Diving Deep with Jonas Georgakakis

WeAnimate 2026-01-09 | wam#0068

It’s impossible to review the career of digital artist and game developer Jonas Georgakakis without looking at his role as an art director at SYBO Games, a company where he worked for 13 years. SYBO and Subway Surfers grew alongside each other, from small beginnings to a global phenomenon. Subway Surfers was the most downloaded game of the decade from 2012 to 2022, surpassing 4 billion downloads, and Jonas was there every step of the way.

A few years ago, Jonas embarked on his own adventure, starting game company Glowlight and launching his own game, The Magical Mixture Mill. The Magical Mixture Mill was awarded the 2024 Spilprisen award for Best Debut, and enjoys a fantastic 9/10 rating on Steam. WeAnimate spoke with Jonas about his new adventures, and about his game development and creative processes.

WA: How did your career in games begin?

Jonas: After I went to The Animation Workshop, I had my internship in England, at Lionhead Games. That was my dream job, but when I got there it was very disappointing. People were just working on things with no idea where they were supposed to go in the game, or who assigned them the task, or why it was important…. it just wasn’t inspiring. 

Lionhead treated me very nicely, but I was working on this character, and nobody knew exactly where it was going to go in the game. They just knew they liked the design, and they gave me a month to work on it. I was sitting there modeling his ankles, and suddenly I was like “who the fuck is going to see these ankles?” And it was that moment where I realized that I was just done, and didn’t want to work in AAA games. Lionhead offered me a job at the end of my internship, but instead I went home to Denmark, and got a job with Bodie and Sylvester after they started SYBO. It was just supposed to be a few weeks to cover a paternity leave, but I ended up staying there for about 13 years.

WA: What was it like being at SYBO for all that time?

Jonas: They always say it’s bad for your career to stay at the same place for too long, and there are a lot of reasons why that’s true. But what I always say to people is that SYBO wasn’t really one place. As the number of employees changed, the structure and vibe changed completely, so it felt like there were these distinct phases, or milestones, where the company transitioned to a new company. Over the time I worked there it was basically four different studios.

For me, the best phase was the second phase: we were around 15-20 people, and there was a very loose structure. It was still small enough that everyone took turns cleaning the kitchen, but it was big enough that food came in and was taken care of. There were one or two producers, but not yet producers to the producers. That was what happened in the third phase, and for me something ended there. I was no longer working together with friends: now I was truly just working at a company.

And it was a very nice company, not a bad company. I was always treated insanely nicely, which is another reason I stayed so long. The fourth phase of SYBO was after it sold, and it became just a company like any other. Still one that was very nice to work at, but creatively stifling, because now they had a very clear mission and they couldn’t take risks.

With Bodie and Sylvester, the original founders, who had run it up until that time, there was a lot of risk taking. And sometimes I thought what they were doing was stupid, and told them so, and they would say “thanks for telling us, but we are going to do it anyway.” So at least I felt like I had clarity and transparency about what was happening. If you want to do something stupid, but it’s your company and you’re paying the bills and it’s your decision and your loss, I feel like that’s fair. If we simply disagree, I’m fine with that.

“I would rather be led by a person who is crazy, if at least they have a vision. We might all think they are insane, but at least it’s fun. I’m not saying it’s better, but it’s definitely more fun. I get demotivated when I feel like everything is happening because of bureaucracy, and good ideas just get lost in the system. “

 

– Jonas Georgakakis

So I worked at SYBO Games for a long time, and we reached a point where we were hiring a lot of external experts and professionals. I had always been just an artist, and thought there were a lot of things I didn’t understand about games. But I was sitting in a lot of meetings with these really experienced people, and I started to think I could do what they are doing. I started to think that maybe I actually had enough knowledge to start my own thing. A little overconfidence never hurt anybody. [laughs]

I was also looking at my career path and I was thinking, “Okay, so I’m an art director. What do I actually want to do? What is my end goal?” And for me it became really clear that the right role for me in a studio, when I have reached my final form (which I may be close to now, or not at all) is as a creative director. And I realized that at SYBO I could never become that. Not because SYBO wouldn’t let me be: they would probably have said “Great!” and let me have the job. But I would never be able to have confidence in that role, because I do not actually play free-to-play mobile games, so I do not understand that market well enough. I am not the target audience in any way, whereas I am the target audience for PC games.

WA: What kind of games do you prefer?

