Game development
Surmount
A physics based climbing roguelite. Developed by me and my friend Jasper Oprel. From 2020 until 2024.
I made all the art, 2D and 3D while Jasper did the programming. We did all the game design and story together.
With sound design by Rumsklang and music by Ryan Yoshikami.
Funded by MidgameFund and copublished by Popagenda.
The game is available now on PC, Steam Deck and Mac on Steam. It’s also available on the Nintendo Switch.
Concept sketches of NPC’s and player avatars, to figure out what kind of variety I could achieve while sticking to one body type.
And a concept of Big Hand and the Rangers, who both made it into the game. The Rangers turned out quite different.
Character design concepts for two NPC’s we added at the end of development. A mystery merchant that trade gems for tools on the mountain. And Mr Mountain, a peculiar man who can make you stronger.
Early animated 3D mockups of what the game would look like. These really didn’t need to be animated but it was hard to resist. The final look of the game didn’t deviate very much from these.
The first and the last concept sketches of what the mountain in the game would look like.
We always knew that we wanted the mountain to look bizarre and to be divided into four distinct zones.
UI exploration of different screens. Both me and Jasper juggled a lot back and forth on this. For the final game we went for a look inspired by hiking maps and leaned more into sportiness.
This is the key art illustrations I made for the game.
Closeup of the bus that brings you to New Tully at the beginning of the game.
I modelled the interior roughly because I made a cool shader for the windows.
A look at the avatar’s file 3D file in Blender. I made the rig myself and made between 150-200 animations, it became a lot because the movement of the character is physics based and I wanted it to look like it was reacting to every possible scenario without the typical jankiness that you get when you go full-in on procedural animations. So there are a lot of blend states for walking on angled ground, spinning at different speeds and falling in different directions.
All NPC’s and the player avatar share the same model and rig. I did this because I wanted a character editor in the game. But it also saved a lot of time, I could easily make more NPC’s using the same features that the player would unlock.
Jasper’s cat passed during the making of the game, so I modelled her and put her in the game.
I made a pair of realistic hands and implemented them just to see how it would look. Mostly as a joke.
A progress shot of me and Jasper working together on the shader of gems, and figuring out their shape.
And a peak at the level design tool Jasper made for us to create the chunks used in the level generator. I made hundreds of chunks for 4 different zones in this tool.
An early blockout of the HUB area compared to the final version of it. Finally climbable and explorable with lots of random NPC encounters and important story moments taking place here. It acts both as a sort of menu, where the player can go to different places to customize their character, upgrade and switch their abilities, go on missions, or go explore Mount Om. It was also important for us to have the HUB be a fun place to mess around and get used to the controls and goof with your friend.
I’m not a big fan of using textures when I make 3D assets. I prefer to focus on the shape. So most of my 3D art is texture-free. Instead I rely on vertex colors.
Some things that I wanted couldn’t be done without textures though. So I made the rock textures using Quixel.
My NPC briefly working at the Gift Shop while it’s being built.
Big Wizard’s Kitten
In this game you play as the defenseless kitten of a large wizard. It’s twist on Vampire Survivor-genre, where you never grow stronger yourself, instead it’s your friend who does.
I designed, programmed and made all the art for this in 96 hours for the GMTK Game Jam, 2024.
It’s available to download and play over on itch.io.
Misc games
Code, design, sound, music and graphics for my game Dropert. You can read about the development here.
Code, design, sounds and graphics for Swapgeist.
A car from a shelved game idea.
Logo, some game design and a 2D rigged character for Super Skelly Belly.
Tinykin
Some concept art for Splash Team’s upcoming game, I mainly focused on using props that you would find in a house to construct cities for insects. Check out their twitter to see more of the game and follow the development.
I constructed this around my kitchen sink for reference.
Hokko Life
Hokko Life is a life simulation game set in a small country side village where you befriend animals and build various things.
These are some concepts and UI mockups I did for it in the summer of 2018. Later I also designed the logo for the game. It's still in development at Wonderscope AB and being published by Team 17.
Official website: Hokko.Life →
Here's a mix of key locations like a hair salon, train station, shop and some ordinary houses. We thought of the location as summertime in the countryside of Sweden, with some liberties.
Some ideas of what different animal villagers might look like and how they could be different by color.
ABC Alfie Atkins
A fun and educational game to help kids shape letters, learn their sounds and spell words. Developed by Gro Play.
You can get a free version of the game on iOS and Android.
Below are concepts and finished assets I helped make as well as some UI/UX elements, storyboards and finished components in-game.
This room act as a hub between the mini games with animated characters and interactive objects.
We made another room to act as a main menu for content that wasn't part of the gameplay.
Final design of the machine
One of the more involved parts of the game is the word machine, it needed to be able to do many different tasks and still be intuitive.
Proud to say it turned out to be a well-oiled machine.
