Creating a game based on Star Wars

I chose making a game based on fandom my final task.

With this project, my goal is to demonstrate that it's possible to create a game that is fun with relatively low effort, as long as the audience knows something about it beforehand.

Here's a video of the finished game:

First I was thinking of picking a different topic but quickly realized that it's better for demonstration purposes to use a topic that (almost) everyone is already familiar with.

Since we are pretty limited on the time (especially on presenting these works) my goal was to create a short gameplay experience that offers replay value.

The core idea of Jedi Master came from the Star Wars movies. My goal is show the frustration that the Jedis face during their training and provide the players with means of getting better.

If you want to give this game a try, I made it available for download (for Windows)

Gambling in video games

Another good Jim Sterling video that addresses the topic of gambling in video games:

This is a topic that I feel people are slowly getting tired of hearing since it's everywhere (kind of like Trump) However, it's a fact that most games nowadays decide to include "optional" gambling features in their games since it means big profits for them.

It's becoming blatantly obvious that the video game industry is exploiting a loophole in laws since creating laws take so long compared to creating digital products. The sad thing is, when these business practices are cracked down eventually, the industry will just put more effort in finding new ways of getting around the laws.

Morally questionable game development

Found this video today:

I think it addresses the topic of game design becoming more and more about money very well. It also asks a interesting question: when will this f2p game bubble burst.

In my opinion it's pretty sad that the companies care more about how to design their games to suck most amount of money out of users as fast as possible instead of trying to create something that is actually a good gaming experience.

The fact is that there is a lot of money moving around in gaming business. However, games can still be profitable even if they aren't filled with micro transactions. It's just that the companies are greedy and prefer trying to maximize their profits.

I don't know how the development team can have any kind of passion with what they do if their end goal is to just create a masked casino over and over again.

Manse Games '18

I missed the last lesson so here's my excuse for that.

Manse Games '18 was hosted at Palatsi in center of Tampere. It's the first time it was made and the topic was free-to-play games so I thought it would be awesome experience to participate. And it was.

The event was free and they offered lunch, dinner and drinks. I'm surprised that nobody else (from our school) was interested in coming there.

The day started at 10am and ended at 8pm. There were 6 speakers about different game design, business and f2p topics.

Last 2 hours included 2 different panels. The first one had designers from Finnish game companies discussing their approach on F2P and mobile game designs.

The second panel had the heads of game companies in Tampere talking about the creation of their companies, the games that they have published and their future projects.

Overall, I really did like the event. It was nice to see what the Finnish game industry is up to and get some insight on what the people on the field do. Even if I hate doing "networking" it has to start somewhere I guess.

This event is also being hosted next year and I'm definitely going there.

AI making artists job easier

Yesterday there was a Reddit post about a website that uses AI to automatically color line art pictures.

The results that users posted were stunning. The site allows people to upload an image, press a button and 10 seconds later it is fully colored. It even allows the users to add different lightning sources, modify colors and download all kinds of variations of the process.

And it's open source project.

So, today I took a bit better look at it. After about 1 hour of poking around, I managed to get out quite a few good looking results. The middle one is the only thing I drew.

Careless and Careful mode comparisons

And here's a closer look at my favorite one. I had to give the programs a few hints on where the colors are supposed to be, it mainly had issues with parts of hair and the hand with glass.

Seeing something like this really makes me wonder what the future will bring us. Some artists are worried (for a reason) and call this method "cheating". In my opinion, if you can save hours of work by using AI, it's just being efficient.

What is a stereotypical Finnish game?

Korean games are grindy, Japanese games have over-the-top effects and USA makes AAA games.

But how would you defines a Finnish game?

If I had to use my own words, it's pretty simple: mobile.

Don't get me wrong, Finland does have some successful high quality PC and console games but there are so few of them compared to mobile that they are out of the question. Looking at lists like "Top 10 Finnish video games" or Wikipedia's list of games developed in Finland it's pretty obvious that the amount of games produces is small with the most successful ones being mobile.

It's important to understand that games are a very new media. What that means, is that there aren't that many well established companies and that there is a big reliance on investor money. On top of that, the cost of living is so high that the wages have to reflect that. This has a huge impact on what kind of scale we can pick for the projects.

