Mikko Vedru

My name is Mikko Vedru. I have over ten years experience in game development industry and my list of projects include many famous titles. My experience and expertise are both deep and wide. E.g. I was one of the pioneers in establishing and using the social processes (social network sites like Facebook or even MySpace arrived much later) in the game development industry. Lately (for many years already) I have also been concentrating on marketing, business development and entrepreneurship roles. Below you can read details about this and my other experience.

As my personal characteristics go, I am creative, analytical and bright.

I am lazy in a sense that I try to do things correctly the first time around, so I wouldn't need to come back to redo them. I call it efficiency. Efficiency is also the ability to stop when the result is "good enough" without needlessly continuing to spend resources. I like to challenge myself and I enjoy the efficient way of learning, which solving complex problems brings. I love improving myself and my skills, in an effort to finish tasks and solve problems even more efficiently (optimal quality/time ratio). The life has shown that I am also very quick at learning new things and using them in practice.

If I would need to choose only one word to describe me as a person, that word would be perceptive. Being very curious about all things around, staying observant and learning really made me who I am. The same passion is still there today and still largely defines me.

My motto is: But what if we really think about it?

• Tuurepori's (renamed to Turun Suomalainen Yhteiskoulu) middle school 1993-1997
• Turun Normaalikoulu High School 1997-2000
• Beginning of autumn 2000 I have been studying Computer Science at the University of Turku. During this time, I spent one year in the Finnish Army (serving my compulsory military service) and many years of zero or only part-time studying, because of the activity with different projects.
  • My specializations (so called minors/majors) are (besides the obvious case of Computer Science): Business, Communication, Economics, Mathematics.
  • In 2006-2007, I spent one year as an exchange-student in the USA, in the Nebraska Wesleyan University. The NWU is a small liberal arts college and one of the best of its kind in the whole Midwestern area of the USA. There, I did the maximum number of courses allowed. In the end, it meant the "Minor in Economics" and almost the same amount of Communication-studies.
  • For my master's degree program I chose "Software Entrepreneurship" (computers + business). Currently, I am writing my master's thesis on a subject of "The History of Social Games and Social Media".

Other

• Steward-licence
• B-driving licence
• One of the Reference Letters I got from University of Turku, which enabled me to be accepted into the highly contested ISEP student exchange program.

• Pioneer in the Community Management and all the other possible and impossible social and people related Marketing and PR stuff.
• Strategic Management, Project Management, Producing, QA, GTD - Time Management and a lot more. Ask if needed.
• Programming: Assembler, Java, C/C++, Basic, Lua
• Web: HTML, CSS, Ruby, Ruby on Rails (ROR), XHTML, PHP, SQL, SEO, Redmine
• Operating Systems: Windows 3.1/9x/2000/XP, Linux/Unix, DOS
• Multimedia: Adobe Photoshop, QuarkXPress, Adobe ImageReady, Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas, Sonic Foundry Sound Forge/ACID Pro, Alias Maya (basics)
• Other: Computer Security, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice, Visio/Dia, and a lot more...

Certifications (new)

Certifications (achieved in 2006)

Worth noticing

• I am an extremely fast learner. Learning the new software/techniques and reminding myself of the older known stuff (MS Project, JavaScript, Python, R, Perl, XML and a lot more I don't think I should mention because of their huge number) is not a problem at all.

Employer	Time	Position/responsibilities
Digimediatoimisto Vilperi	06.2014 - 08.2014	Business negotiator (B2B phone saleman)
Different kinds of own companies and ventures	01.01.2006 - ...	Entrepreneur
Umbra Software	03.06.2009 - 2012	CIS (Belorussia, Russia, Ukraine) territory. Sales. Marketing.
Blitzfront Game Studio	01.10.2004 - 2012	President, CEO, Executive Producer (management, marketing, PR), sound
Finnish Defence Forces	14.07.2003 - 09.07.2004	Niinisalo's Artillery brigade. Commander of the battery division (about 30 people).
Nival Interactive	01.09.2001 - 14.07.2003	Quality Assurance (+testing), Community Management (+forum administration, moderation)
Nival Interactive	03.07.2001 - 27.08.2001	Reference Letter

Worth noticing

• I have been working since I was 13 years old. A big variety of difference jobs: a farm worker, a paperboy, a cleaner, a plumber, a bouncer... I have never been shy to work and to get my hands dirty, if necessary; I have always vigorously and responsibly handled my job regardless of what it was at the moment.

