Rerun Studios

Happy Holidays everyone! You may have noticed that we have been silent for a while now. Our game production course has come to a close and our team is currently enjoying time off! Unfortunately we were unable to release our game's demo version by the end of the course due to some unexpected bugs. We will see what happens once we get back from our holidays...

My name is Tari and I am a sound designer. My specialities are making foley and sound effects (SFX) for movies and games. What is foley and how does it differ from SFX? Foley is recreating sounds that an actor or a game character does. These can be footsteps or moving clothing. Usually foley artists make sounds live with the moving pictures and practice actor movement. SFX are sounds that are really hard to make again live. These can be sounds like gun shots, vehicles or an earthquake.

I decided to study sound design after one game that I played in high school. That game was Amnesia: Dark Decent. Amnesia was one of the best horror games that I had played and what made it so different from other horror games was its dark ambiance. Every SFX and foley sound backed up the story, music and graphics. I usually didn’t check end credits, but I wanted to find out who was behind all these sounds. It surprised me that one of the makers was a Finnish guy named Tapio Liukkonen. Tapio was a foley artist for Amnesia and after this finding I sought myself into a movie and sound school in Outokumpu.

Now I have studied sounds for about 5 years and have made foley and SFX for over 20 short movies and 4 games. I have even met Tapio Liukkonen. The first time was in a foley lecture where he asked a question his teacher had asked him. “If a man drinks from a bottle in the middle of a desert, what kind of sound do you have to make to tell the viewers that the drink is poisoned?” This question can help to understand sound designing greatly.

Hi everyone!

So I am Sanna and I decided to be a programmer in this project. Actually I have been interested in programming for a while and my eagerness to learn it was the reason why I wanted to take this course. I didn’t have that much experience to begin with and I have to admit that it has been a pretty demanding job to learn while working. Gladly we have had help from our teachers and the Internet offers a lot of information about programming and game design. If you are interested in starting game programming I would recommend to try finding information from Youtube or Unity’s answer page. Although most of the time you can’t just copy a code and use it on your script as it is. Usually you have to change the scripts somehow first.

(This is what our animations’ interactions looked like at one point.)

Now that our project’s demo version is almost done, I have to say that I have enjoyed doing my part a lot. Programming is like a puzzle, it isn’t enough that you have all the pieces, you also have to know how you put them together to make the picture whole. When you stare at your computer screen for five hours, you start to feel dizzy and at the end of the day you might also have an incipient headache, but somehow programming just has this way of sucking you and stay interested.

I am actually amazed how much we have evolved as individuals but also as a group. There are of course things that we could do better and learn more about but all in all we all knew that this course was going to be too short to make a complete version of the game, but I am already very proud of what we have achieved.

Hello, I’m Sara and I’m in charge of the game design, primarily what kind of levels our game ‘Memory of Light’ has.

At the beginning of our school project I was given the role of game designer. I have no prior experience in that area whatsoever so at first I was skeptical and a little worried of what I could possibly come up within eight weeks (the duration of our game design course). But I decided to try anyway.

At first I started doodling some possible level designs for the first level by hand after we wrote the story and looks for the first level with Jere, our screenwriter. Since it’s a forest level, I already knew for sure how it begins but I had problems with the rest of the level. What assets are there? How does the character move? Will there be other characters? How can I build it so that it would be enjoyable to play? In the end I came up with the idea you’ll see when you try the demo and I’m quite pleased how it turned out, even if I say so myself.

I’ve already designed the second level (one that unfortunately won’t be included in the demo) so there is possibly more to come in the future. And maybe a few levels more ;)

(This picture is from one of the very first level tests with our character set on a concept art background. Now everything looks quite different.)

This project has given me an opportunity to try out new things and take me out of my comfort zone. It has been rewarding to work as a team, even though I usually like to work alone. I’ve learned a lot, for example how to effectively work as a team and how communication is the key in everything we do. I work closely with Jere so we both have a vision how this game will turn out in the end.

I was the annoying little sister who insisted to play the games her big sister played so that’s how my gamergirl life begun. I love video games very much and I couldn’t imagine my life without them, so it has been a dream come true to try and experiment different aspects of making a video game of our own. Also it has helped a lot that I’ve played lots of different kinds of games so I’m not exactly out of the forest (haha, did chu get it?) when it comes to level design.

And finally I want to point out that our team has done a lot of work for this game. Even though it’s just a demo for now you can still expect beautiful graphics and wonderful music on your journey to the Temple of Light.

