Hi, I’m Sami Pesola!
Indie dev and AAA designer
I’ve spent my whole life pursuing the study of game design, modding games and developing my own on any medium that I could get my hands on! From the crudest pixel games on my high school graphing calculator right up to the latest cutting-edge development platforms like Unreal, Northlight, and the Creation Engine – in my spare time I’m always elbow-deep in some ambitious project, and my primary passion is to develop my gamemaking skills and find opportunities for creating narrative gameplay. I equally love working with scripting and code, creating levels and iterating them to completion, weaving narrative with whatever tools are available. I’ve been privileged to have the opportunity to work with some of the best in the industry, and as my skills grow, I welcome more challenges to explore my abilities.
Most recently I’ve been working at Housemarque, bringing to life epic narrative alongside the studio’s award-winning roguelite gameplay!
Both in the recently-announced Saros, and especially throughout Returnal’s development, I’ve gone to every possible length to realise the detail and mystery of these gameworlds – and just like a rogue game, every development cycle has allowed me to build up a great deck of skills!
From the polish of dozens of cutscenes meeting the scrutiny of an eagle-eyed internet…
… to the cross-team coordination required to achieve truly eerie moments of immersion in a game.
It’s been an awesome challenge rising up to the standards expected by a Sony first-party studio, and so far it’s been an incredible journey for me!
We’ve worked very hard to break out from an arcade-focused studio with only one cinematic designer (me!) to a diverse team of technically-proficient narrative developers, while staying true to Housemarque’s deep arcade roots!
Previously I’ve been hard at work on console action games at Remedy, working in both the level and cinematic design departments on projects like Control and CrossfireX!
Not only was I heavily involved with the dialogue system of Control and its first DLC, I also worked on major cinematics and shipped quest gameplay in the Research Department!
I’ve also spent time pursuing indie game development, which I still enjoy doing in my spare time!
My first indie game was a top-down shooter called Thunder Highway, where the player controls a flying squad of jets in 1958 to fight off an emerging kaiju menace.
Later I partnered up with a talented pixel artist to produce some retro-style gameplay, developing another demo in the form of We Sleep – a loose reimagining of John Carpenter’s “They Live”, where the player takes on a city overrun by alien impostors. While the project never expanded beyond the prototype phase, it was still a lot of fun to create!
I even found time to develop a quick arcade-style game called Aetherbreak, mashing up the concepts of Asteroids and Breakout into a fun and unique experience!
These projects are never far from my mind, and though dormant for now, they may still take my full attention again some day!
I spend a lot of my time also creating mods for various games, particularly the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series, where I’ve been actively modding for the last 15 years! Some of my mods have amassed millions of downloads!
From time to time I write and record music, which I often integrate into my roleplaying characters, such as in The Old Republic, where I was involved with a nightclub that also functioned as a major roleplaying hub!
Jesterbox Creations 