This week, solo developer Kimmo Lahtinen will launch Sektori, a challenging and fantastic twin-stick shooter on Nintendo Switch 2 worldwide. Read my review of it here. Ahead of the release, I had a chance to catch up with Kimmo about bringing Sektori to Switch 2, working at Housemarque before on Sony games like Resogun, a potential Sektori vinyl release, and much more.
Nintendo Insider: For those unaware, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Kimmo Lahtinen: Hi, I’m Kimmo from Finland. I make indie games by myself and my brother usually does the music for my games. I’ve been doing this solo for a long while now before which I spent 13 years at Housemarque making games such as Resogun and Dead Nation to name a few. And my latest game is obviously Sektori!
Nintendo Insider: Last year, many of my friends and colleagues discovered your work with Sektori. Before we discuss that, I want to talk about your solo career just after leaving Housemarque. What made you want to leave Housemarque?
Kimmo Lahtinen: I’ve always wanted to do my own games since I was a kid with a Commodore 64. My time at Housemarque was great, but after so many years and great projects it felt that it was time to go and try to do something on my own or I would never try it. After we completed Resogun, it felt like a perfect moment to go give it a shot. There’s no drama anywhere, sometimes you just feel it in your heart that it’s time for a change and that’s basically it.
Nintendo Insider: You worked on many great games at Housemarque. What was your favorite project to work on and also the most challenging one back then?
Kimmo Lahtinen: Probably Resogun! It was a PS4 launch game, so just jumping on a new hardware platform and suddenly having a lot of extra processing power to play with is always fun. And I got to do some really juicy bits like the ‘hero’ particle effects, the lightning and texts scrolling on the level and so on. And also play with voxels and so on, lot’s of bits and pieces. Lot’s of fun for a programmer.
Most challenging is probably all the projects nobody’s ever heard of. We did a lot of work just to stay alive in the hardest times. Demos that didn’t go anywhere, client projects for esoteric platforms that disappeared without a trace. And mobile stuff that never got anywhere. Stuff like that.
Nintendo Insider: When you went solo, you did a lot on iOS. In fact, I discovered your work when I covered some of it at TouchArcade. Did you consider launching Sektori on mobile at all?
Kimmo Lahtinen: I’m still considering it! It would be great as most of my other games are there too. But it’s quite hard for this one as it’s such a super fast game and then your thumbs take screen space and block your view and so forth. I’ll probably try to do it, but can’t promise if I’ll release it as I wouldn’t want to release something I don’t think works well enough.
Nintendo Insider: Barring your impeccable design and aesthetic sense, I think Sektori blew up (so to speak) because we don’t see many games like it anymore. It is also why games like Returnal and now Saros feel so out of the ordinary. Why do you think we don’t see many games like this anymore?
Kimmo Lahtinen: Major games tend to be such huge productions these days, that they often play it super safe and go for the lowest common denominator. Indies can just target a niche and hope to find an audience there. I think specifically arcade-like games are just not that trendy these days. I think a lot of the design choices in arcade type games appeal to people who lived the arcade age, but that’s quite a minor section of the game playing audience these days. Some of the choices are just not that modern, like I have no real story or no permanent upgrades or any handholding to push you through to the end. People are used to games that are much friendlier, so choices like this can be quite a shock.
Nintendo Insider: When did you start work on Sektori and did you ever consider launching it in early access?
Kimmo Lahtinen: I started April 2021. I did a weekly devlog through the whole development, so I have the exact date even and a nice “making of” documentation (also a glimpse of it is in the game credits). I’m not a fan of Early Access, but I did consider it. It feels weird to me to release an unfinished game on purpose, but I understand why it’s done of course. I don’t even like showing my games to my friends if I know there’s unfinished stuff in it. I’ll probably think about it again for the next game, because there are positive sides too, but for this it didn’t feel like it would’ve made sense as I had a clear vision all the way through.
Nintendo Insider: Can you comment on when work started on the Switch 2 port?
Kimmo Lahtinen: I think maybe late January. It took a couple of months to do and then the rest of the time you go through all the processes and don’t really work on it full time. It always takes a bit of time to get the builds out on consoles even after you’ve finished the code.
Nintendo Insider: I love the HD rumble on Switch 2. Since it is 60fps as well, I think this is an amazing portable version. Did you run into any issues during the porting process compared to PS5 or Xbox?