Hello! My name is Jere and I’m working as a screenwriter in our game studio Rerun Studios. I’ve been working mainly on the game’s story, script and level design together with our game designer. The script for our studio’s first videogame Memory of Light has been in works for a couple of months and now it’s really close to being completed.

It has been interesting and educational to work on a videogame script for the very first time. I haven’t been a huge fan of the fantasy genre but I’ve found so much enjoyment from creating a new interesting world and a background story for it. Our major influences for the game’s story are Inca mythology, Finnish fictional characters called Moomins and many pieces of entertainment inside the fantasy genre.

Working on a platform-puzzle game like Memory of Light has been a pleasure for me because I’m a fan of games that include platform and puzzle elements. I’m glad that this game is small-scaled and very simple to work on from the screenwriter’s point of view. Although at first it was difficult to find the main formula on how to write the game-script, now the writing process has turned much easier.

(This is a drawing I made of our main character.)

The script for any kind of videogame has to include all the basic things and elements that the finished game will feature. The game script includes for example the descriptions of all levels, graphics, sounds and puzzles, all possible dialogues or monologues and lists of assets that help the rest of the game development team on their work. Everything is of course mainly in text-form but concept art and pictures always help to perceive the detailed text.

My journey on writing the videogame Memory of Light has been wild in a good way. It might have felt like every workday has rolled within the same formula, but working with our awesome team it has never been boring. My work has been creating something new and modifying it with other people and their great ideas. After this project I can only imagine if I would get a chance to work on writing a bigger game in the future. That could be something else but it still would be a learning experience in script writing. Just like how this project has been all along.

Hi everyone! I’m Siiri, the one who’s in charge of Rerun Studios’ marketing.

When I first chose my role in marketing I didn’t know much about online marketing. I had an idea of what my job would include, yes, but I had no prior experience in making a brand image and therefore this project has been very experimental and instructive for me.

(Fun fact: These little images of our team members are drawn by me!)

During this project, I’ve had the opportunity to see our members’ progress in their own work. One thing I’ve held important is documenting everyone’s work and making sure to name the members in our photos on Instagram, etc. Since this is our chance to show off our individual skills, I don’t want anyone to be left unnamed and unseen! Still, there are some areas I’ve yet to document. Our sound and graphics teams’ work is easy for me to document as you can hear and see the results of their work right away, but it’s a lot harder to think of what kind of content I could make of our project management team’s work, for example. More than anything this is a chance for me to learn more and I’m sure I will figure it all out soon enough!

All that said, our project hasn’t been a particularly easy one to market. As you may know, we don’t have any finished product to advertise since our game Memory of Light is still underway. This has made my job as an inexperienced marketing representative a little challenging as I have to be careful with my words; even our team can’t be 100% sure that our game demo will come out in time completely perfected even if we try our best to reach that goal!

One particular thing I’ve come to understand is why companies hire people to specifically take care of their social media accounts nowadays. As most of us use social media daily, it can seem a little strange especially to us young people. Anyone can make content on social media and it’s fast and easy! However, in this role I’ve learnt is that making content on social media isn’t just fun and games when you’re not making content only for yourself but a group of 12 people. You have to be sure your content both represents your group and is interesting to the viewer. I’ve definitely changed my view on online marketing and the people behind it!

(These are some of the very first logo sketches I made for Rerun Studios.)

All in all, our project has so far been a great chance for me to learn more about online marketing and creating a brand image on social media. It has been both fun and challenging, and I know I can only get better from here!

-Siiri

(Psst, if you’d like to support my work in this project, make sure to follow us on our other social medias! They include:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RerunStudios/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rerunstudios/

Hey! I’m Ada and I’m the third member of our game’s graphics team. It has been very pleasant to work with this group. I have learnt a lot of new stuff about making a video game. I’ve done many different things such as drawing smaller assets, designing characters and animating.

(I also did some logo designing.)

Drawing has always been an important hobby for me, a part of self-expression and just a way to kill time in the middle of a boring moment so this kind of job can be fun but also hard due to my self-criticism. I had a long break from doing digital art before this project so the beginning felt a little harsh but you only learn by doing! And so it started to get neater and smoother.

