Zach Laster has been developing games since 1999, starting with small projects in C++ on his own, and eventually joining the industry in 2015 after graduating from the University of Helsinki with a masters Degree in Artificial Intelligence and Algorithms. While at university he taught the game development courses. In the industry, he has worked in VR, mobile, and PC.
In 2020, Critical Charm, where Zach worked as CTO, turned to consulting to replace the income they had previously been receiving through various start up grants, now redirected to other support systems. This worked fairly well, but did not enable the team to advance much on their internal projects. In 2021, when Critical Charm decided the current path was untenable, Zach decided to continue working as a consultant. He found the varied challenges, new faces, and opportunity to help so many small studios exhilerating. In short, it was fun.
Since then, Zach has created Arctic Mage Games to provide consultancy services such as DevOps training, process automation implementation, and software development and architecture design, especially catered to games, arts, and the entertainment industry.