These things in mind, it doesn't come as surprise that the mobile games were a huge success. They are possible to be developed even with a really small team and the investors feel much safer investing in them.


Speaking of Finnish games, here's the progress on my final task (Day 1). It's still very rough but making progress.

And here's what it looks after a little bit of tuning (Day 2):

Stalking a famous streamers social media usage

CohhCarnage is my choice for famous person. He has a very successful Twitch channel gaining over 20 thousand constant viewers every stream so he's usually in the top 5 most viewed streamers and this is a really big achievement for a variety streamer.

Links to different media channels he uses:

• Twitch
• YouTube
• Twitter

I will be focusing on his Twitter posting.

Looking back at his posts, it seems that he has a very regular posting schedule of when he goes live and what kind of content he is playing that day. One thing that stood out about this was that his posts are hand written and not automatically posted by Twitch. Seems like he also puts quite a bit effort on writing these and adds mentions of game companies that made the games he plays. His writing style is also very positive.

Another common topic for him (especially in early access / beta games) is to discuss the bugs / features the games offer and if the player should bother investing into the game at its current stage. This also ties to the developer communication that he tries to keep active.

I also noticed a few polls and posts that encouraged discussion. These were mostly related to things that people want to see in the future streams. Some gaming related news posts were also included.

Lastly there are for smaller part sponsored messages (he has a deal with GOG to post about discounts) but those are rare. Overall his Twitter look feels very professional instead of being personal. I could only find one personal message that was about his Halloween breakfast so it's quite understandable.

A quick look at his other media:
The YouTube channel is mainly used as a video archive where he uploads his gameplay. This is pretty much unedited stream footage cut into 30 minute episodes so they don't gain that many views. It's nice to have as an archive though.
The Twitch channel includes well highlighted and archived broadcasts. For me it was surprising to see since past broadcasts for the longest time has been a place where almost nobody in Twitch goes. Just putting the extra effort to keep it organized is a big plus.

Blizzcon 2018 announcements!

Today was the first day of Blizzcon (gaming convention hosted by Blizzard in California) that is usually the highlight of the year for us Blizzard fans. These conventions include news about upcoming content for current Blizzard games, announcements for new game releases and massive E-sports finals for WoW, Overwatch and Starcraft 2.

Since I spent a few hours watching the stream before SC2 tournament started, I thought it would be nice to share what happened and my thoughts on the topics.

First of all, DESTINY 2 IS FREE until November 18th! That means if you get Battle.net app you should see it claimable in the gift box. Personally I have really wanted to play the game since it looks a lot like Mass Effect. I'm not a huge fan of shooting games so paying 50€ for Destiny felt a bit too much. That being said, it has been downloading for past 5 hours now (90 gigs take quite a while..)

I'm speechless. The time for WoW classic release was finally announced after years of private servers being hosted and shut down left and right. This game has a special place in my heart and it has done so many things right in MMORPG genre that it's something everyone should experience at least once. There is massive amount of discussion going around how it's all nostalgia but having experienced it now twice myself I can say that if there is one thing to look towards in 2018 summer it's WoW Classic. The game will be playable with WoW subscription so everyone who pays the sub gets access to current WoW and the Classic content.

Another super exciting announcement. Warcraft 3 is a game where I spent waaay too many hours just going through all the custom maps people created and witnessed many very impressive creations. Some of those custom maps actually became their own games on later date (looking at you DotA 2). Recently Blizzard created remastered edition of Starcraft 1 that let players who own either the old game or the remaster play together. If they manage to pull the same with WC3 and let us play all the old custom games, this is like the dream come true. Currently WC3 is a ghost town so it's pretty much impossible to find players to play with so seeing the game gain popularity again would be amazing.

With all the other exciting stuff coming out, we just had to have something that disappointed everyone. Diablo is one of the most successful PC game series that initially got me to gaming 20 or so years ago. Diablo 3 has had a massive content drought lately (no real updates for last 3 years) so everyone was waiting for something new from the franchise. Then Blizzard at the end of this presentation came up with the M bomb: Diablo on mobile. I have never seen that disappointed crowd in this kind of conventions, there was no clapping and people could have been heard booing. The trailers for the game are massively down voted in YouTube and the Diablo community is going crazy on social media. Having no news for the whole franchise and coming up with outsourced mobile game for established PC series is just a disgrace.