(A sketch of the forest creatures with the main character)

I’ve always been interested in video games as well and I draw my attention to the atmosphere. Our game has a very nice, dark and dreamlike ambience. Lastly, for me it’s important to feel as comfortable as possible while working, so for example I grab some coffee, wear comfy clothes, drink water, listen to relaxing and inspirational music, take a break once in a while and drink more water (stay hydrated!) to keep up the good vibes. Other important things are to ask for help if needed and get a good night's sleep! :)

Hi there! My name is Pinja and I’m a member of our very talented graphics team. My range of responsibility was to create the background and the majority of the largest assets in the game (such as the home tree, waterfall and so on). 

Art and games have always had a special place in my heart, both of them being long time hobbies, number one career choices and means of handling life (to put it lightly), which is why I really enjoy doing what I do on this project.

When we first started to come up with the base idea for our game “Memory of light” I was thrilled. We took references from such awesome games like Hollow knight and Child of light. I had really clear vision of the visuals from the very start which made my job both easy and super hard at the same time. What I mean is that I wanted everything that I had to do to be exactly as I had imagined, ridiculously detailed (and my silly brain just didn’t want to believe the fact that we only had like eight weeks to complete the whole game. Cool). So even if we were short on time I think the graphics turned out really good; visually uniform, dark but not too spooky. Our team has been busy and has shed sweat, blood and tears to make this game look as visually pleasing as possible (I salute you my comrades in art, we did good job).

Now I would like to share some wisdom that I’ve learned throughout this project:

1. If you do graphics continuously for many, many hours, remember to get up and do some stretches. Your body will thank you and you can live your life like a normal human being. I mean it. 2. Remember to always have painkillers nearby, you are bound to have headaches for staring at the screen and consuming deadly amounts of blue light. (No kidding, I’m having a terrible headache right now while I’m writing this.) 3. “Ergonomic working posture” is a myth. 4. You’ll probably die of getting too many tenosynovitis’s 5. You´ll get horrible nightmares of trying to figure out sizes and resolutions. 6. All above is still worth it if you are able to do what you love <3

Hi! I'm Petteri, a member of the graphics team in Rerun Studios and the one in charge of the main character of the game. I've been a huge fan of videogames as long as I can remember and I've always liked doing art, so this is kinda the ideal situation for me as I can combine these two passions into a single project.

 When we started to brainstorm ideas for the game we are currently working on, ”Memory of Light”, one thing that most of our team wanted were ”beautiful visuals”. Us graphics team also wanted to pour our all into making this game look as good as possible (at least for now since this is our first game-developing project ever so there is all kinds of things that differentiate making art for a videogame to illustrations for example). There were two games that we took inspiration from, those two being ”Child of Light” from Ubisoft and ”Hollow Knight” from Team Cherry (these two are also ones of my favourite games so check those out as well!).

The visuals of the game turned out to be a little dark for being a game about light and the main character being a little girl, but I think that's the fault of this season as it's really, really dark in Finland at this time of the year. I wonder how the game would have looked like if we had started doing this in spring or summer...?

Lastly, I want to talk about designing the main character and animating. I wanted the main character to be a contrast to the more darker toned environment of the game's world. At first she was a teenage/young adult, but as the Grandma character came into being, I wanted to tone her down to being a child. She has a scarf, long coat/cape and long hair so her movement would be more expressive. There's also a huge inspiration taken from the Moomin-character Little My, but it wasn't so intentional at first until someone pointed it out.

I have animated before, so I took the job thinking ”This may going to be tough, but nothing I can't handle.” For anyone reading this and thinking about wanting to try animating: it's tough.

Hello there, fellow creatures and humans! My name is Heidi and I am one of the members from the project managing team. I have always loved games; as a child it all started when my big brother tried to teach me to play with Magic: The Gathering - cards. These days, my interests in games are way more varied than ever before and they have always had a special place in my heart.

When we started to work on this project it wasn’t easy at first. But after we started to discuss it more and looked at some games we felt nostalgic about, the team soon started to notice what type of game we were all looking for: an adventure type of fantasy game. Our reference games were amazing titles such as “Child of Light” and “Hollow Knight”. Both had the atmosphere of the game we wanted to aim for too.

(This is a drawing I made of our game’s characters!)

We aimed first for the full game, not processing the fact that we simply wouldn’t have enough time to finish the full version within eight weeks. It’s a shame, but then we just started aiming for a great demo that would leave people waiting for more in the future.

Even when we’ve had a short time to work on this game, I think we’ve had amazing progress. The graphics, the music -simply everything in the game is just spot on and well made for a demo. I’m very proud of our team and how hard we have worked for this project.