Jonas: For me games are all about immersion. They literally take your mind somewhere else, and you lose track of real life. That’s the power of a good game. So I play these nerdy, sandbox games where you have to make a lot of choices and fail a lot. I really like a challenge. I like a game to tell me that I suck so I can prove it wrong.

But free-to-play mobile games do not want to immerse you. They want to occupy your mind, but not immerse you, because they want you to go back to the main menu every five minutes and engage with the microtransactions. The whole point is for you to not think about it too deeply in the beginning, create a lot of feelings of success without even trying, and then make it more and more difficult to progress without paying money.

One of the reasons I enjoyed working on Subway Surfers for so long was because people will actually play it for a very long time without going into the menu, without spending money. But, from a business standpoint, that’s not how you should build free-to-play games. What they want to do (and of course we can’t paint them all with the same brush, but this is basically true) is get you hooked on a positive feedback loop, get you all pumped with endorphins, then slowly start pulling the carrot away from you, pulling it further and further back. So what you are doing as a human is just sitting there really wanting that carrot, and getting frustrated.

So free-to-play games basically live off of frustration, or the promise of alleviating your frustration. And for me, that’s just not what games are about. They are supposed to take us away from frustration. In fact, I stopped looking at them as games as time progressed. I’m not sure what to call them, but I don’t think they are actually games – I think they are something else.

WA: What inspired your career change?

Jonas: I played Stardew Valley. This was a game that I never would have played. I thought it was just a farming game, and farming games are stupid. But people kept saying it was amazing, so I played it, and it was super interesting. And for the first time in my life I had the experience where the game I want to play is also a game that might be fun to make. So I thought that perhaps I could make a game that had a vibe like Stardew Valley: a cozy game for people who just want to chill in a small world.

“One of the reasons I started my own company is because I want to try and make MY thing. You work for so long for other people, and you realize that you are using your creativity to create someone else’s dream. And I wondered what would happen if I actually used all my energy and creativity to make what I think is cool, and something that really comes from me? Glowlight is a means to that end.”

 

– Jonas Georgakakis

I started Glowlight with a little investment. And I went out and hired a programmer named Jonas Tingmose, and we made a prototype for our first game, The Magical Mixture Mill. And then we got full funding to go ahead and make the game.

WA: Tell us about developing your own game for the first time.

Jonas: In the beginning it was great. The publisher really got it and we were all really excited about it. And then… you know how there is that part of the contract that you don’t really pay attention to, because you think it won’t ever be relevant, which applies to cases of war? What happened was that Russia invaded Ukraine. That had a butterfly effect, because our publisher had a marketing department located in Moscow, even though the rest of the company wasn’t. Because of the sanctions, they had to cut their marketing department, so that meant that they couldn’t fulfill the contract, and had to sell our contract to someone else.

So we were in mid-production and had to find a new publisher. At this point I had hired two more people, so I had three people depending on me in order to earn a salary… and this is the part of the job, part of having your own company, that, in a perfect world, would not be my responsibility.

But I had to move fast, because I had people’s salaries depending on me. So there were a couple of areas in the new publishing contract that were a bit vague, and that came back and bit us in the butt later, when we got towards launching the game.

To make a long story short, we weren’t totally aligned with how we wanted to market the game, or spend the marketing budget. The way Steam’s algorithm works is that it responds really well to spikes and big moments, so we wanted the biggest possible push at full release. We didn’t want a small drizzle of investment over time: spreading the money out just wastes it.

WA: But there was some buzz around the game at early access.

Jonas: Yes. We went into early access a year ahead of release. When you have an early access game, you basically have a live product. That means that every time you add something new, you have to make sure that it doesn’t break anything and that it actually works. So you have to do a lot more QA, and you’re getting a lot of negative feedback if you don’t nail it 100%, so you are spending a lot of time supporting your game instead of building it.

At the time, we thought we were ready for early access, but in hindsight we weren’t. That’s one of the areas where we fucked up. And I think one of them was not that we went into early access too early: I actually think we went into production too early. In hindsight, I think we actually hadn’t fully finished our pre-production. There were still some systems … (and it sounds so stupid when I say it now; anybody who has ever made a game will think I’m such an idiot, but this is part of how we learn, right?) … we had some systems we thought we didn’t need to prototype: we thought that they would just work. It turns out that, although they did work at one point, in the meantime other things had changed, and they didn’t work any more, and the game needed them in order to feel like a complete flow. So the core game play had some missing elements that we had to go back and reinvent after we were already in early access. In hindsight, that’s where we messed up.

