Meet Jacky Martin: Bringing new Ideas and Expertise to Womenize!

I would describe myself as a “creative problem solver”. I love complex challenges and I am someone who gets very excited when creative and technical worlds meet. When I was young, I always wanted to develop games, which I still do to this day, but beyond that businesses, which feels to me like a natural extension. Through my career I discovered how creating art, building businesses, writing code and marketing can all merge into fantastic experiences, having that overview of how these systems interact is what I enjoy most. At the heart of it, I really like creating things… and helping other people create the ideas they care about.

I already knew Womenize! from the other side of the stage and I’ve always really liked the combination of professional exchange and genuine community around it. Womenize! was my entry-point into the Berlin event scene for tech and game development. I have always made games and shared these ideas online or went to smaller meetups and hangouts, but I rarely shared experiences with others at a conference, I simply felt out of place.
Womenize! was that first step into making these first connection for me, smoothing some of that initial hesitation when trying something new. There are plenty of events where you go, give your talk, collect your badge and leave again. Womenize! never really felt like that to me. There’s a sense that people actually want to meet each other, share what they know and help others find their place in the industry. I like building spaces in which people feel encouraged to participate and not feel like they first have to prove that they belong there. Also, getting to know the team and having so many good conversations with them at different events definitely made me want to become part of it. 🙂

Probably getting to see how everything comes together from the inside. Learning what is working and maybe also learning what could be improved. I am looking forward to brainstorming and spending time with the team. I have spent a lot of time working with developers, artists, founders, students and publishers and all kinds of people around games. Bringing these perspectives with me is one thing, but learning a completely new side of the industry is another.
Particularly, I am looking forward to creating things people find useful, may it be in event format, workshop or something completely new.

Games are interdisciplinary. You can spend one day talking about visual design, the next day about technology, psychology, marketing, storytelling or business. That’s somehow all still part of making games and I think that’s why I have never felt like I want to do anything else.
I have been developing games back when I was 11 years old for the RPG Maker 1995. I knew from a very young age what I wanted and that never changed. In that sense I am very stubborn. Especially in the indie space, someone can come along with a strange idea nobody would have approved and create something innovative and memorable. It makes me feel like we are always working at the forefront of innovation. Maybe it is not rocket science, but I feel in gaming we are in terms of technology similarly innovating ideas at a rapid speed that later influence our society at a broader scale.

I ask a lot of questions and I get very excited about good ideas. I genuinely want to understand how something works, but I am definitely not someone who immediately jump into blind action-ism. I want to understand why we are doing something, what problem we are actually trying to solve and if that idea long-term benefits us as a team and still makes sense. So my colleagues will probably discover that I am pretty quickly enthusiastic and very analytical at the same time. I love making things happen, but I also really like making sure that we are making the *right* things happen.

Coffee is definitely involved. My favorite days have a mixture of focused work and people. Give me a few uninterrupted hours with music where I can build, design, write or solve some strange problem, then followed by a walk in the evening with my dog.
I then usually like to go back and work some more on my own business, called Gentleland with some friends I made along the way. Building some more systems and and ideas. Recently, I have been doing a lot of web development and I can see that being something I will keep doing for another year or two. I genuinely enjoy that process and sometimes the perfect workday mysteriously turns into a midnight development session because I just need to fix *one tiny thing*… and we all know how that ends.

Tough question. I have been influenced heavily by “Final Fantasy 8”, I really also like the remake, but I feel it partly did not age well for younger audiences due to some longer-winded parts. But the story is fantastic. So instead I would say “dotAGE”. It’s a turn-based village-management game that looks cosy and then slowly escalates and it’s also created by a small team / solo dev.
I enjoy games where relatively simple systems start interacting in unexpected ways. I also of course love a lot of our client’s projects at Gentleland and I firmly believe that games like “Ragdoll Physics Experiments” are going to be fun experiences. Who doesn’t like flying ragdolls? I really enjoyed “Portal 2” and while “Ragdoll Physics Experiments” is still in early development, I feel it’s starting to capture that charme. We are running a Kickstarter for them soon and I hope more people discover it, since it’s also only a very small team behind it who put so much care and effort into the project.
Generally, I like so many games for different qualities, it’s hard to only recommend a single one. So I’d probably list a ton of games depending on the person asking.

Thank you for this interview, Jacky!

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