Day as a Dev: Alice Rasmussen, Lead Game Developer

Today, Alice Rasmussen serves as a Lead Game Developer in the Tech pod at Rovio Stockholm, helping keep Angry Birds 2 running smoothly for millions of players. But her path into game engineering started back in the ’90s. “I guess I was a typical 90s kid,” she says when asked about her early exposure to video games. “Friends would have a Super Nintendo or PlayStation and you would just play. I remember Final Fantasy VII was a big deal for me”. Games were always around in Alice’s life, but discovering indie titles later on truly opened her eyes to the craft. “I really like the idea of small teams making games, like Stardew Valley being made by one person, or Hollow Knight and Silksong being made by essentially three people. The amount of dedication it takes to create such fantastic environments and stories is really inspiring to me”.

Although Alice had always enjoyed coding in school computing classes, her leap into game development happened almost by accident. “It was kind of a bit of a whim and pure luck that brought me into games, honestly. When I applied to university, I applied to what I thought was a program making ‘fun computer games’, but it turned out to be more focused on management and production”. Realizing in her first week that management wasn’t for her, she quickly switched over to the parallel computer science track. That pivot changed everything: diving headfirst into game engineering not only gave her the technical toolkit she needed, but it was during those university years that she truly fell in love with gaming culture and programming as a lifelong pursuit.

Putting everything she had learned into practice working on games professionally brought a whole new set of challenges, but Alice found that hands-on experience was where everything truly clicked. “In the first three months of my first job, I learned like ten times as much about what coding actually was in a real game project compared to four years at university,” she recalls. That early experience cemented her approach to collaboration across the whole studio: “I think I try to learn from everyone. All of my colleagues have something to teach, whether it’s a coder, designer, artist, QA, or producer. There’s something to learn from everyone”.

At Rovio Stockholm, home of Angry Birds 2 since its launch in 2015, Alice’s Tech pod handles the crucial backend mechanics. Eleven years of “constantly evolving” code means that the game requires continuous maintenance to keep things running smoothly for players, and for the internal teams working on the game. Her pod is responsible for framework architecture and core technical upkeep, creating consistency and reliability in how the game’s different systems talk to one another. They make it easier for other pods to build features without reinventing backend code. The result for players is a smoother, more reliable experience with fewer crashes.

For Alice, the day-to-day work of tackling tough technical problems comes with immediate payoff. “The best feeling is either when a feature you’ve been working on just works smoothly without any bugs and you finally ship it, or when you create something very small that ends up having a huge positive impact on the team or product”.

When it comes to impact, any player that has used a “Branded Spell” in Angry Birds 2, has seen Alice’s work in action. This spell allows players to deploy a rain of objects in-game with destructive consequences for piggy towers. The original code, written back around 2016, was notoriously difficult to debug. “One of the main reasons people struggled to rewrite it was because it only worked on physical devices, and It’s a lot trickier to debug on a device compared to a computer,” Alice explains. “I was able to work around that by appearing as an iOS device while using a computer.” Although she did not write the initial code for the Branded Spell feature, her contribution makes it possible to step through the code line by line and resolve subtle menu bugs so players can seamlessly receive their rewards.

Looking ahead, Alice is eager to see how these underlying technical upgrades shape the future of Angry Birds 2. Having worked on the project both as a contractor and now as a full-time lead, she has already seen how quickly the game can evolve. “Game code is never truly static. You never get to just put it down,” she notes. “It’s going to be really interesting to see how the game develops over the next few years, seeing how the architectural changes we’re working on will affect things, and hopefully help to bring in even more players.”

That passion for building games doesn’t stop when she logs off for the day. Alice keeps herself busy with solo projects at home. When asked what advice she would give to aspiring developers looking to follow a similar path, her answer comes back to that same spirit of initiative: “Just start doing it. Today, all you need is a computer and an internet connection to start making games. Join communities, ask questions, and don’t be afraid to try. Doing is always the best way to learn”.