Category Archives: Aalto University (TAIK)

Classes I’m taking, things I’m learning and enjoying at TAIK.

Game Design Portfolio, Master Thesis

Trials of the Wolf (MA Thesis Project for Aalto University)

Video

totw_logo_02Abstract:
This thesis is a reflection of the entire production process and learnings of Trials of the Wolf; an approachable roguelike card game about a wolf, created by Björn Lindholm and I over a period of almost two years. It was born out of our concerns about the endangerment of wolves as a result of poaching in Finland. It was my hope that by allowing for an underlying current of realism to exist within the game, some tangential learning would occur, allowing for players to empathise with their situation. The production was broken up into two major stages: pre-production, and production; my responsibilities being that of design, art direction, and animation. During pre-production, my goals mainly consisted of the background research on wolves as well as the necessary game benchmarking, prototyping, and documentation. Production was the development of the digital game based off of pre-production’s documentation and learnings. It was during this time the most pivots and learnings occurred when evaluated against the entire production. At the end of the production we were able to deliver a vertical slice of the game which entailed our initial production goals: creating a game that was difficult but still approachable with factual undertones. It is my deepest hopes that my research and learnings from this thesis can be used as a guide for others looking to develop their own digital games with a small team and limited resources.

Thesis:
The Production & Learnings of Trials of the Wolf

Alpha Builds:
– Read Me
– Mac 32 bit / 64 bit (Offline)
– PC 32 / 64 bit (Offline)
– Linux (Offline)

Credits:
Developed by Arash John Sammander and Björn Lindholm
Art by Matei Molner
Music by Vesa-Matti Mattsson

Aalto University (TAIK), Master Thesis

MA Thesis Diary Post #6 – Caribou and Boar

Woke up early today, it was so freaking dark and it was 8:30am.  Found out the Sun didn’t rise for another hour and woke back up around 1:30pm 😛  Helsinki only has about 5-6 hours of sun light during winter, so you gotta be careful not to sleep too late or you miss any and all light that might be in the sky.

I was able to still get two animals done today the caribou and the boar.  I wanted to do the moose and the caribou today, but the caribou’s antlers pissed me off so much; I decided to skip another antlered animal for today.

I also reworked some of the colors of the musk ox but I won’t be posting that today.  I’ll probably do a group post of all the animals when I’m done them.

CaribouAndBoar

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Aalto University (TAIK), Master Thesis

MA Thesis Diary Post #3 – Assets, Assets, Assets

The benefits of being alone during the holidays is that you have nothing better to do than get work done. 😛  Here is the result of the past few days of work:

With the worries of art style, perspective, and animation out of the way, I was able to spend the last three days working like a dog or wolf, and was able to produce the follow early draft work.  As you will see, initially I straight up copied Matthew’s tree style but then eventually broke off and began to reinterpret and add my own spin on things.  I think that is a big step for many non artists to understand, they think that if you are using someone else’s work as a reference it is somehow cheating, when in fact it is not.  Of course I will not be using all of these in the final product to be safe but either way I am extremely thankful for finding Mr. Curickshank’s work.

You will also notice I was able to eventually develop my own bushes, and trees based off of this style.  Finally I created some rocks and the wolf and musk ox to see how they fit together in this world, again only caring for 2D profiles and trying to limit myself to only 2-3 colors.  Doing front and back will be more difficult, especially if it becomes a 2.5D / 3 quarters view later on.  For now I’m going to just keep with this so I can keep moving forward.

ArtAssetsWolfGame

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Aalto University (TAIK), Master Thesis

MA Thesis Diary Post #2 – Reworking Art Direction

To address some of the issues that I have been having when creating art assets for the game I sat down and really thought about why I was having so much trouble actually creating them.  While I was thinking I thought long and hard why I was struggling so much.  I knew that I had enough skill and ability to at least produce something reasonable, so why was it that I could not do a thing.

After thinking for a while and talking with my collogue I came to the realization that I have not produced anything out of laziness but more because of the type of artist that I am.  There are many different types of artists with many different skill sets.  They have many different strengths and weaknesses.  There are some that have very unique styles and can always easily create imagery in that style.  Others art “styleless” who cannot create anything completely from their minds, but must see examples of what they need to create.  I fall into the later category.

I was having such a hard time creating art assets because two key things were missing, an art style, and examples.  After being forced by my collogue to address these issues by picking something and sticking to it I came to the following choices.

The art style will be simple and vector based (at least initially) because this is where most of my skill lies, two it should be simple so that I do not fall into the habit of trying to create highly realized (overly realistic) imagery.

Earlier in the week google had done a nice “interactive” story telling about the Brothers Grimm, which had a nice simplistic graphic style, which was done by Matthew Cruickshank.  Something about its simplicity had caught my eye and I really enjoyed how he was able to tell so much with so little.  After talking with a few artists at work, various artists and some 50’s – 60’s children’s books were suggested.  Finally the art of Josh Agle, better know as Shag were also recommended.