There were some other smaller announcements like new heroes in Overwatch and Starcraft 2, Hearthstone expansion and teaser for WoW BfA content but since those aren't really major things I won't cover them here. Overall next year looks really really good to me.

Our groups idea for TV show

Jekaterina wrote the synopsis of our "Do you even Cult" - reality TV series.

The post can be found here.

StarCraft 2 in 2018

It has now been 8 years since StarCraft 2 was released. That also marks 20 years for StarCraft franchise.

I remember the day when the game came out: all of my friends playing it, new custom maps made every day and flourishing fanbase. There were multiple YouTube channels casting the games and they would get almost 100 000 views each that was much for the time.

Recently I won a giveaway for some in-game items and decided to try out the game again. Contrary to the popular belief of the game being long dead I was surprised to see almost instant queues for matches and all difficulties of co-op missions.

This made me think of what has changed. Back in the days SC2 was perceived as a super competitive game (it still is) so the more casual players didn't last long. Now Blizzard has made the game free, added co-op missions with good progression system and fleshed out the ladder system.

RTS as genre has been very niche now for a long time so adding features like co-op that haven't been previously done seems to be the way to go forward.

Music video analysis

Nightwish - Amaranth

One of my favorite songs. Nightwish is a metal band that picked Symphonic Metal as their genre. This can be distinguished from normal metal from the usage of instruments. The synthesizer is a big part of this.

In this video women are displayed as the main focus and men as supporting characters. The singer is displayed in a revealing outfit and has the background band has a bit more formal wear. Their emotions are also completely different: singer having more passive emotions with constant eye contact and the band having no eye contact with very aggressive movements that display anger.

This could be related to the other half of the music video that focuses on escorting a fallen angel. The angel is found by 2 boys. While they carry her, the main focus is always on the angel and the boys are on the side. Similar way the angry villagers are also displayed briefly in closeups showing their anger and disgust.

The interesting part about this video is that the Nightwish band is displayed singing and playing underground. The fallen angel is presented as something clean and pure but becomes hated by the people, only the boys caring for her. This could be interpreted as the authors fear of being hated by people and then becoming something greater and overcoming those fears. It's a pretty dark world view since it feels like everyone is scared of something new and try their best to get rid of it.

Megadimension Neptunia VII - analysis

During this holiday I finally had time to pick up a game from my backlog and this time it was Megadimension Neptunis VII. This is a JRPG that has quite a big following with 4 games in the main series and multiple spin-off games.

I have played 2 of those before (Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth 1 & 2). As the names probably tell with the combination of being Japanese the games are pretty over the top. There is a lot of dialogue that has no choices but are well structured and the main story has both English and Japanese voices.

Here's a 1 minute video showcasing some of the battle effects available.

Overall Neptunia games are pretty generic JRPGs when it comes to mechanics: turn based combat, big numbers, bad tooltips with many different stats and big boss battles.

Of course that includes cute anime girls too.

The previous games had multiple endings based on the way you played. This one in the other hand only had 3 endings and those were based on how many dialogues you found. I had to play the game on New Game to reach the "True Ending" that required some grinding that I had skipped on my first playthough.

Since I already had played some JRPGs before (Kingdom Hearts, Dark Souls) and a ton of MMORPG games the grinding for me is nothing new. That is probably the first point that turns off a lot of people since Neptunia games tend to require quite a lot of optional monster hunting to progress.

However with Megadimension I felt like there was in fact less grinding than the previous games. There were maybe around 3 times during the story where I felt like getting ripped apart by enemies. Those were mostly due to the way the game separates the characters at certain point of the story so you might end up having to play someone who is multiple levels behind your main character.

What I found really interesting compared to the previous games was the New Game playthrough. This time there was a new Hidden Treasure feature added that gives the player incentives to return to old dungeons and complete secondary objectives to unlock extra rewards. That combined with the possibility of reaching True Ending made the second playthrough (with high level characters) really enjoyable. Also the fact that you don't lose any of them during the new playthrough is a huge plus to me.