I won’t say that we won’t ever do early access again, but I will say that we have to be not just past pre-production, but fully over the first phase of production, where all the core assets and game play is there, so all we’re doing in early access is tweaking numbers and adding content. If you’re still making systems in early access, I think you’re in trouble. And that’s what we did, way too much, and that’s why we had such a terrible experience with early access.

We had a Discord forum where we had a small core of really nice people who were so incredibly helpful. These guys are superheroes – we mention them in the game credits. I really appreciate  how they kept us motivated, especially the programmers. Programmers tend to look for mistakes. You can have 95% of the code working, and then someone finds a bug, and then their confidence falls. But we had people on the forums saying “this game is amazing – this is my favorite game! It’s actually quite polished for an early access game!” Which it was – that’s actually the ridiculous thing. Our game was insanely stable and didn’t really crash and it worked well, but that doesn’t matter when there are some systems missing for the core experience. So I think the fan support kinda saved the team: in addition to all the problems, we got a lot of positive feedback too. And the game has great ratings, so that also kept us going. I think that’s the good thing about Steam. The people have spoken, and they’ve said that this is better than the average game.

Our game was not looking to make millions, but it was doing okay. And the crazy thing was, when the game actually released, it did so much better than the publisher expected, even without marketing, that the owner of the publishing company came back and decided to give us localization. But of course it was too late. We needed that big spike in the algorithm to help gain visibility. So that whole aspect of marketing the game was disappointing and frustrating, and it became the exact thing we were trying to avoid.

All that being said, financially the game is on track to be profitable; it’s just not profitable enough to continue adding major updates. We support it with bug fixes and stuff, but we can’t make new content for it, and that’s why we moved on.

 

“I reflect a lot over what I do, so sometimes it comes across as that I don’t appreciate something I’ve done, and that’s not the case. I’m actually ridiculously proud of The Magical Mixture Mill. I think it’s insane that we made that, and crazy how well it did considering how fucked up production ended up being. That being said, I’m also not blind to the mistakes that we made. There are mistakes that are out of your control, so it’s a waste of time to think about it. But it’s important to focus on the things that we did do wrong, and that we should not do again, so we learn from our mistakes.”

 

 

 

– Jonas Georgakakis

 

WA: The Magical Mixture Mill has very strong visual design.

Jonas: Yes, but the visual style of the game presents two problems: one is a marketing problem and one is a production problem. The marketing problem is that although it looks really great, it looks really great in a way that you’ve kind of seen before. In the world of indie games, you really want to stand out, and just looking great is not enough. You have so many good tools and artists all over the world who will work for very little money, so it’s not hard to just look good.

 

“That’s actually a really important thing that I think people in the industry don’t think enough about. It’s one of our big takeaways from working with mobile games, and working at SYBO. We realized that people were sitting in the bus playing Subway Surfers, and if someone looked over their shoulder, they instantly knew what game they were playing. And we realized that was actually a really slick marketing tool: that you can instantly recognize a game just from a single screenshot, so if you randomly see something and then you stumble across it again you know exactly what it is. I’m trying to take that idea into our next game.”

 

 

 

– Jonas Georgakakis

 

And the production problem was that the game looked good because I do really nice textures as a 3D artist. This meant that I had to hand paint everything in the game, which doesn’t scale well.

I’ve talked a bit about the graphics, but on a much more fundamental level I made a mistake that I thought I would avoid, but somehow I made it again. Which really annoys me, because it means that I didn’t learn, and learning is what excites me. The mistake is that I once again made a game that was not for me.

The problem with The Magical Mixture Mill is that we went into the cozy game sphere, but during early access, we got two very different sets of people playing our game. Probably because of poor marketing, we weren’t clearly communicating what the game was. On the one hand, we got the audience we wanted, which was the cozy crowd. But we got a surprising amount of hardcore players coming because part of our game was automation (Editor: A sub-genre of management games). Of course we wanted automation, but we wanted to make it simple and approachable. For us that was a part of the game, but there was also a whole world and story: we were trying to make a holistic experience. But we got people in early access that came from Factorio and Satisfactory, which are much more challenging games, and that’s all they are – they are just about automation. So I think we got confused in early access, because we had these two different audiences telling us what they liked and didn’t like, and we were constantly sitting between two chairs. And I think the reason we had a hard time choosing the right direction sometimes, or making a decision and sticking to it was because, at the end of the day, the game was actually not for us.

