Sebastian Aaltonen, a veteran graphics programmer from Finland, shares his career journey from writing text-mode games on C64 and x86 machines in the 1990s to becoming a lead rendering engineer. He covers his work on virtual texturing and dynamic terrain systems for the Trials games, building a clay simulation game (Claybook) with distance field ray tracing and GPU-based physics, contributing rendering optimizations to Unreal Engine, and his time at Unity working on DOTS rendering and a Nanite-style GPU-driven rendering prototype. He discusses the internal struggles at Unity around competing rendering pipelines (HDRP vs URP), lack of strategic direction, and why key engineers eventually left. The conversation also touches on the challenges of shipping a two-person indie game across four console platforms, cross-platform user-generated content, and his eventual move to Hypipe.
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