The work and thoughts of Erik Svedäng
For the last 5-6 years there hasn’t been much work on Carp , neither by me, nor the community. The whole project did feel quite dormant and possibly “done” (which in the software world often equals dead). You could use the language for stuff, but no one really did. All of that changed during the first half of 2026 when Veit Heller started contributing major features to the project again, big time.…
Artwork for the prototype, by Simon Jannerland . A board game I’ve been working for the last year or so has been nominated for the Swedish game design competition SAGA ! The working title of the game is ‘Playa’ and it’s about selling ice-cream on a long beach filled with sunbathers. Inspiration for the theme comes from Halland, where I live. The gameplay is supposed to be on the lighter side, but…
For the last six years or so, I’ve been the maintainer of the Meetup group “Halmstad Functional Programming”. I started the group when I moved to Halmstad because going to Meetup groups back in Gothenburg was a big thing at the time, and it had led to a lot of fun experiences and long-lasting friendships for me. Unfortunately, Meetup of today (at least here in Halmstad) is not worth the money.…
I’m very happy to announce that I, together with miniature landscape builder Erik Fälth , and comic book artist & illustrator Olof Hjalmar , have received funding from the Region of Halland to develop a tabletop miniatures game about “Slaget vid Nissan” / “The Battle of Niså” — one of the largest naval viking battles ever to occur. (And it happened just close to where we live.) We are very…
The woodcut ‘Raikō shitennō to tsuchigumo’ by Utagawa Kuninaga. Earlier this week I turned 38. It’s not a very exciting age, I know. But this birthday had an additional meaning to me. Something secret that gave it a certain significance in my mind: “Only two years left.” No, this has nothing to do with my expected lifespan (I hope). Rather, what I couldn’t stop thinking about was a bet I made with…
Manahex is a digital card & board game for 2 to 4 players. It is played on a map of hexes, which your mage can control to gain mana. The mana is used to pay for your cards (spells, creatures, buildings, etc). With the cards you try to defeat the other players and be the last mage standing. The game contains over 120 different cards with handmade art, and they are all unlocked from the start to…
Manahex is out on Steam — yay! In addition to being my first commercial game since Else Heart.Break() , it is the also the first game I’m releasing under the Secret Supermarket label. The goal of the label is to make it easy for people to find my digital board games, talk about them, and influence their design. The central place for this discussion will be the Secret Supermarket Discord server ,…
Today I’m happy to announce my upcoming game, Manahex . It’s a digital card game designed, programmed, scored and painted by yours truly. If all goes well, it will be released this spring. You can read more about the gameplay on the Steam page . Wishlisting is much appreciated! <3 Here’s a trailer:
Mjuk Vass is my solo music project that has evolved organically in the last couple of years. Its focus is on live performance using analog modular synthesizers. Listen on Soundcloud Upcoming shows None. Past “Bänkfest”, Gothenburg (Feb 24, 2024) Catbeats & friends, Gothenburg (Oct 27, 2023) Art exhibition “Komplicerade grejer”, Halmstad (Oct 21, 2023) Kulturnatta, Halmstad (Oct 1, 2022)
Given the state of Twitter / X, I created a Mastodon account: @e_svedang See you on the other side! UPDATE: Now I’m using Bluesky instead https://bsky.app/profile/eriksvedang.com
Dear friends, It is with great pleasure that I’m announcing my return to full-time indie game development. For the last three years I’ve been working for a startup called coherence , creating a toolkit for multiplayer games. It has been a lot of fun — I’ve learned a lot about networking and how to make online games from some amazing people. But while making tools for others is certainly very…
The 10:th of September 2021 my second child was born!
After releasing Else Heart.Break() in 2015 I’ve been busy with lots of projects, like a programming language , various board games , and a whole bunch of unreleased prototypes. I haven’t released any new major, digital games though. So about 6 months ago I started to feel that it was really about time to create something like that again. The working title of this new (and somewhat big) game is Ord…
This was a piece of commisioned work for the University Museum of Bergen (Norway), in collaboration with exhibition designer Adam Bartley . The goal was to create an interactive installation where the museum visitors could experiment with the basic rules of crystal growth in a simplified and playful way. The end result is a kind of microscope simulator with a special built hardware interface.…
You’re now visiting my new website! After about 10 years with a pretty annoying Wordpress blog (still available here ) I really wanted a better way of presenting my work , both old and new. Hopefully you will find the site inspiring and fun. If you want to be notified when I post something new, subscribe via rss or follow me on twitter . Cheers, Erik
The 13:th of February 2018 I became a father!
