Oh yeah I have a blog

Oh yeah. I have a blog. How about that.
Let's see... Has stuff happened during these past... 5 months!? Geez.

Kumoon

So as far as school goes, I'm doing few months of internship right now. We're working on this neat puzzle shooter called Kumoon (pronounced almost like "come on"), where you have to get enough points in each room by shooting piles of boxes via multiplier-walls.

We released a free demo during December on gamejolt.com and indiedb.com. We're still working on the full version, but if this looks interesting to you, feel free to give us feedback, or do the whole sharing and social media thing.

If that's your thing.

New DS Vita XL 2

I bough 3DS XL last week. In retrospect, I probably could have waited 3 more weeks to get New 3DS XL with same price.

Oh well, no matter. Streetpassing is fun, and Shin Megami Tensei IV is awesome so far.

I also got PS Vita early September, so that's already some time ago. It's neat device with couple of good exclusives. I had fun with Gravity Rush, I'm still occasionally playing Freedom Wars, and of course I got Persona 3 Portable and Persona 4: The golden.

Yeah, I guess I've been playing a lot of RPGs.

Holidays happened

Spent 2 weeks with my family, not doing much anything. It was a good time; I ate bunch of food and got my batteries recharged.

That's pretty much it, summarized.

What's coming up? Let's see... Tampere Kuplii-comic festivals are approaching again, so probably gonna go there to meet old friends and buy some comics. I hope Tuuli has something new about Saattaja by then.

Also, school's ending this spring, so I guess I should start knowing enough to get a job on game industry. Or something.

As for games, 2015 seems like amazing year. With releases like Bloodborne, MGS 5, Persona 5, No Man's Sky, Yakuza 5, Zelda WiiU, Xenoblade Chronicles X, Hover: Revolt of Gamers, Superhot and bunch of indies, there's barely going to be enough time (OR money) to play everything!

I'm expecting overall good year with best kind of prolems.

That being said, I hope you have a great year too!

Archer: Work In Progress

I'm making a game!

Or, well, at least creating assets for it. Coding isn't really my speciality, but at the very least I'm creating all the assets and User Interface-objects to create "fake" screenshots, mockup-pictures, to show what the finished game would look like.

Anyway, about the game: Archer is 2D target shooter, where your goal is to, by using accurate and tricky shots to break obstacles, hit every target in each level. Basic gameplay is not that different from, say, Angry Birds, but instead of trying to destroy pigs by making their block-buildings fall on them, you are trying to break correct walls in your path to make a final shot that hits the target ring -all this with as few arrows as possible-.

Above you see four arrows you use in the game. Normal Arrow is light and travels far, and can break some walls. Bomb Arrow is heavy and explodes on impact, breaking any wall it hits. Radar Arrow is mid-weight, and shows it's flight trajectory in advance. Light Arrow has no weight, and travels straight through any walls, except glass...

Coming up with distinct features to each arrow was good practice on my Illustrator and Photoshop skills. That being said, were this game to ever be released on tablets or flash-websites, those lighting-effects may already be TOO detailed even as they are now. I may end up downgrading them if needed, but regardless, those are the first drafts.

Tip of the week: Color-code your assets. One of the first things you want to understand when creating game assets (be they anything from simple boxes to main character) is that you want the player to be able to easily and immediately notice what is going on in the screen. This is always worth remembering, but especially important on games that you play on small screens (such as handhelds and smartphones), since everything is super-tiny anyway. Great examples of color coding are all the different angry birds, and Mario and Luigi, for example. It's easier and faster to spot color differences than different shapes.

On other things, school is starting again, so I got that going on with me.
Anyway, I'll keep you updated!

Thing: Sorry about your ass

...There's not enough new stuff in my everyday life since last month to write proper Diary-thing. I bought Dark Souls from Steam sale 3 weeks ago, and suddenly 3 weeks have passed.

Man, Dark Souls is so damn awesome.The world is dark and interesting, level design is godlike, sound design is remarkable, I love the crushing challenge game throws you behind every corner over and over and over again, and the way of telling the story by not telling it is just... damnit, Dark Souls is pretty much perfect, alright? Praise the Sun!

Speaking of games where you protect your head with cooking pots, I decided to wait for Shovel Knight's Wii U release because I'm poor and really want to play it on console. Man, Shovel Knight is so damn awesome too.

Also, I've been learning fighting game basics. Skullgirls is so damn awesome.

Basically it's summer and I've been counter-productive. I'll go back to school to do school-things next month.
Praise the Sun!

Diary-thing: It's hard to be a tonttu

My second short 3D-animation is finally finished. Most of the work was done around late february / early march, but after missing the assigned deadline, I pretty much dropped it due to other projects. This was one of those projects where you just start to get frustrated the more you keep working on it, and by the end you just see more flaws than successes.
Still, it's better to try and finish your projects, if for nothing else, at least for the sake of learning to complete your work.

