have more impact on what we're doing. And Russella approached me. I was flattered. And also the mission of Papukaija, the pitch she gave me really spoke to me.
By then I was a bit burnt out by. The free to play market. I wasn't a big fan. I didn't think I would go [00:20:00] back to making free to play games, but then she pointed out that there's like this Massive unbalance in who makes the games and who plays the games the majority of developers are men, but actually the majority by now of mobile game players are female So she proposed a company where we would, first of all, target this like underserved audience with female players and actually build a team who is more diverse, who can cater to these more diverse audience.
And I felt like that was a very. Very exciting challenge. I like mentoring. I like teaching people. And that would mean that we would probably have to bring fresh blood from outside the industry, bringing people who maybe never considered that they would like to make games, but get them excited about making games and teach them how to make games, shift the whole perspective into how games are made and who [00:21:00] makes them.
That, that was like an interesting challenge more so than coming up with the next. big hit game for the mobile game market, because I felt that was a dead end. It was so explored and like very tough road and not something I wanted to pursue 100%, but building the team and teaching people, that was very interesting to me.
So yeah, it sounded like an awesome opportunity and I put everything else on hold and went with that.
Joseph Rueter: Fantastic. What are like, three things you do differently now when you're teaching? as a result of that experience.
Johannes Ahvenniemi: Something I learned during Papukkaija is to also speak my own mind, not only listen, but also tell what I'm thinking, not only in teaching, but also in teaching.
That gives confirmation to the people, like we're in the same wavelength. I would say I used to [00:22:00] err on the side of listening more, so I would just Maybe nod my head and listen out, but also like more proactively give my own input and not, to be afraid to perhaps, point out mistakes or go against someone's opinion, because that can actually help also them to find their own way in thinking challenging people a bit more.
So yeah, I'm communicating more my own thoughts. That helps both in teaching, but also other stuff.
Joseph Rueter: Cool. So that was recent ish, last five years, right? And now you've, jumped on. Aaron was mentioning Sam, games by Sam. Is that, was that the next step? We don't know anything about that.
We've never done that before.
Johannes Ahvenniemi: One of the many next steps after Papukai, I went crazy. I went all over. I started doing so many things. [00:23:00] My main pursuit after that was actually making a game for Apple Arcade. I figured that seemed like something that would fit a small indie studio, possibly even one person's studio.
Though my goal was to create some, a pitch good enough for Apple Arcade that they would fund it, fund the project so I could actually hire a team. The intention wasn't to work alone, but still keep it small. I've figured, I've looked at the market and figured that a game that, is a bit like Stardew Valley, like these, live sim crafting games.
Could do well on mobile, on a subscription platform. For some reason, those games haven't really worked out as free to play. There hasn't been many free to play life, crafting scenes. There must be a reason. I didn't know what it is, but there must be a reason. So I figured maybe it works as a subscription game.
So that's what I pitched to Apple and they liked it. We did a few rounds of discussions and eventually after a long [00:24:00] process, they said no. And I can see now why, because their platform is full of these Stardew Valley type games. So I would say I was reading the market correct, but I was too late and my quality wasn't quite there with the competition.
The competition was coming on really hard. Now they have the Hello Kitty Island adventure. They have the Tamagotchi game, some Japanese, really cute pixel art game. They have the cozy cove. It's really nice. Yeah. I could not stand out there anymore.
Aaron Kardell: And so you've gone in, in multiple directions. We'll get to a few other of those, but let's spend some time on the, by Sam games.
So by my count, it looks like you've got, three of those games in the app store under that moniker. And just say from personal experience, we were talking about playable ads earlier and I, found one of the games because there was a [00:25:00] style of game that I. Really liked, but had a whole lot of ads.
So I went, looking for an alternative, amongst your, other things that you've been working on, you've got these, three by Sam games that I've seen in the app store. Can you tell us more about what the inspiration was for those?
Johannes Ahvenniemi: The by Sam games. They started soon after this bigger, life crafting scene game.
I was trying to pitch to Apple. I needed something small, like I felt like I haven't published a game since I was 20 or something. I had just been working on games and on other people's games. And most of the games I was working on never published. I wanted to show that I can publish a game. And at the same time, I was looking at my wife playing some games on mobile.