In the fall of 2018 I participated in a course called “Pedagogical Game Design”. Our final assignment was to make an educational game, and I — at the time teaching game design at the University of Skövde — thought it would be a good idea to make a game about designing games. The result was “A Series of Interesting Choices” (named after a quote by Sid Meier). It was inspired by games like Dixit and…
Born out of frustration with current tools for digital game making — and a love for the Lisp family of languages — I invented Carp. It’s a programming language designed with game making in mind, focused on speed and predictable performance. Also, it has the kind of tooling and syntax that I prefer. Hopefully it will make me and others feel a little bit better while programming. The first version…
An Ikaruga -inspired space shooter made together with Ossian Borén during the Banana Jam 2017. He programmed and designed most of the game, I just made the enemies (art + movement). This game (just like Fluctus from the year before) was made using Pico-8 , Ossian’s weapon of choice when it comes to game making. The final game was displayed in an arcade cabinet made out of cardboard banana boxes.…
A two-player platform brawler where you try to shoot the other dude with your gun. The only catch is that your gun shoots waveforms instead of in a straight line (the wave form can also be adjusted by picking up powerups, i.e. to make it oscillate more frequently). This was a collaboration with Fabian Sörensson during the Global Game Jam 2017. I coded the gun and the waveforms, he did everything…
Hotrod is a very small software library for live reloading of code in C. This allows you to tweak a function while your application is running. Please let me know if you find it useful! To download the code (and to file bugs) point your browser in the direction of https://github.com/eriksvedang/Hotrod .
My big interest in board games and their history inspired me to run a study circle on the topic. Eight times during the autumn of 2016 a group of people gathered at Lindholmen (Gothenburg) to play various board and card games from around the world, both new and old. Hopefully I will have time to do a second run at some point. Get in touch if you’re interested in participating!
After studying ancient board games during the fall of 2016, I felt inspired to create this game. My primary design goal was to make it feel like something that had just been discovered in an old grave, with inscriptions on the wall for how to play it. I also wanted the act of playing it feel somewhat ritualistic. The resulting game is one of shape shifting (“hamnskifte” in Swedish) and…
This game was co-designed with Ossian Borén . We wanted to make a collectible card game (think Magic the Gathering) but where the players themselves were allowed to design the cards. We developed the rules at the No More Sweden game jam 2015 and during later playtests in Gothenburg. We also made a website (now defunct) with a form for entering cards into a shared database.
Stomp is a prototype I made based on the idea of a card game played in real-time, removing the need to wait for your opponent to make their move. You can try it out over at itch.io (link above). I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, and some people really love it. Unfortunately the current version is also fairly inaccessible and hard to understand. Hopefully I can find the time to make a better…
Perdure is my take on how to play Magic the Gathering (or Hearthstone) with a normal deck of cards, nothing else needed. Here’s a description of it’s rules. Setup Shuffle a regular deck of cards (no jokers) and split it in the middle, giving each player 26 cards. Each player draws a hand of five. Randomise who goes first. Turn structure There are five phases in a player’s turn, executed…
Made together with Niklas Åkerblad (art, music, animation), Tobias Sjögren (art), Oscar Rydelius (sound) and Johannes Gotlén (programming). I was the designer, lead programmer and writer. Else Heart.Break() is by far the biggest and most ambitious project I’ve ever been part of. It took about five years to finish and the end result requires both wit and persistance to play through. If you have…
The Advent of 2014 I challenged myself to make one piece of art everyday, posting it to an advent calendar. You can have a look at the result here .
A lot of my programming work is open source and can be found at github.com/eriksvedang .
