Meet the Developer: Jungsoo Lee

For today’s blog, I would like to introduce myself with some casual things around me! Just in case you missed my previous intro – you can visit here to understand my career as game dev and key philosophy working on games!

What Else?: I used to play bass guitar at the band as hobby, I still have Music Man Stingray bass which I don’t play anymore.. and which my wife asks me to sell it pretty much every time we clean our house.. My favorite bassist is Flea from RHCP.

I have two ragdoll cats – Oliver and Kona, they are super friendly and lovely… but unfortunately, they still don’t get along well.

I love coffee! I especially love to drink Cortado(or Gibraltar). Because of the pandemic, I couldn’t go out to grab coffee for a while and bought semi-automatic espresso machine! It has been giving me joy of ordering different types of beans and making espresso for my family.

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Games as a Gamer

Favorite Games:
I enjoy all genre of games. But if I need to pick my all time favorite – I would choose Astonishia Story and Farland Saga.

Astonishia Story was the very first RPG I have played. It was a rare package RPG developed by a Korean dev team. If I look back, the game wasn’t very special compared to other RPGs out in the market, but because it was my first RPG experience and the game was pretty well made, I don’t hesitate to pick the game as one of my all time favorites. It had simple turn-based combat, and grinding was more important than strategic thinking.

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Farland Saga series was the first JRPG I have played. I loved turn-based combat with anime style art. I loved the series so much that I continued to play Farland Story 1-5. It has been a longtime since I played the game… and can’t remember the story, but still remember how much I loved playing the game, and whenever new series came out I had to play it on the first day of its release.

Outside of those two SRPG titles, I have spent majority of my time playing League of Legend since 2009, also spent 900+ hours on Slay the Spire and Football Manager.

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Favorite Game Studios:
Nintendo and Riot Games. I always loved type of games Nintendo has developed. Nintendo sticking to their key philosophy for such a long time is something I respect. Not many big gaming companies can spend long time creating a game like Animal Crossing: New Horizons! It must be in there DNA, enabling their teams to work on family friendly, and different types of games.

I like Riot Games because I had so much fun playing League of Legends, but also because of their effort to innovate the way free to play live service game should be. The level of transparency and the communication they had with the community was something eye opening for me.

What have you been playing lately?:
To be honest, I never had enough of time for games after my first son was born May last year! But I managed to play few, and also played some of tabletop games.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses and Animal Crossing: New Horizons are two games I have been playing lately. As you could see from my list of favorite games, I love turn-based SRPG genre, and Three Houses had all the great elements including classic mode. I have enjoyed the game with classic mode, and had blast playing the game.

I also played Animal Crossing: New Horizons with my wife and friends. It was a perfect game to enjoy during the Covid 19 pandemic days… I really loved how relaxing the game could be. Spending time on each other’s island with my wife gave us a lot of happiness..

Also, played lots of tabletop games such as Terraforming Mars, Castle of Burgundy, Azul, Dominion. My best pick is Terraforming Mars – great combination of deck building and city building aspect makes the game super fun to play, and has great replaybility.

FEW OTHER STUFF

I miss MapleStory Fest! It was a lot of fun preparing and running the show with the team.

I still miss MapleStory 2! and miss working on MapleStory.

I am currently in Korea – it has been almost 12 years since I have stayed in Korea this long. I love my time here, and will try to enjoy everyday until I get back to the States.

The first project is coming out pretty well, I can’t wait to share more details about the project soon… but it doesn’t mean I can share something next month or so….

Based on the progress of the project, I am writing few job descriptions for few positions in the States. It will probably include few localization positions and a community manager position. Project schedule changes every week and it will depend on the project progress when I can start hiring.

** Please feel free to follow my Twitter: @jsoceandrive