Taking these into account but leaning more towards Cruickshank’s style laied the foundation of our art style.  Now with that out of the way, we came across my other problem.  Since I could only create what I saw and now that I had a lot of reference, none of them were rendered from above but only from the side.  Again this was one of the biggest challenges I have had, seeing something then trying to imagine it from above.  It really twists your brain.  I could have of course created or found 3D models, then orbited around them to get the angle and look that I wanted but even this would take too much time.  So Björn and I decided that we will now just worry about a side (or semi-side view).  This made things a lot easier cause I just had to copy what I saw instead of try to imagine it.  Also I was told to ignore animation (one of my other weaknesses) for now and if and when the time comes that I could not do it, then we would hire someone to handle the animation.

And so my work began…

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Master Thesis

MA Thesis Diary Post #1 – Early Tree Concepts

Over the past year I’ve been working on iterations of my MA thesis that I and Björn Lindholm are collaborating on.  Though I’ve spent many days iterating on various designs and art styles I believe that I will probably be going for a more clean vector style which only uses 2-3 colors max per object.  Below is an example of some early concepts:

TreeConceptsFinal

As I continue to work I will post more images and discuss my progress.  I will continue now to iterate more landscape objects as well as work on more iconic representations of objects which will be used in another portion of the game.

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Aalto University (TAIK), Game Design, Understanding Games

PRAYERS ON A PORCELAIN ALTAR, AKA WHAT THE HELL ARE WE SUPPOSED TO BE DOING? (UNDERSTANDING GAMES, LARP REVIEW)

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So we are all laying around on the cold floor or hard tables of the game design lab in TAIK Media Lab, Helsinki Finland.   Half of us read the rules for the game and others just got the gist of the part they had to play.  Each person had a character sheet describing their personality, what they did last night and how they felt about the current situation.  Fortunately for me my character was exactly who I am in real life so all I had to do was just act natural.  Supposedly waking up with really bad hangovers we find out that we are in someone’s house after a crazy party, maybe celebrating the end of entrance exams to a theater school we are all trying to get into.  One of us finds a bloody bed and we are all so nauseous that we don’t dare go anywhere but the bathroom.

We laid there till one of the characters finally broke the silence and mumbled something I have long forgotten.  After a few minutes of a really confusing discussion, she got up went upstairs, then hurried back, warning us of the bloody bed upstairs that none of us would be able to go to.  So here we all began to try to move the game forward.  My character’s job was supposed to be the realistic one, and move the group forward to solve the problem, but at the same time I had realized that I had sex with someone last night and was hoping that I didn’t kill anyone.  The thing that was even more awkward was that there were only two other females playing the game and none of them seemed to have gotten laid last night.  So I had a sinking feeling I had sex with one of the guys, or the person that I did actually sleep with was one of the characters that we did not pick.  Or could I be the killer?

From here, it was pretty much confusion, all of us trying to force ourselves to attack the other character’s morals, etc.  Hoping that we could turn up the killer, if there really was one.  Unfortunately this never happened.  A few people got up to go to the bathroom room and when they left, no one said anything special which I had assumed was a perfect time for us to gossip to find out what was going on, but alas things just drudged along.  No one really finding anything out and after about ninety minutes of just sheer force and confusion the story never got anywhere.  We were all just as confused as when we had begun.

I believe the main problems were that we all knew each other fairly well, and just had too much trouble really trying to attack each other to the point that something might have probably happened.  It would have been nice to have some type of moderator, someone that knew the bigger picture and tried to help us along, but alas we just basically ran around in circles until people finally gave up and decided to leave.   Afterwards we discussed the event and also read all of the sheets, hoping to find out who did what and still we were lost and confused into exactly what was supposed to happen and where we were supposed to go.  What was the final outcome supposed to be?  Was it supposed to be so open ended that anything is valid?  If this was the case then it is very hard to ever predict what will happen from this game and to guarantee a rewarding experience to all players.  Though I really wanted this to go well, in the end, it just kind of became more of an awkward waste of time.

If I were to say one thing that might have made things easier on us, it would have been to specify strong clear goals that the characters have to achieve and what the outcomes of achieving or not achieving them would result in.  Some type of risk versus reward, some type of direction.  Anything so the players would know if they were on the right track, if there was any track to begin with.  Maybe we missed the point.  But I hope we do get a better understanding of what was actually supposed to happen if we continue to play the scenario over, maybe this time with a full ten people.

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Aalto University (TAIK), Game Design, Understanding Games

HALF-OGRES CAN’T FLY. (UNDERSTANDING GAMES, LECTURE #5)

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So this huge ogre with chain-mail and a pet whirlwind (Dingy, I think it was called.) is chasing us to the edge of this cliff.  The rest of the party consisting of various Dragonlance characters, a minotaur, kinder, and my half-ogre mage are all running for dear life.   Me being the heroic idiot that I was, decided to “slow him down,” while the others got away, ignoring the obvious signs from the game master that this was not the stunt I should be trying to pull right about now.  I mean what really got us to this point?  I don’t remember exactly.  I was feeling all the real emotions that I would be feeling if I was actually there in real life, which was awesome.  It was the early 1990’s and these were our adventures in the world of AD&D.

