Take a seat, a warm coop of tea and I'll tell you my life story. Maybe listen to one of my song in the background:
Who I am
Let's start in the current time. My name is Jonas Sandstedt, and I'm currently living in Sweden, working as a senior Front-end Developer at Fully Studios and part-time on our sister-company The Fully Arcade as an Technical Artist and overall game developer.
In my spare-time I'm developing my own games, mostly focusing on VR (Virtual Reality) and MR (Mixed Reality). Time to time I also compose music or play drums in a jazz-sextet.
My background
When I was a kid, I painted a lot, made comics with a cousin, build with LEGO™, build small micro-towns in paper and tried to build my own RC-controlled cars and planes (I failed). I grew up on the country side among cows, horses, dogs and cats, wish I think have coloured my way of thinking and made me enjoy nature. But also made my hate weeding.
Early in my teens I started experimenting with building websites. The first commercial site I build was for a local child musician association called RUM Skaraborg, think I got 500 SEK for it. Not much, but is was a start, and it triggered me to build more.
Around 6 years of age, I started playing drums in our local music school. Most of the other kids in the area was playing soccer or ice-hockey, but that kind of sportsmanship never interested me (it would take me over 25 years before I even tried competitive sports). This interest took me all they way to playing for kings and queens an millions of TV watchers. More on that later.
The town I grew up in, or rather 20 km outside of, was a small town, not more then 10 000 inhabitants, so it wouldn't take long before I moved to a bigger city. I was eager to get out of there, to say the least. This led me to applying for a music gymnasium (it's like a high-school), wish was a lovely experience.
After that I wanted to continue with music as a career, so I though applying for the music military services was a great idea, getting free music education and all, so I ended up serving a year in AMK, Royal Swedish Army Band (our non official website is still up an running btw: amk2008.se). This was a really cool experience, not much of a military training, more a musical training with great teachers. There I played for Sweden and other countries royalties and head of states, played in famous concert halls and for 7 millions TV viewers in the larges musical contest in Sweden (Melodifestival-finalen in Globen 2008).
Next next stop was a music education in Tjörn (Billströmska Folkhögskola) between 2009-2010. Lovely place and good education, but finally after all years I got tired of practising music. So I decided to pick up another interest I had from my earlier years, making Graphic Design. So I went to a one year education down south of Sweden (Östra Grevie), and after the second try I got into my dream education at HDK (School of Arts and Craft) in Gothenburg.
During my three years there I got an appetite for Motion Graphics and interactive media, and my interest for Web Development sprung up again. So after half a year exchange to New York at SVA, an final examination project in 2014 (that you can find here by the why), some freelancing as graphic designer and web designer, I took of into my first carrier as a web developer when I got hired by Fully Studios (by then they where called Fully Flared) in September of 2014.
Again, I managed to get a dream job where I was allowed to grow as an artist and developer. I made everything from graphic design, motion graphics, 360-photo shoots to award winnings websites and fin-tech services.
In 2019 some guys that shared office with us, started a game studio, Wishful Whales and asked us for some help. So we ended up becoming a sister company and renamed the company to Wishfully Studios. There I helped them with a platformer prototype. Now they are working with first game Planet of Lana (the site is programmed by me btw and won some prices). Soon after, we at Fully Studios started prototyping our own game, Fenderball at what later would become the new game studio The Fully Arcade, that I helped build and showcase at places like Sweden Game Conference and GDC 2022. I mainly focused on lighting, animation and art pipelines, but also helped with some game programming, modelling, texturing and testing, as you do in a small studio.
The creative itch
Ever since I was a little kid, I wanted to create and learn stuff. I'm always looking for new ways of expressing my creativity. Today, most of that energy goes into creating games. It all started with a random email (on Sunday 9 mars 2014 09:54 to be exact, thanks Gmail history), from a guy that had found me on Google, asking for help building a digital board game (you can see images from it here).
Together with him and his studio Ghoulsoft, be build a lot of mobile games, some less successful then others. But this gave me the creative itch of game creation and experience in the mobile game industry, things I carry with me today, so I'm very grateful for that opportunity.
Nowadays I mostly explore the possibility space of VR/AR/MR (all the acronyms of extended realities!). There is just something with the ability to directly interact with digital objects in a artificial space, that triggers my creativity. Some experiments you can find in my Instagram, but I'm still working on my big next project. So stay tuned.
And thanks for reading!
Jonas Sandstedt
Gothenburg, August 7th, 2022