Andreas Heydeck Games finds games in life

What’s in a name?

Shakespeare riddled off 154 numbers for his collection of sonnets. The Beatles’ second Capitol Records album was given the inventive name of The Beatles’ Second Album.

Andreas Heydeck followed the same path, naming his studio, Andreas Heydeck Games, after himself. However, his games have much more inventive titles, including his newest one Smooth Operators – Call Center Chaos.

Heydeck, a developer who resides in the small Swedish town Karlskoga, had no idea what to call his game and submitted it to the Dream. Build. Play contest as Simcom Corp. Luckily, he was able to work out a contest with Catherine of IndieGamerChick.com to host a “Name the Game” contest. The winning submission, Call Center Chaos: Smooth Operators, was given by Daniel McFarline, who won credits in the game and 1600 Microsoft Points.

“Immediately when I saw his entry, I knew it was going to be hard for someone else to beat it,” Heydeck said. “I think most of the other judges felt the same way.”

Andreas Heydeck rocks on with his Coke and ice cream.

Heydeck had a few other hiccups during production before, and even after, he had a name for his newest game, since the game was not finished until a few weeks ago. Although, Heydeck had some problems, he also had some laughable moments. He said Smooth Operators had some strange bugs for the game’s artificial intelligence (AI).

“[The game’s AI information technology staff] would come to work, and go to lunch after a while and never come back,” Heydeck said. “I thought about leaving it in because it was sort of a stereotype behavior of IT staff. I wrote about it on Facebook, and the IT staff at my day job didn’t think it was funny and was sort of grumpy towards me for a couple of days.”

Although, he received some flak in the work place, Heydeck thought a call center was a good setting for a game.

“I just thought that it would be funny to play that game,” Heydeck said. “I do have a lot of ideas with extreme events as well, but I tend to focus on the games that I would want to play.”

Even as Heydeck’s newest game is awaiting release, this is not his first venture in the game development. He said he has played games for as long as he could remember, starting with the Commodore 64, which is an 8-bit computer with programming and gamming capabilities, similar to the ZX Spectrum. He made his first game, Masken, in 1995. Masken was a Snake clone for DOS, and the game was distributed by a Swedish home pc magazine as the “Floppy of the Month.”

After his first game, Heydeck made some games for friends but eventually took a 15-year hiatus. Then around 2009, Heydeck’s friend and programmer, Robin Reicher, enticed him to return to game development after talking about XNA and some classes Reicher was taking in college. The two decided to both make their own games. Heydeck then shortly released Meep, an Xbox Indie game. He would eventually release Meep Jumper for the Windows Phone and Meep 2 for the Xbox and PC.

Even with the mild success Heydeck has had, he has advanced his game concepts and has more game releases planned with ten or so game ideas in the works.

“In the beginning, [making games] was just a desire to expand on games that I enjoyed, to realize the full potential of mechanics and gameplay,” Heydeck said. “Nowadays, it’s a bit different. I think I have at least 10 ideas that are based off of everyday life.”

With those ideas in hand, Heydeck said he is ready to continue making games and to expand his knowledge in game development.

“And of course, I hope I’ll have a mega hit some day.”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2BBx1nhiEA