aaskisoft is a collective developer of independent games. In addition to their core members they rely on the tireless wisdom of the greater gaming community. With the release of askiisofts first game, Tower of Heaven, I set out to design askiisofts website. The reasoning for the the design and color choices becomes (hopefully) more clear when you learn a little bit more about their debut game.
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This entry was written by Cristian, posted on April 15, 2010 at 6:44 PM, filed under Gaming, Indie Games, Webdesign, Work. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

I’m very busy at home right now so that’s why I haven’t been able to post these pictures until now so for all of you who has been asking me over and over here they are! I’ll just post these pictures without any descriptions since there are over a hundred pictures. Some of these pictures were taken by one of my friends (another student at the university) and are of my greater quality.

This is from my last week~ in China.
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This entry was written by Cristian, posted on April 9, 2010 at 1:46 PM, filed under China 2010, Personal. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Almost one week ago me and Kevin Wrobel arrived at Beijing Airport. We had been flying all night but we couldn’t go to sleep when we arrived in China because even though it was past midnight in Stockholm, Sweden it was 08:00 in the morning in Beijing.

Read on to see many of the pictures we took during our first days.
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This entry was written by Cristian, posted on March 17, 2010 at 9:45 AM, filed under China 2010, Personal. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

As most of you know, I am in Beijing on a scholarship that me and Kevin Wrobel recieved from Stockholm University. We will stay here for four months to study two courses that will most likely both be focused on animation. While we’re here we will also have to finish and write a thesis (C-uppsats in Swedish).

It’s Sunday right now and it’s almost midnight. It’s the end of our first week in Beijing. We have only been here for a few days but we have already seen quite a lot. I plan on trying to write a blog post with pictures every week and today I was supposed to write one but while the internet speed here at our campus is fairly decent when it comes to download speed, the upload speed is horrible and uploading the pictures I have taken so far is going to take ages and I won’t be able to post anything today. In a day or two I should have the pictures from week one online.

Stay tuned.

This entry was written by Cristian, posted on March 14, 2010 at 5:59 PM, filed under China 2010, Personal. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

David Cage’s has just released his latest game Heavy Rain, a PS3 exclusive featuring a unique control scheme and a heavy focus on narrative. The game is supposed to be more adult than most and to me it feels like Cage wants to make movies rather than games. Heavy Rain has interested me, an aspiring writer for video games greatly since I first heard about it since this is one of the few games where a lot of time and thought has been invested in the storytelling.

Something that is extremely important to not forget however is that games are still games and if the gameplay is lacking then all you’re left with is an interactive movie and that is not the direction I’m hoping these kinds of games are heading in. While Heavy Rain was doing it’s mandatory install on my PS3 there was a 12-step guide on how to fold the origami piece that is seen on the cover of the game and which as I understand it is the sign the “origami killer” in the game leaves behind on every victim he slays. I think it turned out pretty good. I’ll have a review of Heavy Rain posted later when I’m finished with the game.

Read more to view the games trailer
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This entry was written by Cristian, posted on March 2, 2010 at 3:06 PM, filed under Gaming, Personal. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

I have been playing a MMORPG called Darkfall Online for almost a full year now. It has paid off in many ways with the most recent being quite interesting. Read on to see why.
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This entry was written by Cristian, posted on February 23, 2010 at 2:24 PM, filed under Gaming, MMORPG, Personal. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

I’m currently writing my Thesis for my bachelors degree in computer game development at Stockholm University. I’m writing about personality and identity development in massively multiplayer online roleplaying games and how this manifests when you’re “living” through an avatar in a synthetic world that is similar to ours in many ways. I have encountered a problem where I have a hard time deciding how to phrase myself. Take this fragment of a sentence for example:

surrounded by a lot of other real life people playing their avatars which opens up for a lot of the same social interaction that can be experienced in the real world.

It doesn’t feel right to write “the real world”. When it comes to readability I guess I’d prefer using the word real for such a sentence though. However, what makes a world like Azeroth (from World of Warcraft) or Norrath (Everquest) not real? How do you define real? I honestly don’t know and I guess it would be possibly to base a thesis solely around this question. To me a synthetic world is just as real as the world we’re living in.

This entry was written by Cristian, posted on February 13, 2010 at 5:37 PM, filed under Gaming, MMORPG, Projects, Virtual Reality. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

This is my final post from my month in San Sebastiàn during the summer of 09. The pictures are from the last week where San Sebastiàn celebrated Grande Semana which is a really big thing for the people down there. Grande Semana means the big week and it is a week of constant party. Every night there are immense firework displays taking place, rock concerts and people partying until morning. Everyone is in a very cheerful mood and it’s probably one of the greatest places in the world during this week.
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This entry was written by Cristian, posted on February 11, 2010 at 7:20 PM, filed under Personal, San Sebastián 2009. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

During the last week in San Sebastiàn we went on a trip to a small village north of the main city. It was a small village just by the sea and most people living there were fishermen. We got to learn how to create pintxos while we were there. Pintxos is a basque word and it’s basically tapas which the basque people eat a lot of. In every corner of the entire city there are pintxo places where you can eat a variety of different sausage, chicken, fish and vegetable based pintxos. They are very delicious and not that hard to make.
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This entry was written by Cristian, posted on at 6:18 PM, filed under Personal, San Sebastián 2009. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

At the end of the third week we went to an old vineyard that served classic basque dishes that were very tasty. They also had a warehouse looking storage room with huge wine kegs which you could help yourself to as much as you pleased. The later it got the more blurry my pictures became but I still have a couple I think are good enough to show you.
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This entry was written by Cristian, posted on at 5:53 PM, filed under Personal, San Sebastián 2009. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.