Hi, I’m Philip Ask Zeplin-Frederiksen.
Welcome to Angry Airship Studios – which is really just a fancy, official-sounding name for my home office (which is just a fancy way of saying “my apartment”) here in Denmark.
The name “Angry Airship Studios” comes from an old comment on the Danish subreddit /r/Denmark, where a person once referenced me as “ham det sure luftskib” (“that guy the angry airship”) due to my family name “Zeplin”.
While it’s been many years since then, I’ve always remembered, and laughed at, the comment. And thus, the studio “Angry Airship Studios” was born.
From Visual Design to Algorithms
My path to game development wasn’t the traditional one. I hold a BA and MA in Visual Communication from the Danish Design Schools, and in my early days, I spent a lot of my time creating Photoshop tutorials. But for the last 19 years, my professional life has been deeply rooted in algorithms, digital marketing, and SEO.
I’ve spoken at Google conferences and VidCon, worked with Fortune 500 brands, and spent years tinkering with the YouTube algorithm. Back in the early “Wild West” days of SEO, I relied heavily on automation and various “black hat” techniques to manage massive networks of content – and thus, my love for emergent systems came to light.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but managing those databases and writing automation scripts was the mental focus and understanding I would eventually need to program procedural game environments and deep, data-driven AI systems.
A 10-Year Detour
I’ve been toying with game development for close to a decade. For a long time, it was just R&D – figuring out what worked and, more importantly, what didn’t.
I started in Unreal Engine back around 2014, building horror maps just for fun. That evolved into a procedural survival horror concept called Get Out Of The Swamp (and a brief detour for my never-finished platformer “Boy Chases Dog”), driven by my fascination with generating open-world environments. When I realized the sheer volume of 3D asset creation required for a solo dev was a trap, I noped out entirely.
I moved to TyrannoBuilder, conceptualizing a tongue-in-cheek RPG called Samurai Shiba Shinosuke – Triple S (or simply “SSS”). While learning quite a lot about the engine, and while I found my game concept pretty funny, it also became clear that what I had in mind was bigger than what TyrannoBuilder was able to handle.
I spent the next 12 months just thinking, planning, conceptualizing and mapping out how complex game systems could interact in a 2D space. I discovered the Godot engine, and it changed my workflow entirely. That workflow is what transformed the lighthearted Samurai Shiba Shinosuke into the grimdark, highly systemic colony sim I am building today: Shogun Exodus.
For more information on me, you can always read me website zeplin.online