62 hours well spent.

Pikku Kakkonen Game Jam

I did mention in my post about Mobile games for children that I'd be attending Pikku Kakkonen Game Jam. That took place last weekend and it was really cool. This will be a small coverage of what took place there and what we got done.

I'll just start this post with the video (made by me) about the game my team created.

Our main concepts for the game came from children who sent their ideas to YLE. There were a lot of different kinds of characters made by 3-7 year old. After we took out 2 of our favorite ideas, we then proceeded to form teams and refine them further.

The second day we started working. Our team consisted of 4 artists, 2 coders and a music guy. The core idea for the game was to create a driving game where the player can see and interact with various characters created from the concept pictures.
We managed to split the workload well with our team (I did 3D model for the car and 2 characters).
After the day was done, we already had a working demo that was only missing the finalized assets.

On the third day we started to wrap up the project. Pieces started coming together fast and the final game was done well before the deadline. Later that day we had a bunch (around 20) kids visiting the studio and getting a chance to test our games.

It was really cool to see the reactions and different approaches they had to our games. We were not allowed to say anything about the game so it was interesting to see what approach they took. I think everyone who played our game really enjoyed it.

The cool guys at YLE even gave us some rewards (stickers and patch).

My Mindtrek 2018 coverage

Now that Mindtrek is over it's time to share my experiences of the event. I did participate on both days trying to attend most of the game related topics (although second day didn't really have any).

Day 1:

In the morning there was an interesting presentation about improving the Chinese education structure. It was mainly targeting kids who attend primary schools since there is massive differences in the quality of teaching. What needs to be improved is the Chinese society as whole since the family structure is very attached to schools. Their solutions were creating more open study structures and trying to keep parents involved in education process by utilizing online communities.

After the first presentation ended I headed to a much smaller room that held the academic presentations about game related topics. The first 3 topics were about utilizing gamification to make chores more bearable.

First one of these research topics was about letting the players decide what kind of game they want. They then analyzed the game elements players chose and tried to come up with the "best" set of elements. The interesting part was that even if the elements are widely accepted as good, they might become worse if combined with others and vice versa. That makes it relatively difficult to determine "one-size-fits-all" kind of element set.

Second research was done with an online store. Their goal was to gamify a storefront and test the difference between tangible (physical) versus intangible (virtual) rewards. The results did show that the tangible rewards were increasing the user activity by around 25% whereas the intangible ones had almost no effect. It was interesting to see that the results with intangible rewards we so bad but I feel like they just didn't implement it correctly. Making a good virtual reward system would require a pretty large upfront investment and I don't think they had that.

Third research was about motivating people to move by making a game out of it and displaying the results in a public place. The game itself didn't seem to have much effect but when it was displayed for others to see people did start moving more. I felt like the sample size was a bit too small for this study and the target group was already moving so it was something that would motivate people who already move to move more.


After these, there was a small analysis on how Game Jam design process was different from a normal design. That felt kind of pointless because the sample size was 1 group and the presentation didn't really show any results of the research.

We also had a guy that had done analysis of the players reaction to The Division -game (7 people) and how / why their opinions changed during the gameplay. It was nice to see that someone can actually pull of an academic research about a topic like this. Personally I felt like the guy doing this just wanted a 60$ game for free.

Analyzing F2P games from paying players perspective was an interesting topic. However, this research was done in 2015 and their target audience barely had any mobile game experience so it kind of misses the point of "whales". There were certain good points like the difference between value of cosmetics and progress but it barely scratched the topic of P2W and big spenders.

The same group who did the analysis of game elements also made analysis on user preferred elements in live streams. The elements itself were well analyzed and their ratings recorded. I think this research could be used as a baseline when trying to understand what kind of elements are available for streamers but none of the elements are actually needed for having a successful stream.

And at last for day 1 we had a small study done to analyze the abuse targeted to minors in DotA 2. In this research, it was found out that the minors are less affected by the abuse than what was hypothesized and that the minors do tend to end up in the punishment queue more than older players. I feel like this research could have had more interesting outcomes if their target group was larger than 30 people and if they analyzed the data on more angles than just the age. For example players skill, country, gender and voice chat usage were not considered at all.