And also my mother in law was playing some games. And I was wondering about the quality of them and the amount of ads in them. I felt bad for [00:26:00] them for suffering for the ads. And also I felt like the quality could be way better for the size of the project they are. Like comparing the marketing budget, those games must have to the quality of the game didn't feel fair because I felt like I could beat those games in quality by myself.
I can't make a successful game because the mobile market is what it is. You need to have performance marketing and so on. But I did ask myself, like, how bad is the organic discovery actually on mobile? I knew organic discovery is not really a thing, but like, how bad is it? Actually, I didn't have any.
Clear idea on that. So I decided to try. So I took one of the most popular mobile games on the market at the moment. That was block puzzle, which I think is like a derivative of wood. A very nice game. Like they, they really earned their place at the top of [00:27:00] the most downloaded. It's gone through many iterations.
Like the whole mechanic brings together, they send some other games and. A great game, but very easy to copy. So I copied it just to see what happens if I don't put any ads and I put it in the title, like this is block puzzle, but with no ads, will people find it? Turns out they don't, but also turns out there's actually like thousands of block puzzles that are carbon copies of the most popular one.
I didn't do enough market research on that. I figured whatever, it's like a couple of weeks project. I'll just do it and see what happens. But I didn't give up. I thought okay, what if I try something else? What if I try something that isn't yet that copied? I wanted to try the Hexasort game next.
That was like a new game, new mechanic. Very interesting. it's really fascinating how that. [00:28:00] Mechanic was created. I don't really know the whole trail of iterations, but looking at older games by the same publisher, you can see it's not like it didn't come out of the blue. Someone worked on it and it's really brilliant mechanic.
And the quality of the leading one was quite bad. In my opinion, it was like great background with super saturated colors, looks like a hyper casual game. Which is fine, because that's what it is, but what if there is someone who likes this type of game, but wants a bit more quality and doesn't like apps?
Will they find my game? Since there, was no competition yet. I could make one and that's showing some promise. It's not yet great, but it's going upwards, and that's what makes it so exciting. It started with a couple of downloads per week, and now it's at 10 to 20 downloads per day. Where is it after two [00:29:00] months?
We'll see.
Aaron Kardell: It's only been out for two months, is that right? It's been out for a few months.
Joseph Rueter: Okay. These are the laws of exponential growth, right? it was one and two, and now it's 20 a day. And then,
Johannes Ahvenniemi: Hey, where's the top? It's exciting to see if it's an S curve or an exponential curve. It's very hard to predict.
At the moment, it looks a bit like an S curve, unfortunately, but it goes in waves. Everything goes in waves. And now it seems like
Joseph Rueter: a t shirt. That's a t shirt. Everything goes in waves.
Johannes Ahvenniemi: I always think about waves and trees. Everything is a wave or a tree in my mind.
Joseph Rueter: Talk more about that.
Johannes Ahvenniemi: Yeah, everything goes up and down.
Nothing is abrupt. Something, I think I realized this when I was brewing beer. I brew my own beer, and even if a degree in computer science, which involves a lot of Physics and math studies. Also, I did not [00:30:00] think of how things cool down. So I had this bucket of beer. I had to cool down. I put it outside in the cold and I took a temperature of it.
Then I can one hour later back to take another temperature. And then it's okay, so now I know how fast it cools down. It's like here. And after an hour it's here. So I just draw a line and then I'll know at what time it's cool enough. Of course, that's not, how it works. It's a curve. I could never.
If it was a line, it would go to zero degrees and under zero degrees, even if it's not that cold outside. Yeah, everything continues. Nothing is abrupt.
Joseph Rueter: I'm there. How about the trees? How do you, the waves and trees, like spikes?
Johannes Ahvenniemi: The trees are both in coding and in life. Everything is a tree. A person is a tree.
They grow branches and drop some, but they always leave a mark. You can also, you can, like trees, they also, they always go to the light. They grow many branches, [00:31:00] trying to find the branches that happen to find the light. It's not like they go for the light. They go in all directions and then they focus on the part that goes into the light.
So maybe that's also how I do choose my projects at the moment. And that's it. I've spread myself very thin, I have many projects and I'm testing out where is the light.
