Dodem Hjelm
Näyttöportfolio - Spring 2021
This page is a collection of projects and assets created by me during the Spring of 2021, including assets from several games.
Written Documents
Throughout the Spring, we had several writing assignments to do with games. The links to the assignments are below.
(NOTE: Documents are in FINNISH ONLY)
Art Studies
Samples from the numerous art studies from Spring 2021
Perspective Drawing
Game Art - Digital Painting
A digital landscape painting heavily inspired by the environments of Salmon Run, a co-op horde mode in Splatoon 2
An assignment in which we were to paint a fruit (or a berry in this here case).
A greyscale painting assignment, in which we were to paint existing sculptures
A digital landscape painting heavily inspired by the environments of Salmon Run, a co-op horde mode in Splatoon 2
Traditional
Some funky fresh "drawing from reference" -exercises using simplified shapes and lines
Nerd Lecture: Weapons
A game character concept based on old armor and weaponry, with the twist of everything being composed of parts from the ocean. I designed the character (just called Mackerel Hero in this file) with the concept of a solo knight in a medieval setting, and looked at different kinds of armor and weaponry while thinking: how would something like this be crafted with just resources from the ocean? I then planned a kit that would offer an interesting look and abilities to a game character; a turtle shell as a shield with part of the spine as the handle, cephalopod limbs as belts, squid sucker rings to create chain mail, et cetera. With both a spear and a gladius, the character could have both long-range and short-range melee attacks. I didn't design a bow, but I had the idea of using small fish skeletons as the arrows.
Pixel Art and Animation
Idle
Walk
Run
Jump
The animation on the right is the first one I made, as a sort of RPG combat idle sprite for an enemy. For the other cycle-based sprites, I ended up designing a small character that could move in some kind of overworld. All of my pixel sprites were animated in FireAlpaca.
A pixel tree for the assignment to make, well, a pixel tree. I had fun with the colors and shading details.
The two sprites underneath are my first attempt at a sprite for my Fakemon, Fangrain. I ended up making 10 animated sprites more alike those in the Pokemon games for my personal art project course, also in Spring 2021. The sprites and supporting information can be found in the Taideprojekti 2021 tab on this site.
Adobe Animate
For the "final" animation of the course, I created "Birdcake", a simple and short story about... a bird and a cake. The assignment called for the animation to use some of the "principles of animation", such as framing and emphasizing movement.
"Fire" and "Yelling lad" were warm-up animations to learn the basics of the program, and are now included in here.
Below Birdcake, I've included some of the animations I proceeded to do on my free time
A rough exercise in layers and coloring an animation
Mostly an attempt to find the ideal way to colorize an animation in Adobe Animate. I don't think I found it. I'm not sure I ever will find a way to make anything look clean in that program, but I would LOVE TO.
One of my first animations in the program, both in lines only-form and colored.
On the Train
This animation was made as a cross-program project between Adobe Animate, Medibang and Pencil2D. It was very heavily inspired by the reveal trailer of Splatoon 3 in February of 2021. I am including it because although it is not a school project by any means, it is probably my most multifaceted animation and pretty fun to watch.
Game Studies
Throughout the Spring, we had a lot of exercises that had to do with coding and building games. Here they are.
RPG Tutorial
One of the earliest exercises was making a little RPG fetch quest-game in a ready-made engine with existing assets. It focused on things such as creating a game world (with tiles), applying animations to entities, box colliders, collectibles and multiple choice dialogue for NPCs. Below is a stretch of screenshots showcasing a brief playthrough of the game with short commentary inside the images.
Roll a Ball
Roll a Ball is a game building- and coding exercise in which you, well, roll a ball to the goal. We created collectibles, scripts and a map to roll around in. There was also an additional powerup that we had to include.
John Lemon's Haunted Jaunt
Prior to learning that we did not actually need to do this one, I completed almost every step of the tutorial - but could not get any collider boxes to work. All I have left now is screenshots of my anguish after telling my friend about this project after working on it for the entire day.
I may have suffered in vain, but at least I learned how to apply animations to assets, make prefabs and do some shading.
3D Models
As a part of learning to use Blender, we were assigned to create several 3D models. The models below are 3D models made by me that were NOT made for game projects.
The first true Blender exercise, creating a sushi platter. It taught many of the basic functions of Blender, such as scaling and extruding, as well as materials and how to use them.
An assignment to model a donut from scratch, following a tutorial series on Youtube.
It taught useful skills such as UV-map painting and particles.
Mugs
We created two mugs in Blender as a learning experience to learn to create more complex shapes as well as work with textures. The images of the dog mug are the second, free-choice mug project. The tall, plain mug is the first one, but I've lost the finished one somewhere.
Game Projects
POSTISOTA
POSTISOTA is a 2-, 3- or 4-player board game in which you play as a postman and travel around the map delivering mail with the objective of delivering your mail before the other players can. This is important, because each house can only take so many packages before it shuts down - leaving other players to travel further to be able to get rid of theirs.
POSTISOTA was the first team game project of the year and an experiment in game design, based around a Game Design Game. I designed and drew out the board that was used in the final game.
The Sandcastle Duel is a 2-player PvP game where two players try to hunt each other down in a small room inside of a mysterious desert temple. The lighting in the room changes periodically, and as it does, the hunter becomes the hunted. [The title is also a link that leads to the game.]
The Sandcastle Duel was the second team game project and was made in 2D sprite style. All assets shown below are things I made for the game.