Day 2:

I was in early, figured out that it would be nice to go and listen the discussion about data analysis. The speaker did nail quite a few good points about how companies are utilizing data and how everything collects it but not many people know how to utilize it. It was a pretty straightforward presentation and the main giveaway was that they had developed an add-on (global consent manager) for browsers that automatically tells the websites how the users data can be used. Not really my favorite topic but I feel like it would be nice if it was possible to just tick "no" everywhere by default.

After a short break, in the same hall, we had a completely different kind of presentation. This one was about a country called Liberland. It's about 2 square kilometer large piece of land between Croatia and Serbia. Their goal is to create a tax heaven that uses bitcoins as their main currency and has an open source government. Currently there is over 500 000 applied citizens for the country.

That presentation really felt like an advertisement for bitcoin millionaires who just want to launder their money. It's an interesting idea by itself but it just feels like the "people in power" are spending their times visiting different lunch parties.

And that was the end of Day 2 for me. I wanted to visit the Internet OS presentation but it got cancelled 15 minutes before the start and that meant another 90 minutes of just standing around before the next presentations.

By far the best part was the food, it was very good on both days (and free). It was nice to get an insight on what kind of papers qualify as research on game related topics. I think the even itself felt pretty empty, might be due to the ticket prices being quite ridiculous for everyone except students. The topics themselves were also mostly targeted to people who are in the education field.

A quick look into the current mobile games aimed at children

Next week Yle is hosting Pikku Kakkonen Game Jam at Mediapolis (Finnish kids TV show). I'll be participating in that as a designer so I thought it would be nice to take a quick look at what kind of mobile games are made for kids nowadays.

The first list I read was 30 of the best Android games for kids between the ages of 2-8 that was created last year so the games are relatively new. There are a few things that most of the games in the list have in common:

1. Very easy controls (usually involves only tapping)
2. Mostly animal themed characters
3. Doing stupid things
4. Many educational games
5. No IAP / Ads (in most cases, looking at you Disney..)
6. Destroying things

Many of these games also had an upfront cost that is rare to see in other mobile market. I guess that's due to parents finding them and rather paying 1-3€ than having the game infected by ads or IAPs.

The most popular game in list with 50+ million downloads "Toca Kitchen 2"

The other list was the official Pikku Kakkonen Games list. These games are played as mini games inside the official app. There is also a website that has archived all the previous games. What stood about these was that most of them are 2D games and don't really offer any unique features on the first glance.

Example of a minigame from Pikku Kakkonen app

The website itself was pretty well designed with lots of interactive elements that make sounds or play some kind of animation. The buttons itself first played a video explaining what is behind them that is something I haven't seen elsewhere.

Overall I think the games aimed at children don't receive that big of a budget due to them not being very profitable. There are a few exceptions to this, especially the ones that are made by big companies like Disney but those games usually involve either ads, IAPs or both.

When designing something that  is supposed to be played by kids younger than 8 it's important to keep in mind that it needs to be super simple and engaging, otherwise the player might feel overwhelmed or bored and end up losing interest. Another way to make the games more engaging is adding seemingly useless things like interactive objects that don't necessarily add anything to the core game play but makes the games more immersive.

Narrative world of Dark Souls 1

The original Dark Souls released in late 2011 is probably my all time favorite game. I first bought it for Xbox 360 and spent probably around 10 hours just being clueless of what's going on and where to go. I ended up not finishing it on console due to it releasing on PC and when I had to start fresh, the game became much easier due to roughly knowing how stat allocations etc work.

What makes Dark Souls 1 special is the way the world is build. The moment you start up the game, there is a path for you to follow. Or not.

The game doesn't hold your hand at all. It gives certain hints of where to go next but the player always has an option of going to a completely different route. One good example of this is the option of starting the game with Master Key that lets you completely bypass the first quarter of the game and run directly to area that would normally take dozens of hours to reach for regular player.

About 50 hours in I found a secret area. It was hidden inside a tree trunk in the swamp that was below the starting zone. When I first saw the roots of that tree I just went residing in a massive underground lake it hit me -- Those roots, the trunk, that massive tree that grows in the middle of the first zone and covers the area with its leaves -- They are all connected to each other. That opened my eyes on how beautifully the whole world was put together and how everything that I see in the game is connected.