Kimmo Lahtinen: Thank you! There wasn’t really anything special. I’ve worked on many consoles so you kind of know what you have to do beforehand and can prepare even when just building the game before ports so things go as smoothly as possible. Switch 2 is a great platform to work on, so no issues really. I did have to do a bit of extra optimization to get it to be a solid enough 60fps, but that’s pretty normal!
Nintendo Insider: I appreciate how fast Sektori boots up on Switch 2 compared to many games on the platform. Are there plans to patch it with a higher resolution when playing docked?
Kimmo Lahtinen: It’s 1920×1080, 60hz both handheld and docked, no plans to change that for now.
Nintendo Insider: Now that Sektori will be on all major platforms, do you have any plans to do more with it?
Kimmo Lahtinen: No plans really, but I’m looking into if the Apple platforms like iOS might be possible when I have the time. Not promising anything, but it would be nice. That’s probably it for platforms for now.
Nintendo Insider: How much time went into the difficulty tuning?
Kimmo Lahtinen: Well, it depends. The whole gameplay development is always constant tuning back and forth. The ‘Challenge’ difficulty was the default development difficulty and I’ve always kept it so that it’s something fun to play for me personally. But that’s always a potential trap you can fall into as obviously you know your own game really well. The extra difficulty levels came later in the process, as they’re really just modifiers on the base level. Revolution is mainly for the super players who really want to get into it, it’s way too hard even for me. Whereas Experience is tuned so that it becomes quite trivial once you learn the rules.
Nintendo Insider: Did you consider adding an easy mode at any point during development?
Kimmo Lahtinen: It’s a funny game, as I consider the ‘Experience’ mode the easy mode. But I know it isn’t easy per se as you jump in for the first time. The thing is that you need to get into it, learn the rules and know what things mean and then you suddenly notice that you’re flying through it. You can’t just start it and expect you’ll complete a run on the first try. A true easy mode would probably have to slow down the game a lot and start tearing down some of the system, remove enemies and so on, but I feel that would not help the game at all. I don’t think you would get the same satisfaction from completing the campaign if it just gave it to you like a survivor game or something. But I don’t know, I do think it would’ve probably been a bit more popular if it had a casual mode too. These are hard things to decide on too, but I’m quite happy with the way it is.
Nintendo Insider: The upgrading and selection aspects of the gameplay aren’t touched on too often when Sektori is discussed. I think they really elevate it above just being a great looking and feeling game. Did you worry these would make the core gameplay too complex?
Kimmo Lahtinen: Yes, very much! The card system especially was something I tweaked back and forth many many times over the years. And even considered dropping it completely quite late in the project. I’m quite happy with it now though, but that was probably the hardest thing in the project to get right. Once I tried the ‘deck’ system for them, so the player had a bit more control than the standard ‘pick three’, that unlocked it. Also the player has so much to consider in the game itself too that just getting the right balance there is a very interesting problem. Sometimes a card might have been fun, but is just too much to read and parse, too many rules, when you want to keep the pace of the game up. Or at some point there was a ‘reroll’ opportunity at the card screen, but again that’s just complexity and you want the player to be playing, not spending time in menus. And then you need to have enough interesting upgrades both on the upgrade stack and the cards, so you constantly get something at a nice pace through the 30 minute campaign run. That’s a lot of design you have to do.
Nintendo Insider: Are there any plans to do a physical release or a vinyl soundtrack?
Kimmo Lahtinen: Nothing to announce there, but it would be super fun to do!
Nintendo Insider: Are there any plans to bring more of your earlier work to Switch 1/2 barring Barbearian?
Kimmo Lahtinen: I’m not sure I really have other games that would fit perfectly on the platform, so probably not. But I’ll never say never, it’s always fun to bring games to new platforms.
Nintendo Insider: What should we expect from you this year?
Kimmo Lahtinen: You can expect me to take it easy and maybe I can at some point finally get all Sektori platforms out of my hands and start prototyping something new! I don’t know what that is though.
Nintendo Insider: What did you play in 2025 and 2026 so far that you really enjoyed?
Kimmo Lahtinen: Just finished The Drifter, that was great. We also got our coop campaign of Factorio Space Age done with a friend, highly recommended. Also Titanium Court, that game was obviously made with a lot of love.
Kimmo Lahtinen: Nintendo Insider: How do you like your coffee? Go into as much detail as possible.
I don’t drink coffee! I know, I’m weird.
