Santa Feeniks Blog — Bridging-Worlds

Let me outline some things for you…

… to make this article a bit more clear:

Santa Feeniks is a imaginary city, created by the Brotherhood of the Blood Phoenix. It is in the world of Midgard, a super continent on which humanity is at war with magic.

The brotherhood found a way to defeat magic and build a city near their source of power. In addition to this, they created a prison, the Prison of Nightmares, that holds the evil that cannot be destroyed.

But how did the idea come together, how did it start? Read on to learn about that…

The Secret Path (TSP)

it was around my time at Qantm (2007-2008) that I was thinking about creating my own world, in the beginning obviously mostly in a 3D sense. But the more time I invested in planning, the more ideas I got about it. And so I have contemplated over a lot of little ideas, most of which I never write down…bad mistake looking at it now.

But the first big idea was not a city. The first idea was a Dungeon, full of traps and and an ancient evil that will start following you and hunt you through the catacombs. One of the inspirations for this was the movie Cube.

…I even started to work on a Cube game, but lost interest fairly quick…

So the first idea was to become a dungeon crawler survival horror game. As a young student archaeologist, you stumble through the woods in Norway, searching for signs of an ancient civilisation. Deep in the forest, you discover a very old well that seems to be in the middle of nowhere. While you are inspecting the well, you lean over the edge and it starts to crumble. You fall….endlessly it seems.

…FADE TO BLACK…

As you wake up, you find yourself in a large room with 2 giant doors. A faint light was around you, the darkness was everywhere, but you could still see more than enough to make out your surroundings. One door was crushed open by a statue that fell over, you can see traces that your fall down into this pit might have been the cause. You slowly walk towards the open door and look through it…an empty room. But the darkness in there was different, it felt like it is soaking up any light that came from the bigger room.

As you make your way over to the 2nd door something moved behind you. You heard a noise. After you turned around very quick you saw nothing. But the room had changed, the darkness from the adjacent room was inside the pit now, you could see it on the walls, the floor…

With you walk over to the other door with quick steps, opening it and looking into a long empty hallway. Not wanting to stay with the darkness at all, you run out the door and along the hallway.

The concept of TSP

In TSP you are supposed to run away from the darkness in a maze. There were supposed to be traps everywhere, but the idea was to turn the solving of the traps around, as they were meant to keep intruders out, but you were coming from inside, so you had to think differently than the obvious way to get around or disarm them, which should usually include some form of puzzle. All under time pressure as the darkness is slowly coming towards you trying to consume you.

So was the idea born for The Prison Of Nightmares, and incidentally also the Brotherhood who build it. The brotherhood build a prison that was keeping in an evil so powerful, it would consume the world if freed. So they build the prison in a way that nobody can get in to release the darkness.

hallway 01

hallway 02

hallway 03

the pit 01

the pit 02

the pit 03

And then I was spinning the story a bit more and thought: What if there is not only one setting? Only one level of the prison?

So I started thinking about how the prison is structured in several levels, the old crypt, the catacombs, the entrance….and then The City.

The player was supposed to be chased through all the levels, encountering traps and at some point even other monsters than the darkness, very default stuff like werewolves, ghosts, vampires. But the whole story slowly started to fail in my mind. It was becoming too generic, too “done already”!

Below you can see even more concept art about the hallways of the dungeon.

The city becomes the focus…and gets a name: SANTA FEENIKS

After I dumped the idea of having a dungeon crawler type of game my priority shifted. I already loved the idea about a huge city, so that was what I wanted to focus on. And as I already knew that the Brotherhoods guardian will be a phoenix, I looked for a good name. The word Santa was pretty much given from the beginning, I like the sound of the word, now I just had to find something that fits to it. But I did not want to call it Santa Phoenix, that would have been to easy and to boring.

So I checked out the word Phoenix ins other languages and the Finnish word won: Feeniks! And so was the name born: Santa Feeniks.

In the years 2009 to early 2014 I tried many times to start working on Santa Feeniks. But they all failed in one thing: I was overplanning everything. Every attempt started with a big planning phase, e.g. how are the streets? How are elevations? Where are parks or other special places?. Every time I started I got lost in the planning and then lost interest because I was not seeing any progress. I cannot really tell how many times I started in those years, but I would estimate it was about 15 to 20 times.

Below you can see 2 concepts of failed attempts…

The 2nd image shows my last attempt in early 2014, at least I think it was the last attempt at the time. It was going somewhere but then end of 2013 and the beginning of 2014 was a really bad time for me.

The fight with Insomnia

Since my time at Qantm and many years after that I was bound to “work as much as possible” on different little ideas that I had. While we were working at our final project for Qantm, I was starting to skip sleep. Sometimes a night, sometimes 2…and the amount grew and grew with every week. Lots of coffee or caffeine pills were helping me stay awake and keep working. In the beginning it was all fine and I did not really felt any side effects…

…but keeping this mentality up for years did severe damage to my physical and, which is way worse, my mental health. At some point I couldn’t even fall asleep, no matter how much I tried. I was laying in bed awake all night and couldn’t find any rest. I am not even sure when I stopped wanting to stay awake and just did it because if has become a habit. My days were pretty much a grind of staying awake, staying alive…being awake for 48-72 hours, then crashing completely for a couple of hours, lets say 6 tops, and then being awake again for days.