Aaron Kardell: And behind the scenes, so it's fair to say you don't have any monetization yet for the BISAM games, is that right? They're all free download, no ads.
I gather you've got some other things going on behind the scenes to keep the cash coming in. What else are you up to?
Johannes Ahvenniemi: I do consulting work. That's how I finance my crazy ambition projects that's required for a year or so. So I just focused on my own projects, but then I run out of cash. So I started consulting and it's been really nice.
Like I have a good client at the [00:32:00] moment, so I can balance. My consulting work with my own work really well, pre working hours and pays well enough so I can do it just half time.
Aaron Kardell: This is the, for our audience listening, this is a playbook to learn from. I think a lot of people out there would, aspire to.
Get a steady consulting job and use that to fund their other passions. So kudos to you for charting a path on that. And, I will say just for the audience, Johannes is, he's also very respectful of any of his consulting agreements. he will not disclose who he's working for. So good advertisement.
He will guard your secrets. Close to the vest. what's, what do you think is, next on, your own endeavors beyond the consulting, where are you headed next?
Johannes Ahvenniemi: I'm hoping that one of the games by San games would take off. That [00:33:00] would be like that. One potential path for now. I'm okay with three games.
I use that now as a portfolio. I will iterate them a bit, bring them to new platforms. I'll try some web platforms like Facebook, maybe some chat things at the same time, I've been doing this. One of my projects that seems promising is a Sudoku solver slash generator slash greater. I actually got the idea from your podcast.
I was listening to you talking with the good Sudoku guy, Zach, and he mentioned that there's not many Sudoku solvers available, like good ones, available online, because if someone has one, they can make money off it. And I had been toying around with this Sudoku solver idea implementation for quite a while, and that kind of gave me the kick to actually finish it and launch the beta [00:34:00] version of that recently.
So that's now done and I can focus on other stuff again, but I'm hoping that might take off. Like maybe there's clients who need a Sudoku library or an API or just levels. Let's see which one seems more, most lucrative for people. And then. I mentioned the escape game. We were doing the magazines with my wife, the escape puzzle magazines.
They seem they're not very profitable, but maybe one day we'll just manage to tweak the margins enough so we can start scaling it. And then at the same time, fantasizing of the, digital escape game. That could be a big based on what I'm seeing on. Yeah, just a bunch of projects. I'm hoping one of them finds the light.
Joseph Rueter: Under promise over deliver. So good. I was going to ask about how you allocate time when there's a bunch of projects around, which could be fun. Like on Monday, I don't think [00:35:00] about.
Johannes Ahvenniemi: That's a good question. I am not super good at it. I. Sit down at my, in front of my laptop in the morning and I'm like, okay, what do I do today?
Do I need money? I'll do some consulting. What do I feel like doing? Then maybe I focus more on one thing for a week. Like I, I guess I try to finish stuff. That's maybe it. I start something and then I try to finish it. And then everything else that just has to somehow fit in between there. So I can finish the thing I'm doing.
It can be just a feature. It can be like a, an optimization or yeah, just pretty much anything, but finishing stuff and, Yeah, I'm not planning too much.
Aaron Kardell: That's a good heuristic. what do I need and what do I feel like doing? Good deal. Johannes, if you want people to find you online, where should they look?
Johannes Ahvenniemi: They can find me on LinkedIn [00:36:00] and then adartis. fi is my domain for. My company through which I do consulting and all this. And then of course I have the sudokugen. com, which I just launched. And Games by Sam. Looking through one of these, I don't know, I've spread myself so thin. I don't know anymore who I am, how to contact me, maybe LinkedIn.
Joseph Rueter: We've been, look for my LinkedIn. Maybe when you're walking through Helsinki this summer on a trip, right? You could say, we could say hi.
Johannes Ahvenniemi: That would be nice. There's many conventions also in Helsinki. So I might, I'm not good at attending them, but I might start attending them more now that I have to start connecting with people and market and so on.
So yeah, meeting more people at Finnish conventions. Maybe, I'll be there.
Aaron Kardell: All right. thanks for listening. If you like this episode, we'd love to have you rate [00:37:00] our podcast on Apple or Spotify and let us know your favorite game to play in the comment or review section. Thanks so much, Johannes.
Johannes Ahvenniemi: Thank you.
