Interview with Steven Manschot 

  An interview with Steven Manschot, lead Programmer of Artmunk games, about his work in the adult gaming industry. Manschot will be one of the writers of the ‘In development’ section of the Lovechess website and worked in the Lovechess games.

From origin you’re a programmer in the ‘normal’ field, how does it feel to end up in the Adult gaming industry?
You make it almost sound negative :-) I think everybody who works in this industry has to overcome the initial hurdle of sexual taboo. Once you got that behind you it?s a fun industry, I sometimes really laugh my socks of when i see what people invent around sex. As a programmer I also have a very different, less distracting, view on the content.

Is there much difference in the development process?
One of the nice things of programming games compared to, let?s say, accounting software, is that you can start every project with a clean sheet. There is almost no legacy code to learn and maintain so the works stays fresh and challenging. From a technical standpoint the field of 3d programming constantly evolves. Every new generation of videocards brings new techniques, challenges and, to be fair, problems.

How do fellow programmers ( or game developers in general ) respond to your work?
Programmers tend to look more to the techniques than the content. So after the initial giggle and laughs we quickly switch to the more technical sides of the work.

Can you share a little about the development process of your games? Where does it start? What are the mayor challenges?
Most of the times our development process starts with a rough general concept following chaotic period where we iron out all the technical and creative wrinkles with the help of mockups, prototypes and a lot of meeting. After than the actual implementation starts with the making of the models, animations, lightmodels, code, setup program, website etc. etc.

Our main challenge is to maximize our limited resources to build an excellent product. We are not Electronic Arts(c), so we have to not only work hard but also very smart.