The Environment
The environment of the game was heavily inspired by Ancient Egypt, and I was in charge of designing the backdrop. Although no proper lore was established for the game, I tried to slip some interesting tidbits in; why are there cat sarcophaguses? Why are the cat and mouse battling in the temple? What are the engravings on the wall? Well, these questions have no answers, but it's good to have them anyway.
The Darkness Falls
On regular intervals, the lighting of the room will dramatically change and the sarcophaguses in the background spring to life with a mysterious power. During this time, the mouse become the hunter.
Unused Animations
I made several animations for the background; such as lighting and burning animations for the sarcophaguses' eyes as well as the eyes fizzling out and multiple variations of sand streams. None of these ended up getting used in the game, but I've included them here to show what it could have looked like if they were.
Building Blocks
I created the assets for the background objects in the game. The spikes were created when the game was still in development phase and was originally intended to be a level-based side-scrolled-platformer, not a PvP game, and thus could've used a trap element.
Concept Art
The second draft for the idea of what the game could look like. I was experimenting with the idea of having interesting imagery in the background way back when. The basic pillars- and platforms- thing was also established here. I came up with the concept of the timer, which eventually became the role-switching mechanic.
The first draft of the game was a very simple silhouette- concept of what kind of colors would be fitting for the theme, and what kind of player character would stand out and be interesting. The style for the game was not yet decided at this stage.
Game Art
Reptile Revenge was the final team game project of the Spring, and instead of a 2D-game, this project was done in 3D. It unfortunately did not get close to being finished at all to the point that barely any assets made it into the game, due to the team effectively only having one coder and subsequently only one person on the Unity side of actually building the game. Even so, there are a TON of assets that were created.
(As with the previous game, this one's title is also a link to the game.)
Our animator couldn't make it, so I did a very rushed run cycle for the characters on the final day just hours before publication. It did not end up being used. I also had to teach myself how to animate with Blender in the same session.
The Player
The player model itself was not made by me, but it was left uncolored and without bones, so I went off to finish it at the final moments of the project. I cleaned up the model, assigned armatures and colored it.
Before the theme and style of the game were properly chosen, the general consensus was that the player character would be a thief, but the design itself wouldn't be locked into a lizard until much later. This ended up falling in line because the enemies were already lizards. The hidden and very much unused lore ended up being that this player character was an imprisoned former member of the enemy cast, on a mission to take the King's crown. Their motivation remains unknown.
The Enemy
The basic design was reached very early on, but would be further elaborated on.
After the enemy character was designed, the player character was soon after decided to also be a lizard, and the theme of the game solidified. The idea of the enemy shining a spotlight onto the player was decided very early on, but making it into a Gloworm, a common food of the lizard folk, was decided together later.
Designing the enemy character was my actual job in the design as the concept artist for the game, and I wanted to go for something that looks stereotypically mean and angular. The triangular head shape was chosen so that it is easy to tell which way the guard is facing in the game, which naturally progressed into something akin to a chameleon. This is where the reptile motif for the game started.
As with the Player animations, our animator couldn't make it so I created a very janky run cycle for both characters hours before the deadline. Like the Player run animation, this one did not end up being used either.
I made the enemy model from scratch, and worked on it for the majority of the project's runtime. A large part of the time went into figuring out how to color the model, which ended up going nowhere, really, as the final colors used were simply the basic Blender material colors.
The weapon and the Gloworm were modeled by other team members and colored by me.
The image on the right shows an alternate coloration of the enemy character which I hand-painted with Vertex Colors after days of going "I can't believe you can't just paint on top of the model itself". Well, you can. But no, they did not end up being used, because exporting the model with the colors intact turned out to be way past my knowledge. Furthermore, as the player character wasn't colored until the very last moment and had no vertex colors, the style disparity between the two would have been jarring.
THE KING
During the in-person brainstorming event, the idea came up for the king of the game to be a baby.. or an egg. I ended up modeling the egg and creating the texture for it.
The Environment
Due to time constraints and work issues, the environment ended up not existing. However, there was quite a lot of things planned for it. My primary role was the concept artist, and I created quite a few things - many of which were made into assets by others.
The Idea
All the way back when the project started, we settled on the idea of a lone thief stealing something from a castle. As seen from the first true concept art (above), the idea was very fresh by the time it was made, back when that was ALL the concept was.
The Evolution
As development continued, the reptile theme stuck and the world became more personalized. There was the brief idea of making the player feel small in scale to the world, which ended up happening in the form of a very simplified castle; pots.
(Below: The "normal castle tower" pot I modeled for the game)
Nature
For the general look of the world, I started working on a "vibe" for the game world. The concept of cool blues and violets was already decided on for the basic colors, as it would allow all game characters to clearly stand out from their surroundings. I wanted to strike a simple yet stylistic and recognizable middle ground with the look of the game. The trees look exotic, but are actually scaled-up Madagascar Jewels.
Throne Room
I did not go very far in-depth with the concept art and design of the throne room; we knew we wanted a large-ish room with a singular throne and some miscellaneous junk around the place to bring atmosphere. The idea of the game was that the player would collect four keys, after which they would head to the largest tower, which held the throne room. After taking the crown of the King, the game was won, but I'm not even sure if the crown nor throne room made it into the final build.
Splash Screen
The final thing I created for the game was the thumbnail for the website... only about 10 minutes before the deadline, but we made it. Because the final build ended up not having almost any of the environmental elements, I designed the art to look more like the actual game; very monochromatic with the core elements of the build, the pots. The title itself was VERY rushed, but I came up with the idea of shaping the R like the lizards (accidentally), which is a very fun touch.