But what did I learn from this game project as a project manager? Well, it’s kind of hard to say just a few things because I feel like I’ve learned so much these past weeks. One of the things, for example, is that I learned to write and manage our production script which has helped us this whole project to keep track of what we have worked on and what has been finished already. I have also learned to support my team better and I have got better at looking after our team so we could get everything done in time. Of course, I don’t think I’ve been doing a perfect job with this since this is all new to me, but still we have managed this far, so I haven’t completely screwed everything up!

Overall, I think if you want to be the leader or the manager of a project group a good reminder is to look after your team’s health and make sure everyone is still having fun until the end! We all have our bad and good days but we don’t have to feel burnt out every day!

Rerun Studios is a small game developer group formed in Karelia University of Applied Science. We have 12 members all working towards making a videogame for our game production course that’s part of our studies in Karelia.

Project Management

Name: Heidi / Heibi (Get it? Hei-bi :D) Role in project: Project Manager Favourite videogame: Overwatch / Project Diva F2 Motto: "Drinking five cups of coffee per day doesn't kill you - yet"

I'm Heidi but people like to call me Heibi! I'm a 21-year-old coffeeholic, an artist and one of the project managers in our game. I have some experience in leading and organising but not with game projects - but I'm never afraid to learn new things! Just seeing how hard our team has worked for this game makes me proud of how talented people they all are!

Name: Jenni Role in project: Project Assistant Favourite videogame: I have to admit that I haven’t played in ages, but when I did it was Super Mario 3 Motto: “A question that sometimes drives me hazy, am I or are the others crazy?”

Hello, I’m Jenni and in this project I work as a project assistant. I don’t have any earlier experience with project management tasks, but I have really enjoyed doing them. The project management tool Teamwork has become more familiar to me during this project and I think that skill will be useful in the future.

Game design

Name: Jere Role in project: Screenwriter Favourite videogame: TMNT (2007) / L.A. Noire Motto: "I haven't seen it, but i've heard or read about it"

I'm Jere and I work as a screenwriter in this game project. I'm a 21-year-old fan of movies, series, art and of course videogames. I have written some smaller screenplays before but this project has been the biggest and most educational writing process I've experienced by far. This is my first time working on a videogame and it's been a good time learning new things here and there. It's been great to create content to our very own game and I hope people will enjoy playing it.

Name: Sara / Sarra Role in project: Game Designer Favourite videogame: Dragon Age 2 (also an infinite list of many others) Motto: "Don't say you don't like it if you haven't tried it"

Greetings y'all! My name's Sarra, I'm 21 years old and I act as the game designer in our team. My interests lie mostly in RPG, horror and sci-fi videogames (to name a few genres), reading and drawing. Game designing has been a new welcomed challenge for me since I've never done anything like it before. That said, I've been playing videogames my whole life, so different kinds of level designs are quite familiar to me. I hope that people will enjoy our first game and appreciate the work poured into it.

Graphics

Name: Petteri Role in project: Graphics, mainly character designer Favourite videogame: Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker Motto: "Everything will work out in the end"

Hello, my name's Petteri. In this project I work as a character designer, so I designed and animated the main character of the game. I'm interested in videogames, comics, art and storytelling, so it has been really exciting to work on this project. I would love to work in this field of work in the future as well. I think our first game project will be something that we can all be proud of.

Name: Pinja Role in project: Graphics Favourite videogame: Dragon Age: Origins + many others Motto: "You won't learn if you don't try"

Hi there! My name is Pinja, I'm a 21-year-old media student from Joensuu. My place in our game project is within the graphics team. I have always been quite an artistic soul and a passionate gamer so being a graphic designer has really been all I ever wanted to do. For me this project has been very instructive and I hope I could work with games and graphics in the future as well.

Name: Ada Role in project: Graphics Favourite videogame: Silent Hill 2 Motto: "Shared joy is a double joy"

My name is Ada and I'm a part of the graphics team in our game project. I'm 20 years old and I enjoy arts, music, horror movies and video games - especially the old school stuff. My job here is to draw different assets, animate and design stuff. It's been a very interesting learning process this far!

Sound Design

Name: Mikko Role in project: Sound Design / Music Favourite videogame: Fallout: New Vegas Motto: "Stupid ideas can be polished to good ideas"

I'm Mikko, a near 30-year-old bass player and a father of a five-year-old daughter. My job is to create life with sound and music in our game. I have almost no experience in composing music, but I'm not afraid to jump in the deep end in learning something new. I'm really excited to see how music and sound can make our character live in the game world.