After 6 years, which was in early 2014, I got to the end of my rope. And so was my body. I started to suffer from something that is called “Narcoleptic Episodes”. My body would just randomly shut down wherever it was, no matter how exhausted I was….I had a total of 4 of these in 2014, twice I woke up in the hospital.

And this was the wake-up call I needed to start changing my life. I was trying to get my life and sleep in order by myself and it was not working at all, my sleep schedule was ruined and even if I tried to sleep for 8 hours a day, it took me 3-4 hours to fall asleep and then I was sleeping for a couple of minutes until I woke up and was wide awake again. There was no chance for me to fix this alone.

So I signed up with a sleep lab so they can analyze what is happening with me when I try to sleep and give some advice. After spending a weekend in there the doc told me that the moment the lights go out and I am in silence, my brain starts ramping up its activity by a lot, massive activity spikes were recorded. Meaning I was thinking about all kinds of stuff, work, private stuff, a lot of times about failures or mistakes…

So the recommendation was to find something that distracts me from thinking, not trying to sleeping silence but having something audible in the background that distracts me from overthinking everything. I tried a couple of bullshit Audio CDs with some subliminal tone that is supposed to sooth you, but it never helped. And then I came back to the one thing, the one person that always made me feel relaxed and put me to sleep in my younger years…. Bob Ross.

His painting show was my saving grace, it helped me to sleep again. And from this moment onward I always put his show on loop and I had (almost) no issues sleeping.

But why am I telling this story, what has it to do with Santa Feeniks?

Well, during this time I had totally given up on working on the city. There was no power left for it, no motivation. I was simply overwhelmed with the project and thought if I would work on this more, I could fall back into trying not to sleep, trying to power through and just keep on working. So I stopped it…

I stopped working on Santa Feeniks.

On a side note: Please never ever try to skip on sleep no matter how much you consider it a waste of time (like I did). Your body needs sleep to fully recharge, so never do stuff like staying awake for 3 days, get your sleep, get your rest, have sweet dreams! Going through shit like I did just because “I wanted to work more” was not even close to worth it. This whole thing nearly destroyed me, don’t make the same mistake!

Project 2015

abandoned high-tech or medieval fantasy?

Nothing happened for Santa Feeniks until the end of 2014 in which I had reorganized my life in a good way and slowly came to terms with my sleeping disorder and how to solve it. So I started dreaming again about my glorious city and how to build it. But although I already had some ideas about a story, I was torn between a decision for it:

Should it be a post-apocalyptic high-tech city or a medieval fantasy one?

To help me decide I create a Facebook poll among my friends to see what they thought. The poll showed that more people were interested in a medieval setting and I was relieved, because although I was really loving some ideas I had for a abandoned overgrown tech city, my heart was more set for fantasy and the idea of building in a Gothic, Victorian, romantic style.

So in early 2015 I started writing and building something new for Santa Feeniks. The writing went fairly well but the 3D work went awful again. I was still trapped in my way of overplanning and overthinking things and after a coupe of hours of working on the new city I was already losing any interest in it. So work here became very slow and very boring to me, which was a bit of a killing blow for it. But I was not giving up that easily, I motivated me as much as possible, even did something I would have never thought I would ever do…I streamed my work for the first time on January 13th, 2015.

And then, in March 2015, something stopped me completely in my work…

I little accident, a fall, and a pretty bad landing and I broke my left hand pinky. It needed to be fixed and with the cast and everything I couldn’t properly move my hand for weeks. NO work could be done! And due to a super hot summer that year the healing process ran into many complications, from infections due to sweat, the metal to keep the bones straight having issues with my nerves and causing massive pain in my hand and other things it took a total of 19 weeks to heal, and for most of the time I was barely able to use my hand as I was not able or allowed to move the fingers during the healing process.

And that was the killer for Project 2015. It was over when it came to working in 3D. And I totally lost hope for it and totally given up. There was just no chance for me to ever find the motivation again to do this.

But…

…most of you know that I did not fully gave up, that I restarted the project and have gotten decently far with it. How did this happen, where came the motivation from?

You will have to read this in the upcoming Part 3!

A small introduction beforehand

If you don’t care about my backstory, just skip to the next part…(coming soon!)

I was a gamer all my life. School was a horrible place, mainly due to the messed up people I had to deal with in there. So I retreated into gaming worlds and found my passion there. Level Design!
From a very young age I started to create game worlds from scratch and created maps for all kinds of games: Age of Empires, Warcraft 2, Starcraft, Age of Empires 2…a long list of RTS games.