Language	Level
Finnish	Excellent: Diploma from the All-Finnish Debate Competition Certificate of the workshop to improve overall communication skills University of Turku's Department of Media Studies' recommendation letter)
Russian	Excellent (both oral and writing skills)
English	Excellent: TOEFL result before the student exchange: 270/300; Minor degree in Communication from US University)
Swedish	Fundamentals
Chinese	Basics
Arabic	Basics

Certifications (new)

Certifications (achieved in 2006)

• Evil Islands: Curse of the Lost Soul - one of the first 3D RPG and strategy genre mixes. I wasn't part of game development per se, but I was indeed involved. I was a fan of the Nival Interactive company and its games, and when Evil Islands was released I instantly bought their newest invention. I liked it a lot and every time I noticed different bugs, I sent information about them to the developers. The result: I informed about a half of all the numerous bugs which were eventually fixed in the patches. The company was so impressed that it wanted to hire me.


• Etherlords - mix of TBS and RPG genres. Can be described as the combination of the Heroes of Might and Magic-type strategy portion and Magic the Gathering-type card fighting system. The best overview of my responsibilities one can get by reading the reference letter I got. Additionally to all the things mentioned in the letter, I also worked as a QA-manager and was fully responsible for a huge beta-testing phase (both testing itself and all the organizing and auxiliary activities). The beta-test consisted of three phases:
  • The first phase. Over 500 (five hundred) testers. One month.
  • The second phase. Over 1100 (one thousand and one hundred) testers. One month.
  • The third phase. About 60 (sixty) testers. Two months.
• Etherlords II - the continuation of the first Etherlords game. Better and polishier. My tasks: Community Management and Forum Administration. Not much of the fresh community creation activity, because I have already done it so well for the first Etherlords game and the old community could be conveniently used for the sequel.


• Blitzkrieg - a hugely successful RTS game set in WW2.
  • Community Management, marketing. I created an absolutely huge game community from scratch (it was the developer's first game in a completely new genre). It was for sure one of the finest examples of proper usage of fan energy. I believe that an extremely active community was the key for game's success and for the emergence of dozens of commercial MODs, add-ons and independent game projects let alone all the incredible amount of non-commercial MODs, maps etc.
  • The general QA and beta-testing
  • Forum Administration
• KRI - Russian Game Developers Conference 2003. At the first ever Russia's Game Developers Conference in 2003, I reflected on my experience of creating the massive Blitzkrieg-community and talked on a subject of "Community Management and Forum Administration" including the following topics:
  • What kinds of people visit forums (bulletin boards) and what do they need
  • How to create fan-community and how to keep it together
  • How fans can be useful for a game and game developer both in quality and monetary sense, or can they?
  • How to "manage" the community (rules, attitude, saying the right words at the right time, being quiet when necessary, other tips)
  • What one should never do
  • Answering questions and a lot more.
• Silent Storm - a truly legendary game, which was a really long-awaited rejuvenation spike for the whole TBS genre. Both Pelit-magazine's editorial staff and its readers awarded Silent Storm a PC-game of the year 2003 title. In a struggle for the year's best game among all the gaming platforms, the readers chose a multiplatform game Star Wars: Knight of the Old Republic as a winner, while PC-only Silent Storm came second. Games like GTA: Vice City, Call of Duty and Finland's own Max Payne 2 were left behind.
  • Analysing the game and writing suggestions (to help game designers)
  • Community management
  • Game testing
• Silest.ru web site. The idea was to create a functional game site for the Silent Storm game, with best (fastest, biggest, trustworthiest) news, articles, analysis, files-section, tips and community. And what's most important - doing it independently, with fair game in mind and without using any of the internal, invisible resources (i.e. relationship with the developers).
  • In practice, I was the strategist and project manager. I believe that I had a lot to do with the fact that our site was alive and well for so long after the release of the game, far longer than any of the numerous competitors-sites. Silest.ru was fully alive in 2006 when I left the project.
  • Our discussion board was better and more active than the official forum. This activity can be seen in the creation of MODs, one of which was even released commercially. I believe that a big (if not absolutely vital) key behind all the impressive results was the creation of the platform for all the Silent Storm enthusiasts (creating the community, pulling new people in, making the community stronger, maintaining and nurturing it).
  • As a writer, I must humbly claim our news/articles/materials sections being the best in the whole Silent Storm related Internet, among all languages. Best by far. A lot of times the "traditional game journalists" asked game-related questions from us instead of writing/calling to the game developer.
  • I was responsible for web site's SEO. The idea was to achieve top 10 positions in the Russian-language search engines when the user was searching for the terms relevant to our site. It was successful. Our site achieved the strong first position in the paramount "Russian Google" (meaning that Silest.ru was the site above any other, including a developer's and game's official sites). I didn't concentrate at all on getting results on ordinary Google, because of the small amount of Russian-speaking users it had, but our site was still in top 5.
• Blitzkrieg II - The highly anticipated continuation of the first Blitzkrieg-game. For the project itself, I did only a small-scale testing (the game development itself was in a very early stage, and there wasn't much to do). Otherwise, it was my time to go to the Finnish Defence Forces, and I was busy writing internal manuals, HOW-TOs (all related to marketing and community management) and training other people to do my job. I think the transition went as well as it possibly could.