We should have been the audience, because then we would know what’s right and what to do. We’re just four people, trying to guess what people want, and trying to understand the brains of a different type of person. If even just one of us was the target audience, then we would know immediately what to do. So that’s the biggest learning for our next game.

WA: So tell us about the concept for the new game.

Jonas: I asked myself “what is the coolest game in my head?” and this was one of the ideas that came out. We had a long pitching session, and made prototypes and stuff. We were down to two ideas before we settled on this one, and it’s one of the hardest decisions I’ve made in this company. One of the biggest reasons we settled on this one (aside from the fact that we did some market research and actually this type of game does really well on Steam), is that this concept also plays to our strengths as a team. We are still just the four of us, and when I look at what it is that we are good at, when I look at where we really excelled in The Magical Mixture Mill, I think this concept really speaks to those strengths. And that’s another thing I’ve learned, which is to make a project that fits the team.

It’s a colony sim, so it’s got the soul of a management game, but you control a colony. It’s a small colony – right now we don’t know exactly what the number will be, but it will be less than 10, maybe less than 5 people. The sim aspect is very much like RimWorld or Stranded: Alien Dawn. But we’re setting it underwater in a kind of steampunk setting, and it has a lot to do with survival and terror of the dark deep. So it’s more hardcore, and it’s spooky.

Because of the setting and the theme, we arrived at some cool gameplay that we didn’t even plan, and the game is actually really fun. I don’t think The Magical Mixture Mill was really fun for me until we were in production. This game is already fun, but then again, I’m the target audience. So I know where the fun is in this game, and now we just have to make it better and better.

We want to set it in the late 1800s–early 1900s, where it’s steampunk and underwater. A bit Jules Verne, a bit French… it needs to be elegant, so we’re listening to classical music while trying to survive these weird monsters in the deep. And as you go deeper and deeper, literally, down into the depths of the sea, you start out with things that we know very well, and things that really exist, but as you go deeper and deeper we start inventing stuff.

It’s believed that only 10% of all life in the sea has been discovered, so we have a lot of room to make up new stuff. So that’s the gradient we want to make, and then the colonists, as they go deeper and deeper, they go to depths that humans were never meant to survive. Humans were never meant to live under the sea, even though that’s where all life comes from, so there is an overarching theme of a kind of regression, of going back to origins, where they begin to alter themselves to better fit this environment. In a lot of survival games, you alter the environment to fit yourself – but we want you as a player to get so far that you start altering the humans to fit the environment.

I’ve been watching a mindboggling show that only went for one season called Scavenger’s Reign. It’s an animated show that follows a group of 5 people who have crash-landed on an alien planet, and everything on this planet almost works like one big organism. It’s not evil, but they are intruders and everything is trying to absorb them in some way, and they are trying to turn these weird alien flora and fauna into tools to help them survive. That’s one of the things we want to try to do here.

I’ve also always had a romantic attachment back to the times when the earth felt big. We only have to go back like 100 years to when the earth and all the places and cultures felt very far away and different and the earth had a sense of exploration. Going from the cold North down to Egypt must have been like going to another planet. But today we’ve seen pictures and movies, and perhaps we’ve actually seen things so much that we don’t have a lot of curiosity to actually go there. So another reason we want to go back and have this retro feeling is so that we can revive this feeling of exploration and curiosity, so people can be curious but also terrified.

Wondering what is in the dark is both exciting and terrifying, especially because if it doesn’t kill you, you might get something that makes your survival more likely. We want to keep the player constantly in this state of two minds – not wanting to know, but wanting to know. It’s all about what is hiding in the dark, and the classic idea of not showing the monster, because whatever monster you are imagining is probably much more interesting than the one I would design. This is also really nice for production, because it means that we don’t have to make a billion monsters – the player is going to dream them up in their own mind.

WA: How does this type of project satisfy you personally as a creator?

Jonas: At SYBO I started as a 3D artist. Then, as more people came on, I moved on to become a lead artist and art director and so on. Honestly, I was in no way qualified for the job – I built the experience over time. Now that I look back, I am better able to see what my own strengths and weaknesses are, and my greatest strength is that I am really good at knowing when something is good enough. I’m not a perfectionist, and I know when to stop. A lot of artists can’t stop, and keep polishing forever, but I am good at knowing how we can make something look like it took a lot of time, when in reality it’s a hack job. I think that’s my main strength. That’s what I did a lot at SYBO, and it’s what I’m trying to do here at Glowlight. I’m trying to make us look like we’re a 20-person team when we’re actually just 4.