My favorite example, although I lost all of it, was a Starcraft campaign, that took months to develop. It had its own story line, characters (one of them is also the main character for Santa Feeniks) 10 maps with their own little story events etc. It took a “good” SC player around 13hrs to finish the whole thing. I was so proud of myself, it was a masterpiece (for a 12 year old). A couple of months later I lost it all when my hard drive started burning…RIP…and no copies made…

Then came Unreal and more importantly in 1998: Unreal Tournament.
A game I played obsessively, both alone and with friends on LAN parties. And by some random accident, while browsing in the game directories, I found a file called EDITOR.EXE. My eyes went big, a smile appeared on my face and a burning sensation started in my heart.

I sat day and night on learning how to use this damn editor, because back in the days of Unreal Engine 1, there was barely any help, no Static Meshes (the UE name for imported 3D models) and this whole thing was obviously very much different than working in 2D.

But I was determined to learn, so I just tried all kinds of stuff, created very basic block levels, and slowly build up to a fundamental knowledge about the Engine and what you can do. For many years to come, I worked on maps for UT1 and, with more success, UT2004, which by then had the Unreal Engine 2, which had Static Meshes, so I could use the UT game assets to puzzle together my own maps.

My maps being a hit on every LAN party, my confidence was boosted and the plans for my future were made. I wanted to become a Game Developer, a Level Designer, a creator of worlds!

Sometime in 2006 or 2007 I started to think about what to do with my life and how to approach my dream. I was in the military service at the time and was looking to apply for universities for IT specialization. I wanted to become a Game Developer, so going into IT direction was a good start, I already oriented my majors in high school towards this goal.

But then you read that IT in university is a super boring topic and about 60% of the people quit because it is not what they expected. So I got discouraged and stopped looking for a good place to study towards IT jobs.

At the same time, a German game magazine started a new project that was focused on Game Development. And right in the first edition was an article about studying Game Design. So there was my chance. The only problem: no government funding and extreme high fees per month to study in those rare places (Game Design was not at all a common topic in the German school system). There were 3 schools in Berlin that offered Game Design as a course, each of them were demanding a monthly fee of ca. 800€. So my hopes were crushed. I had a good amount of money saved up from my service time, but it was not nearly enough.

So I talked to the only person who could help me now: My dad!
He is somewhat of a financial genius and helped my brothers with ridiculous ideas already…so I thought why not give it a try. We sat together for days calculating what is needed and talking about how to get the money. In total I needed about 30.000€ to

get into the course
move to Berlin
don’t starve!!!

One month before the course we picked started, in November 2007, my dad told me that is impossible to get the funds and that I would have to either wait or go for another direction to study. Obviously this was a major set back and I was crushed beyond anything. A few days went by and I had given up hope when my dad came to me and said: “Son, I might have found a way!” (I am sparing you the details here, it was a rather long journey to many banks, many talks…).

I did not want to get my hopes up, but I listened to him and we both agreed that it is worth a shot. So we applied for a student credit with our bank that had promising values in a sense of interests and payback time. The money for the course itself was paid by my dad in full directly, so the student credit was to get me through the “not starving” part.

After the funding was done, we had to get me an apartment in Berlin, so I started looking and found some promising places near the school. We drove over and visited those apartments. A couple bad ones, a couple good ones, and then there is the place I was meant to stay in for a very long time! My new Home, my very first apartment, I moved in on the 13th of October 2007!

And so began my time at QANTM Berlin

For 18 months I was to learn how to be a game designer. To learn 2D and 3D art, animation. Story and quest design. Audio and video editing. And many more things.

But for me the obvious focus was on 3D and level design. the first few weeks were all kinds of stuff that was interesting, but I couldn’t wait to start with 3D. And at some point my time has come, we learned the first program: 3ds Max, the worst program in my opinion. I had so many difficulties with it, the version we were using was far away from any other program in the 3D business, like Maya or XSI. But I learned the basics and what is important in 3D modeling and texturing.

After a few weeks we moved on to Maya and later we had a look at XSI (now Softimage). And XSI was my GOTO. It was super easy to use, had all the tools I needed and I quickly established a very quick and good workflow to do all kinds of things I wanted to test and learn.

During my time at QANTM and the time after I made a couple of 3D scenes for fun projects with my fellow students. For example 2 fighting arenas for a BeatEmUp game. The first picture shows the Olymp and the second a bathhouse.

This was part of our final project and was a lot of fun. I especially took a lot of pride in the water shader of the Bathhouse, as it was mirroring all its surroundings, which took quite some effort to create. I also learned a lot of differences between Game Art and Movie Art (Real Time and Offline rendering). Our 3D teacher was from the movie business, so his knowledge was very limited when it came to real time rendering techniques, which gave me a lot of trouble especially for lighting static and dynamic objects inside the scene. But with a lot of Google searches, I figured it out (and the term Lightmap UV burnt itself into my brain).

After I graduated from QANTM I worked on a few small things every now and then, but I was already highly engaged in my new job as a Games Tester (hired directly by one of our teachers right after school).

After spending a certain time on those last two projects I really disliked my progress and stopped for a while…until my passion flared up again and I tried something different. Create a scene, but on a much smaller scale, not intended for a game, just as a form of showroom.