Fionn Keeley, who graduated from the MSc at the end of 2019, has a dual career, as a palaeontologist and as a games developer. He is reported in a recent profile on the noted web site from his native Ireland, We are Irish.
Fionn explains the links between dinosaurs and fantasy computer games, ‘‘I’m not sure what drew me to extinct animals more than living ones. I suppose I’d always liked mythical creatures too, and I think there’s sort of a fantastical element to prehistoric life, especially when you’re a child. There’s some element of mystery to palaeontology that I really like as well – it sometimes feels like you’re imagining the missing pieces of a jigsaw or trying to work out the colours of a black-and-white photo.’
He released his first game Fadó in October of 2019, just a month after finishing his MSc thesis. Not only that but he’s now working on several projects both on his own and as part of a team. His game Fadó is a retro RPG about Irish myths, a topic and a game genre that he’s always been fond of. Fionn sees the game as a collection of short stories that were in the kind of books that he used to read as a child. ‘I’m hoping to follow it up with further episodes that add to each story and continue to grow its world – since all of the game’s areas are real places, it’s a lot of fun to build on the larger-than-life versions of them established in mythology,’ he says.