Anyway.

E3's been happening this week. First person shooters are still not going away. Tomb Raider looks like Uncharted. Kojima is still godlike when it comes to making trailers. Dragon Age made everyone yawn. Ubisoft is losing respect of gaming community because animating girls is super hard because reasons. Uncharted looked like Tomb Raider. Nintendo actually had new IP; kind of like Team Fortress 2, except fun-looking. Bayonetta 2 is still happening, and Smash tournament was HYPE!

At this point, I think I'm about ready to jump on Smash-wagon. How hard can it be to catch up to people who have been playing it for like 15 years?

 I'm probably spending most of my summer by further honing my skills on art of game design. Probably going to come up with some small project of my own and keeping myself busy with that.
That, and playing Mario Kart and Shovel Knight.
I'll keep you all posted!

Diary-thing: Oh no, there goes Tokyo.

So yesterday I ended up going to see the new Godzilla.
It was -unfortunately so- different from what I expected.
[SPOILERS FOLLOWING]
The first half of the movie was mostly just exposition of plot and introduction of this giant flying spider-lizard that runs on nuclear waste. It's alright, good at best, and Bryan Cranston pulls a good role, but for the first hour Godzilla is nowhere to be seen, or heard. Then it kind of just appears, and the rest of the movie is army planning how to kill both monsters, while they fight against each other.

My main problem with the movie was how Godzilla itself was surprisingly meaningless deus-ex-machina side character. The main focus of movie was always in the main character guy, and while Godzilla and the other monster do fight at the end, even that happens at background, while the main focus stays on main character and his team of soldiers trying to plant nukes or whatever.
I don't come from the background of being huge Godzilla-fan, but I get the feeling that long-time fans may unfortunately be bit disappointed. It has entertainment value, I'll give that, but Pacific Rim came out year ago, and did this kind of movie much better.

That being said, if I didn't like the movie at all, or didn't care, I wouldn't have bothered writing this much about it. It was just kind of "Why isn't Godzilla bigger character in it's own movie?"-experience for me.

Still, it inspired me to make that picture earlier today. Made it entirely on Adobe Illustrator in about 2-3 hours. Good practice, and one of the best works I've done in a long time, I'd say.


School is going fine. There's been lots of stuff about 3D-animation and post-production, with week or two of Photoshop's and Illustrator's basics. I'm learning stuff, even if final products are far from Pixar-quality.


With videogames, I've been hooked HARD on Metal Gear-franchise!
I could quite literally talk hours about Metal Gear's attention to detail, amazing gameplay gimmicks, dumb-awesome plot, gameplay-flow and anything really, but the post's pretty long already. I'll just say that especially Metal Gear Solid 3 has become my favourite game.

Still waiting for Shovel Knight's release. Should be any day now, really. Hopefully before E3, maybe?

Finally, I want to mention Hover - Revolt Of Gamers. It's interesting-looking project that mixes some Mirror's Edge (no guns though, fortunately) and Jet Set Radio, and seems to even throw some elements from old Tony Hawk's Pro Skater-games. Concept looks definitely interesting, and Hideki Naganuma, composer of Jet Set Radio is making the soundtrack, so if you're into backing Kickstarter games, I'd strongly suggest this one (I threw $30 into it's direction). There's still week to go to pledge, and every dollar makes the game a bit better.

That's pretty much everything. See you again!

Last update was gloomy and boring

My friend Jerico Pretzel (who is not only still alive, but out of hospital and getting better!) wanted suggestions for new hair color.
I got some ideas. Just go and pick one, Ziisa.

Diary-thing: Breaking point

Two years ago I was alone. Back then, I was fine with that.
During these past two years, that has changed. I met people, and we became friends. Good friends. Even more than that, for the first time, I felt I had friends who I couldn't afford to lose. I feared -and I still do- that losing them would break me.

Meawhile, they had their own struggles to go through. Some of them were physically weak and had to fight for their literal survival. Some of them had started to believe their bullies, thinking that they were worthless. For some of them, life was almost too much.
For me, I wanted to help them, because they accepted me.

So I forced myself to grow strong. I wanted to be someone to depend on, someone to share the pain with.
And maybe I did help. My friends are all strong, and I would never take take the credit of something they achieved, but today things seem better for them than what they were, and maybe I managed to help on their darkest hours, even if I didn't notice it myself.

And now it's starting to break me.
I feel like I'm losing one of my friends. I don't know why, I don't know if there's anything to do, and it's tearing me apart.

I feel I grew strong for the wrong reasons. Even if I can be there for others, I don't feel strong enough to help myself. Have I even been a friend, or just a "pillar" to support others? If so, if I break, will there be anyone to help me back up? Does thinking about these things mean I don't trust my friends enough?
If I can't do friendship right, then what the fuck am I even good for?

I can still see colors, but I don't want this to get worse.
It's scary to know my family will read this.

I think I grew too strong
I'm starting to break