We would plan for weeks in advance, fighting with our parents to allow us to sleep over my best friend’s place.  My parents would rarely let me go, my father usually telling me that home is a place for sleep and that I should always come home. Sometimes for birthdays, special occasions, or when my parents had gone away on trips, I would be able to stray from the rules.

Outside of our AD&D campaigns, I would draw little comics of our adventures and the big events that would happen to us.  I would draw bubbles above the cartoon characters and my best friend would write the dialog.  Sometimes he would write thing so funny that we would cry from laughter.  Like one time I had a picture of Riverwind getting killed by a dragon (or something) and he laid there as mass of body parts and guts, us standing over him sad and confused.  My best friend wrote, “Gee, I didn’t know Riverwind was made of silly putty, I wonder if he can copy comics.”  This was my favorite picture of all time.  Unfortunately as always most of these things were lost in the many spring cleanings that my family would have when I happen to “not be around.”

So back to where we began, I turned around, thinking I was some bad ass warrior and threw my +1 magic dagger at the ogre, and after a failing dice roll and the game master shaking his head, looking at me like I’m an idiot, the dagger bounces off his chest like a pebble.  Then my best friend assuming the role of the ogre points at me and in an angry ogre voice, commands his whirlwind to commence throwing me off the side of the cliff.  Ironically, I’m sure I got to the bottom of the cliff before the others.

When my character had died, I was actually at the brink of tears and had to leave the room.  It was amazing now looking back how much real emotion I had felt for a character that never really existed but that I had associated so strongly with.  Much later, my friend came up and told me I was resurrected and we could continue our adventure.  Though, I said that this was bullshit and that I thought I should stay dead, he told me he did a successful roll to recover me and I was legitimately resurrected not just a fake roll to bring me back to make me feel better.  To be honest, that may have been the last day that we had ever played AD&D.  Soon we just grew up, and got so busy with life that we never resumed our adventures.  It was a nice feeling though, going through old hard back AD&D books and coming across my character sheet, looking over the stats, and remembering all the good times we had.

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Aalto University (TAIK), Game Design, Understanding Games

STUCK IN THE MUD. (UNDERSTANDING GAMES, LECTURE #4)

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Unfortunately, long ago, upon graduating from high school (mid-90’s), I was considered by the state of Delaware and the US educational system, not “smart enough” to go directly to a university.  Probably cause of my poor PSAT/SAT scores.  I have no idea.  But I remember being told by my counselor that I could probably hope to become a gym teacher one day.  (Mind you I graduated from that same school magna cum laude with two engineering degrees.) Which to me was a riot cause I pretty much sucked at pretty much all the “cool” jock sports.  Instead doing well in things like volleyball and badminton.  Anyway, I was required to go to a transitional college to “prove” myself before I was accepted into one of our universities.  So while in this school I studied the same subjects and got the same credits that would transfer to my future university, just that I would be eased into university life.

While there, I became a fan of MUDS (Multi User Dungeons).  Lets not just say a fan.  I became addicted.  In the beginning yes, things were interesting, even though it was just some colored text that would scroll up the screen.  I think what was most attractive was that it had grinding RPG elements tied to a social activity.  It was here I had my first MUD crush, as you would call it.  Meeting a girl (I hoped), and talking about more interesting things outside of the MUDDING environment was very much a high.  Of course I eventually met other guys that filled me in on her not being up front about a lot of things and treating all guys the same way, so I was not her special “one.”

Then there is the official trading of photos.  And of course you will see what you expect; it is not Megan Fox on the other side.  Megan and the other hot girls are out with the guys that used to beat the crap out of you in school.  You my friend, have reached the all time low of trying to build a relationship with someone you haven’t seen or met in person in an online environment.  Eventually things did not work out and we went our separate ways.  But alas this was not the death of my mudding days.  The nail in my mudding coffin was from a Miller Lite (Beer) model.

I was the top student in my Elementary Evolutionary Ecology (Say that three times fast.) class.  One day a really beautiful girl from class came up to me.  She had jet-black hair and mesmerizing blue eyes.  She asked if I could tutor her in the class.  Of course I’m living with my parents still so no way to ever get her to come to my place, so every day after class we sat and studied together in the school dining hall.  Anyway, long story short, she got a B in the class and came the last day in the lab to thank me personally.  I being the idiot that I was, did not realize that she wasn’t just thanking me, but wanting to “thank me,” by saying maybe we can hang out sometime.  I of course being so into my game said, “sure no problem, sounds cool, talks to you later.”  I blew her off!  So she said bye and left.

Immediately all of the other guys in the lab stood up in unison and said you are a #$%*ing idiot!  That girl was hitting on you and you were too dumb to notice.  I froze, replaying everything in slow motion, analyzing every word.  They were right; I just threw away my chance with being with the hottest girl I had ever met in my life (Of course not as beautiful as my wife who is probably reading this; checking up on me.)!  I said, maybe I should go after her?  They said No!  It is too late, you #$%*ed it up, there is no going back.  I agreed, and sat down staring at the colored words going up my screen.  They no longer held my interest and became colored words again, like they always had been, and my days of mudding had come to an end.

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