This is a repost of an article I wrote on my old blog (the original has a lot of nice comments). It was written as I was knee deep in working on Else Heart.Break() and oozes of worry and self doubt — enjoy :) This morning I flipped through a fresh copy of a Swedish game magazine called Level. On one of the ‘indie’ pages I found an interesting looking game by Blendo Games, the creator of Gravity…
Dmrsion is a game about fluctuating dimensions of time and space, represented by pieces of art throughout history. It is a very quick game for 2 – 4 players, packing a lot of depth and replayability into a single 50 card deck. Matches take only about 5 – 10 minutes and almost every card is unique, leading to very different situations every time you play. The rules are so simple they fit on a…
Initially designed by me as a board game in the spring of 2011, later to be digitized by Johannes Gotlén (programming), Niklas Åkerblad (art), Oscar Rydelius (sound), and me (programming and design). It’s a 2-player game similar to chess, except that both players plan five moves ahead (secretely) and then watch them play out. There are various attacks available and a whole slew of destructible…
The colorful and party-inclined cousin of Shot Shot Shoot. Made together with Shelby Cinca , adding several elements to the gameplay (powerups, legion mode) while preserving its strategical depth and reliance on reflexes. In fact — Tri Tri Triobelisk is even faster than the original Shot Shot Shoot. It also contains an album worth of songs by Triobelisk .
Shot Shot Shoot was designed when the first iPad came out. It’s a local multiplayer game for two players that plays to the strengths of the unique tablet form factor. The goal of the game is simple: destroy the five squares on the opponent’s side of the board. Maneuver single shots with high precision or overwhelm the other player with massive attack waves — Shot Shot Shoot is a mixture of…
A watercolour space exploration game made together with Niklas Åkerblad . Circle the planets, eat stuff and find pieces of art scattered around the universe. Designed as a relaxing experience for iPhone and iPad. This game can’t be bought from the AppStore anymore because we haven’t updated it for modern phones and tablets.
This article was first published by Gamasutra in 2010. I was a bit reluctant to write this text at first, since I don’t think I’m the best person to pick my own game apart. I’m a creator, and not a game critic, and obviously what I’m going to write about lies too close to my heart for me to really see it clearly. Initially I was going to write a regular Gamasutra postmortem, which would have…
Slice & Dice is a minimalistic card game designed by me (in 2010) with illustrations by Nicolai Troshinsky . It could be described as a novel take on the deck-building genre. Over the span of five rounds the players build up their troops and fighting power to win treasure in battle. With just two decks of cards and some dice this game is packing strategic and novel gameplay into quite a small box.…
Blueberry Garden is an experimental game about curiosity and exploration. You take on the role of a creature investigating a mysterious world to find out what is going on there. It’s probably not very much like anything you’ve played before but I hope you will find it enjoyable! Awarded with IGF:s Seamus mcNally Grand Prize, 2009.
No More Sweden was a gathering of independent game developers from the whole world meeting up somewhere in Sweden, making games and partying for a weekend. At it’s peak, we had around 100 visitors. The event was been run by me and Martin Jonasson ( @grapefrukt ) from 2008 to 2018. Read more about it at www.nomoresweden.com .
My old blog posts are still available here: https://eriksvedang.wordpress.com
I was born in Uppsala (Sweden) but grew up on the countryside in the tiny village Haberga. There I roamed the forest and learned how to play the clarinet, among other things. When I was 12 years old our family moved to the west coast of Sweden. Me and my three younger siblings spent a lot of time making movies. I also practiced magic but decided to not become a wizard until my beard was gray. In…
This essay contains some recommendations for where to surf on the internet. I’m a big fan of the oldschool kind of homepage — a personal and self-made collection of static pages with lots of little nooks and cranies to explore. One excellent site with excactly those properites is the one of David Parlett , renowed games scholar and designer. If you have any interest in board or card games you must…
Here’s a list with some of the places where my work has been exhibited: Mediateca Expandica, Madrid, Spain (2009) Art Center Nabi, A.L.I.C.E. museum, Seoul, South Korea (2009) FILE Games, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2010) Mansedanse Play!, Tampere, Finland (2010) Hjärta Spel, Linköping, Sweden (2012) Game Masters Exhibition, Sydney, Australia (2013) Hjärta Spel, Tekniska Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2013) A…
I really enjoy giving lectures, talks and workshops. Here’s a list of the major ones I’ve held so far: Creating Blueberry Garden, Assembly, Helsinki (2009) Three Games I’ve Made, Mansedanse Play!, Tampere, Finland (2010) Panel discussion, Nordic Game Conference, Malmö (2011) Inspirational talk, Blekinge Technical University, Karlshamn (2012) Creating Clairvoyance, University of Skövde + Chalmers…
E-mail erik.svedang@gmail.com Phone +46 (0)73 - 75 66 716 Social Media Bluesky: @eriksvedang.com Discord Server Secret Supermarket Steam Developer Page store.steampowered.com/developer/eriksvedang/ Board Game Geek Designer Page