The story of the little games studio

Ninro gameMika Urtela and Hannu Pajula, graduates of the Department of Computer Science, are realising their piña colada-flavoured dreams in their game-producing company, Soul Aim Studios. This is the beginning of their story. The piña colada part of it has not come true yet, but they're working at it.

Ninro-logo

 

First steps on a game-developer’s path

 

One of the most common dreams among users, students and workers in the IT field is to develop their own game. Though we are now working in our own game studio (Soul Aim Studios), our starting point was probably similar to countless other game developers’: we wanted to make that dream of our own, 'real' game come true.

 

We were both interested in many kinds of games, from board games to digital ones. From this starting point, it was easy to convince a legendary code-writer (Mika Urtela) to implement an original game idea. The concept was to use current technology and a modern appearance to combine a card game like Magic the Gathering with advancing from level to level as in Super Mario. The prototype of the game was soon completed and was nice to play, though it was hard to approach for a new player. After the prototype, we cooperated intensely for months to improve the usability. We tried hard, but the outcome was to be expected: the project was too big and it is still on ice.

 

The most important lessons are learned the hard way. If you want to develop the game of your dreams, do not make it your first game. There are many practical issues in games development that are not apparent in an amateur development. Giving the interface an intuitive finish, creating menus that coincide with current expectations, and honing graphical effects and the appearance into a marketable whole. The restructuring of the code needed for these features can also pose a problem. If all the above suddenly comes crashing down on you, it is usually too late to try and simplify the game so that it would be realistic to manufacture it.

 

 

Mika Urtela
Work for expert data processors

 

Ideas are free. The average game designer produces 14 great game ideas per week. It is unlikely that a single one of those ideas will be implemented, much less successful, without a good deal of code-writing skills and knowledge of the theoretical side of computation. Most of the basic and intermediate courses in computer science are closely associated with skills that enable us to develop the more complex games.

 

The Department of Computer Science earns our gratitude for, from time to time, organising courses specifically about developing games. For students, this is typically the only possibility they have of learning about the world of games development. Such courses include Pelit ja virtuaaliympäristöt (games and virtual environments), the From Game Design to Prototype Workshop and AI for Games.

 

 

Hannu Pajula
Child in basket, basket in stream

 

We reached something of a milestone on our game development path when Ninro, crunched together in two months, was published at the end of March (https://market.android.com/details?id=ninro.main). In spite of the highly pumped expectations of its developers, the game has not (yet) sold enough to take them to a paradise island to enjoy endless piña coladas and maidens cooling them with the leaves of tropical trees. It has, however, showed us showed us mistakes and problems with marketing a game, which we had not even thought of before.

Mika Urtela & Hannu Pajula

(Soul Aim Studios)

 

 

More details:

 

Editor: Hannu Toivonen

Translation: Marina Kurtén

Created date

13.06.2011 - 10:18

Not just the local hero

For the Department of Computer Science, the well-being of international staff has a long history. Everyday communication in English is an essential part of this.

“It makes no sense to be just the local hero. If we want to develop further, we’ll need to follow international research standards” emphasises Juergen Muench. The German Professor has been leading the Software Systems Engineering research group at Helsinki University’s Department of Computer Science since 2011.

Linus Torvalds inspiring department students


Linus Torvalds – alumnus of the department, doctor honoris causa of the University of Helsinki, the best known representative of Finnish computer science internationally – visited the Kumpula campus on 23 October. He answered the questions of students and staff during an informal Q&A session attended by some 300 guests. As the floor was open, and Torvalds emphasized that all questions were welcomed, the queries ranged from extreme to extreme

Exactum rooftop greenhouse experiment grows herbs

A greenhouse has been built on the roof of Exactum in a collaboration by the Department of Computer Science and the Fifth Dimension science project. To begin with, sedum grass is growing on the roof and tomatoes, courgettes and chilli in the greenhouse. The greenhouse is 9.4 square metres large.

The motivation for the computer scientists is the estimation that 2% of the greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans are emitted by equipment using information technology. This is more than e.g. air traffic produces globally. To the scientists, this is reason enough to look into how to decrease the impact of information technology on global warming.

Study, teach and do what is fun

New postgraduates have recently been selected for the HeCSE graduate school that the department shares with Aalto University. One of the rising young researchers is Antti Laaksonen.

 

Antti finished his Master’s degree in spring 2011. Those whose job description includes reading lightweight Scrum theses written for the industry may be heartened by the fact that this student wrote his thesis on a most essential area of computer science, i.e. minimization of regular expressions. Antti chose his topic himself, because it was ‘interesting and suitably challenging.’