The beautiful world aside, Dark Souls 1 manages to create a very uneasy feeling for some of their areas. Some of the places are so terrifying that it feels almost better option to just start a new game rather than having to enter them.

Each one of the areas manages to tell a very memorable story. There doesn't have to be anyone force feeding the lore down your throat when you play if the world is built in a way where the player can get immersed.

WoW Hardcore raiding - PvE esports in the future?

WoW recently got their new expansion "Battle for Azeroth" and it has been very popular in Twitch (live streaming site). Last week the first Mythic difficulty raid Uldir opened. This is something that most common players spend months clearing but the top 0.1% will most likely clear in a week or so.

Now, this is nothing new, Blizzard has kept the same Raid formula since beginning of WoW and it works fine. What has changed now is the top guilds streaming their progress through this content that is impossible for most of the playerbase.

I was watching Method (arguably the best guild in the game) and their progress through Uldir. They had multiple people from raid team streaming their point of view with their leader having around 60 000 people constantly watching the stream. When they managed to kill the last boss his viewer count peaked at around 200 000 people that is insane amount for a single streamer. Usually numbers like this are seen only on some top Esports tournaments like CS:GO, Fortnite or LoL.

What is even more insane is the amount of money he made during this 8 days of progress raid. From Twitch "subscribers" alone he made almost 40 000€ and on top of that the ad revenue and sponsorship deals most likely put this number somewhere in 6 digits.

This is very interesting to see since almost everyone has claimed the "Player versus Environment" content not viable for streaming due to the nature of scripted encounters. The raiding scene has been really isolated with the guilds doing everything in their power to even prevent others from seeing what players are playing in the current raid team.

I'm not sure if this is a one-time thing due to them streaming the progress live for first time but I hope it isn't. PvE as a viable option for content creation would make a lot of people happy and maybe the developers will start creating more games outside of the regular "just go kill other players" themes.

EU is pushing new internet copyright directives

Yesterday European Parliament voted for a new directive that aims to make websites responsible for copyrighted material posted on them.

This directive is targeted at websites that use this kind of content for their main source of visitors and create profits out of it. This includes sites like 9gag, Reddit, Facebook and various other image hosting sites.

If the law passes in January, these kind of "for profit" websites will have to start implementing Content ID systems to filter out material that is copyrighted.

The public opinion of this law is negative, most likely due to misinformation and people seeing this as a way to limit "freedom of speech". Large media groups, publishers and content creators in the other hand see this as a good change.

In my opinion this is a very good change. At the moment big websites are creating massive amounts of revenue and basically giving nothing for the people who create the material. If the law passes it will force the sites to start curating what kind of content is posted on them and give new opportunities for online content creators to earn their living. Implementing Content ID systems should also make it easier for content creators to track down stolen work and either gain a share of the revenue or take them down.

Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market - Wikipedia

EU approves controversial internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’ - Reddit

My media consumption habits

Media consumption is something that has in recent years become exponentially more popular and with that the amount and quality of content available for normal consumers has increased dramatically.

I think one of the biggest reason for this is the ease of access via cellphones and evolution of search algorithms. It's so easy to fill all the "idle" time by flipping open Reddit to check the most popular topics without ever needing to read the long source materials.

Similar way YouTube offers endless amounts of new videos for practically anything. Every time I sit down on computer I have an endless playlist of music playing on background.

I have noticed that my habits have turned from investing time into reading to finding the most popular opinion of certain thing and going to next one. Spending more than 3 minutes on a topic would mean that reading through hundreds of articles would take the whole day so filtering the most interesting stuff is necessary. I also feel that the articles themselves are becoming more and more clickbaity for revenue so being able to just skip them is very useful.

Introducing: Me!

6 years after finishing High School (with long Mathematics and Physics) I find myself on Media & Arts side of TAMK. Probably last place that I could have imagined when I started High School.

The future is bright, so many good choices to pick from. Most likely I'll end up somewhere in Game development field but I'm not locking out any other options either.