You are currently working on a video game studio called Nordeus games. What can you tell us about the studio?

I’ve been in Nordeus for the past 6 years, almost from the beginning of the company, and I honestly can’t imagine myself working somewhere else. I was the company’s first in-house artist, and we went through some highs and lows for a while. But now I’m enjoying the stability of working for an independent mobile game developer. The biggest reason for that is that I get to work on Top Eleven, our first game, which is actually the most successful mobile sports game in the world. That game helped us grow to 30+ artists in a 160-person company. Now we’re both playing to our strengths and trying to explore new and exciting genres.

Nordeus is based in Belgrade but we have worldwide and world-class experts in all fields. It’s really not easy to bring people to Serbia; there’s a lot of historical baggage. But we have some interesting perks and advantages to help encourage potential recruits. We keep the hierarchy at a minimum and maximize the opportunity that everyone has, cross-organization and in terms of cross-product influence. On top of that, we invest a lot in our people, not just in art, but in all areas: development, machine learning, user research, marketing, and so on. It’s a high-velocity environment, and ideas for projects can come from anywhere. So as an artist, you could be working on a live game, a promising prototype, doing some research or making a tech-art demo like the one we just did with Unity. Fun times.