When I put together this team, I wanted to work with people who play video games, and I wanted to work with people who have an opinion. I was well aware that we were going to spend a bit too much time discussing things, but I would rather have that than if I just express an idea and someone silently thinks it’s a bad idea but doesn’t say anything. But what I had a blind spot towards was that none of us are salesmen. Firstly, none of us are very active on social media, so we don’t understand what people want, because we ourselves do not consume marketing in that way. And that’s a problem, nowadays. That’s why the issue with the publisher was so important. Secondly, I am the person who leads the team, and I am a person who likes to focus – I work most efficiently that way. But I am already wearing so many hats, and the salesman hat is not one that in any way comes easily to me. And any time I try to force that, it’s time taken away from something else.

I mean, we’re going to make more games, but I will get to a point where I might want to go back to just being an employee. I definitely see that happening one day, because owning a company and being responsible for all of this stuff is not why I got into the business – it’s a means to an end. And that end for me is to create things.

 

“I want to make video games. I just really want to make video games in a small team. I don’t want anything big – I really don’t. I want to have a company that’s never more than 10 people. At heart I am someone who needs to create things, and if my company ever got bigger than that I would stop creating and start managing instead. I don’t think I’m a bad manager, it’s just not what gets me out of bed in the morning. I want to think of new things, and make them into reality. So I just want to make games, and I want our games to earn enough that we can make more games. That’s it. That’s the mission.“

 

 

 

– Jonas Georgakakis

 

WA: If the team was 20 people, you could make 2 games at once.

Jonas: And boy does that sound exciting, because I have a lot of ideas and I don’t have a lifetime long enough for all of them. But the problem with that is that, at the end of the day, I really like to be focused. If I had to work on two games, I wouldn’t be able to dive in the way I want to. For example, the game we’re working on right now, it’s an underwater game, it’s about finding new materials. At first you start finding minerals, and then you start finding alien ruins down in the water, and you start making some weird tech out of that… and I just love sitting and nerding and learning about minerals. I’ve spent weeks learning about how different alloys are made, where you find certain metals, how are they extracted… This is what I like about a new project: you get to nerd out on new shit. You get a little bit smarter, and I think that’s really fun.

That’s another thing that I get from making projects that are not just the same thing the whole time. The project, once it’s done, stays with me, because I learned something. Subway Surfers for example. This may come as a surprise to you, but I am not the most “street” person. I am not that hip–hop. But I actually studied it, digging deep, trying to find my own hip hop inspiration, and now I know a surprising amount about skateboarding and graffiti and street culture. And I love that, for that reason, Subway Surfers is really grounded in 80s-90s hip-hop, because that’s what I knew, growing up with Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and stuff. It’s before hip-hop became gritty – it has a kind of New York, storytelling, street culture style… So that lives with me, and all these projects live with me.

I also think that a lot of things you do are, like Bob Ross says, “happy little accidents.” If someone who had a better understanding of hip-hop had my role on Subway Surfers, and had been integral in the designs and the characters of the game, I think perhaps it may not have been so accessible. One of the things we learned about Subway Surfers is that it really connected with a lot of people – it interpreted a very niche culture in a way that made everyone feel welcome.

 

“In my journey as an artist, one of the things that has always followed me through my life and career, is actually that I’m quite normal. There are a lot of artists who immerse themselves so much in the industry that they forget to live, they forget to connect with the average person. But the average person is also your customer, and I think sometimes the industry can lose sight of that. They live in some weird other world, where their audience is not. And of course the game industry has auteurs and weird people who do art, and that’s great, but most of the time, the average person just wants a good experience, and the more you connect with them, the better position you are in to make that for them. My creativity is a tool to give someone an experience. I’m not doing this because I have a message or because I’m out to change the world. I just want to make shit. And I want to make shit that people enjoy. And it’s that simple.”

 

 

 

– Jonas Georgakakis

 

I’m a very simple person. And I’m also a very lucky person. So I have everything I need in my life. I got to marry my best friend, we have a kid, we have a place to live, we have stable finances, and I get to sit at home in my robe all day and make video games. So I have nothing to complain about. So the longer I can drag this phase of my life out the better – that’s my goal. These are the good times.

With that kind of attitude and track record, Jonas and the team at Glowlight are sure to make more and more interesting games for years to come. We can’t wait to see what they come up with!