Name: Tari Role in project: Sound Design Favourite videogame: Fallout 3 or any good RPG Motto: "Tequila is a Mexican champagne"

Hi! My name is Tari (25) and I am a sound designer. I have studied sounds for films for almost six years now. I have always wanted to make sounds for games and here I am doing it. Game sounds are very different from films and this project gives me so much new information. I am glad to be on board.

Programming

Name: Sanna Role in project: Programming Favourite videogame: Crash Bandicoot Motto: "Ideas can change the world"

Hello, I am Sanna and in this game project I am a programmer. This is the first time I have worked as a programmer and I have learned a lot during these couple of weeks. It is awesome to see the project develop so much in such a short time period. I am eager to see how it ends up looking like. I hope I can participate in other game projects in the future.

Name: Taru Role in project: Programming Favourite videogame: Spyro Motto: "The pain you feel today is the strength you feel tomorrow"

I am Taru and I work as a programmer in this game project. I'm 22 years old and this is my first time dealing with a project like this. I ended up here because I love videogames. I also love to train with heavy weights at the gym. These weeks have been very educational, and I have learned a lot about programming. It has been both fun and challenging. I wish I'll learn even more in the future! I'm excited to see how this game will turn out in the end when it is ready.

Marketing

Name: Siiri Role in project: Marketing Favourite videogame: Overwatch Motto: "Things have a tendency to work out somehow"

I’m taking part in a game production project that is a part of Karelia University of Applied Sciences’ media studies. The marketing team in this project suggested that every participant writes their own blog post regarding the project and their own team (the project’s participants were divided into six different teams in the beginning of the course). I got the honor of being the first writer.

I am Jenni and I belong to the project management team. I started pondering what I should write about. I Googled “project management” and the search results that came up one after another seemed quite boring until I happened to come across the image shown below (found from Wikipedia).

I thought that the image looks quite nice. I looked at it for a while until a question came into my mind: Could project management tasks be passed to robots? And just how handy it would be if a robot moved among the people shouting deadlines, upcoming tasks, the time spent on individual tasks and the time spent on the entire project by both individual members and the whole team.

In addition, the robot could run the awkward meetings in a robot voice to add a little more value to them. The robot would save and make a memo of the topics discussed at the meeting. It would also prepare an agenda for the next meeting. The robot could recognize the employees in the project with fingerprint or iris recognition. With a robot taking over the project management tasks people could avoid doing “unnecessary work” and they could concentrate on the “real” tasks with concrete results.

(This text is written in a humorous context. The writer has actually really enjoyed working in project management and will probably keep making meeting agendas out of habit for weeks after the project has ended.)

Rerun Studios is a game developer group formed in Karelia University of Applied Sciences. We have 12 members all working towards making a videogame demo for our game production course that’s part of our studies in Karelia.

Because Rerun Studios was formed in order to carry out a course, transforming a group of people into a team wasn’t quite simple. We have all been classmates for two years but we have never worked together as a team. Becoming a team required weekly meetings in order to get to know each other a little better. Our group consists of both very extroverted extroverts and very introverted introverts, so one of our first tasks was to learn to take each other’s qualities into consideration.

The beginning of our journey was a bumpy ride. Not having a teacher to actively give us orders or steps proved to be a little harder for us than we thought. Taking everyone’s ideas and opinions into consideration and having the bravery to share one’s ideas in the first place in a newly formed group was quite difficult.

Getting started with the game included many meetings full of brainstorming. We thought of values that we share and qualities we all wish for our game to have. Once our mutual values and wishes became clearer, it was a lot easier to plan our game.

As we started making our game with zero experience, starting off the project took its time. We weren’t sure where to start or how to start. However, once the ball started rolling, it hasn’t stopped since. Our teachers have helped us out when we’ve needed them and we have also spent a lot of time doing our own research and trying to learn on our own.

Hello everyone! We are Rerun Studios and we are currently working on our first game, Memory of Light.

We are a group of media students from Karelia University of Applied Sciences. We have no prior experience with making video games, but we are willing to try and learn things along the way as we work on our very first game project.

Our game will be an atmospheric 2D platformer about a young girl who takes off on an adventure to regain the balance of light and darkness in her world.