• Heroes of Might and Magic V - one of the best if not the best games in the whole legendary HoMM game series.
  • A year or two after I left Nival Interactive, I was contacted by the company to help it with the issues related to community management and marketing activities. I was hired to analyse the situation, make my recommendations and write other internal documentation on a variety of subjects. The community and marketing aspect of HoMM5 was well done and even though it was along my lines, it's impossible for me even to speculate how big or small of influence my thoughts actually had on the end result. I can only hope that they were invaluable. :)
• Talvisota: Icy Hell (Fin: Talvisota: Jäähelvetti; Rus: Талвисота: Ледяной ад) - RTS-game set in a Winter War-setting. I was responsible for the project's strategic management (marketing, sales, contracts, etc. - I handled all the nontechnical project management). Additionally I was also responsible for the sound-portion of the project, as well as did a ton of other small, but important tasks. In November 2007, the game was published in the ex-USSR area (Russia, Ukraine, etc.; Game's front cover and back cover). The publishing in Finland finally happened in the autumn of 2008. I alone handled the whole publishing matter, including cover design, manufacturing, getting the age-rating (I managed to get the game to be classified into the "educational games" category) and PR (click to read and listen to media materials in Finnish). The game was a big success (e.g. many dozens of weeks in the Anttila's list of top 10 sold PC-games, sometimes even to the point of non-availability).


• KRI - Russian Game Developers Conference 2009. At the year 2009 conference, I was lecturing on a subject of "Guerilla marketing with zero-budget", where I talked about the whole journey of the Talvisota: Icy Hell game project and shared information about the:
  • Latest know-hows in marketing, especially the free and unconventional kind
  • What does a Social Engineering term means and how the concept can be used to benefit people and companies in the Game Development industry
  • How to fight piracy successfully and even to earn money using it
  The lecture was a big success. I was given the biggest lecture hall available, and during my presentation, it became almost full. The feedback (both personal and anonymous) was great.


• Umbra Software - CIS (Belorussia, Russia, Ukraine) territory. B2B sales. Such clients as Wargaming.net (World of Tanks) and others.

• All kinds of sports:
  • Martial Arts: BJJ/submission grappling, Kickboxing (old combat sports: Han Moo Do, Wing Chun Kuen Kung-Fu)
  • Raw/power sport: kettlebells, gym, weightlifting, gymnastics
  • Other: running (several Marathons successfully completed), snowboarding and any other kind of self-torturing.
• MMA
• Movies
• Photography
• Game Development industry
• Accumulation of knowledge
• Self-improvement (health, Getting Things Done (GTD), mind and body, anti-procrastination, communication, etc)
• People

• Ask me for a list of people who recommend me.

Reference letters from different years

• Ruokavarasto's reference letter (FIN).
• RTK's' reference letter (FIN).
• Some of the Steward-work-related reference letter (FIN).
• Nival Interactive: reference letter.
• One of the Reference Letters I got from University of Turku, which enabled me to be accepted into the highly contested ISEP student exchange program.
• University of Turku's Department of Media Studies' recommendation letter.