In Conversation With: Luka Tilinger

Luka Tilinger

Luka and I met in front of Kombank Art Hol gallery in which he had an exhibition of works he made during the last two years of his studies at the School of Applied Arts, graphics and books department. Luka was kind enough to give me a tour of the exhibition, which gave me a chance to learn more about his works and himself. Besides books, illustrations and drawings, in one corner of the gallery facing the street, a 7-minute-long video was played, showing the game that Luka made for his master thesis. The game was initially called Destiny, but was later renamed to Seeker.

Whenever he worked on games in the past, he would always start from something he knew he couldn’t finish, because by trying to do it, he would learn a lot. However, until he worked with Eipix, his projects were left unfinished. He started doing 3D modelling at the end of elementary school. “At the beginning of high school, I read on the Dizajn zona forum, where I used to post my 3D models, that a team from Novi Sad, Eipix, was making a game, 3D arcade race game “Ultra Tubes”” That sounded interesting to him, so he sent an email and asked if he can join. They needed him to send them some work, and that’s when he realized that he doesn’t really even know how to map a model, but that didn’t stop him from trying. He sent them parts of the aircraft model and different versions, but since it all went to slow they told him to call them when he learns a bit more. And so it was, he later worked with Eipix on the game Pyroblazer.

Before he enrolled in the School of Applied Arts, he graduated from Mathematical Grammar School, and it looks like math and art often intertwine for him, although art seems to be more dominant, because, as I read somewhere, “Luka likes drawing better than not drawing”. On the other hand he says “I fell in love with math because it’s functional and, through programming, it becomes almost tangible. I think that people usually don’t like math because they don’t know hot to implement it, so it’s seems like something foreign to them. I was interested in what could be made from it.” He wanted to study Game development at the University of Metropolitan, but at the end of high school he got more interested in drawing, so he decided to enroll in the School of applied arts, for which he only has words of praise. However, while he was at university he stopped making games and only came back to them when he needed to decide what he wanted to do for his master thesis. “I wanted to make a screenplay that I could at least roughly stick to. That was the biggest challenge for me. When I was writing stories for some of my previous games, I would rely on cliches and even, unconsciously, quote parts of my favorite titles. So this time I was really nervous about writing a story, and whenever I came up with something, I would start checking it from all sides.”

“I wanted to make a game that would use the main feeling that I had when I played adventure games as a kid. The thing that made a strong impression on me was the way you move, especially in Myst, the way you see the space rendered screens and that feeling of invisible presence from the first person view… It’s different later when you have a free camera in a 3D space, somewhat weaker, it’s like you’re in a little car. That’s why I imagined the player as the invisible ghost of destiny. But, even tho people cannot see it, it can influence what seem to be accidental events (for instance falling of a rock) – the player initiates that with his character. That way that magical invisible character actually has its place in the narrative.”

For his master thesis, he wanted to make introductory chapter in which the player wanders around the world, and at the end of that chapter he gets a mission to save the man who then has to save the world. He decided on abstract graphics that by its color, composition and animation suggests, as he says, a childish and different view of this world which is pretty depressive, by the story. The game was made in Adventure maker which he says is the younger, more powerful brother of Power Point (yes, Power Point) in which he used to make prototypes of his point and click adventures. He wanted to focus more on drawing for his master thesis and not programming, so what Adventure Maker can offer was enough for him. “Everything was drawn in Photoshop; I joke that it’s “laso graphics” because all the graphics was made with laso tool. Laso tool – paint bucket. So then it seems like collage. I figured out that I can draw fast that way, and then I can animate it fast as well. It took me 4 months to make those 7 minutes of gameplay. There was a lot of work with animations, for instance, the complex animation composed of multiple layers – I spent a lot of time on that.“

For this game, Luka did the programming, graphics and the story, sound design is by Aleksandar Manja, music for the trailer by Pavle Dinulović. The font that was used was previously made by Branislav Pantić. “Sara Radojković is working on the screenplay for the rest of the project, we’re sort of negotiating at the moment, but I’m looking forward to that collaboration, I just don’t know in what pace it will develop. Collaborating with people to make games really suits me somehow. When I draw and animate, I have an idea behind it. It doesn’t have to be a specific idea but rather a feeling about the direction in which it should go. Later, when I observe what I made, I can understand what I was thinking about. People that make other parts of the games can feel and then interpret in their own way those ideas that are like a layer above something that is direct, that can be seen. I find that very interesting, especially if we’re on the sam page. For instance, now that Sara is working on the screenplay, she is making her own variations that are partly inspired by my initial ideas, drawings. I find it interesting how it corresponds with what I imagined. It will be exciting for me to respond further with my drawings because, in that way, a new in-between layer appears. That’s maybe the main thing that draws me to make games. It seems to me that a game needs to have some scope to have a meaning. I think working on a longer game would take some serious planning. That’s something I’m not quite ready to accept yet but I would love to achive that in the next few years.”

The language the game is in is Serbian, and since that is not a common thing, I asked him what made him decide on it. “That’s something that we brainstormed a lot. When I made adventure games before, everything was always in English because everyone speaks English, I wanted to be understood by everyone. However, when I was doing poetry illustrations at university, I started getting more interested in Serbian language.” He then realized that it is important to him, in a creative sense, to present the story in Serbian because it’s his native language and he gets a lot of associations through it. The script that was used is Cyrillic and the reason for that is probably the best and at the same time the simplest that I ever heard someone give: “I just love how Cyrillic looks visually. I don’t know if it has any base in reality, but it seems to me that some texts look really good in Cyrillic and some in Latin script – I feel that it looks different graphically. So based on that, I decide on the script and there’s no more wisdom to that. As for this project, and especially in this first stat of it, as a master thesis, it was made in Belgrade, in Serbia, for my friends to see. So it wasn’t necessary to choose another language and scrip, so we decided to keep the Cyrillic. It’s really unusual to me to see it in the game for me.”

“The text is from the first person perspective, it represents character of destiny and it’s very loosely defined. I actually insisted on it being completely undefined, but others suggested that I should define it at least in some way. So it remained some sort of an angel of destiny, however the topic is not religious at all. In general, all those religious motives that exist in the game, judgment day, prophecies, they were taken for all the possible ways they could be interpreted and because of their picturesqueness, vagueness, they don’t have the original religious meaning. It’s like they are taken from some literature that talks about it, that’s how I perceive it. At the very end, the gender of the protagonist had to be decided on. If I made it gender neutral it would be very limited due to the nature of the Serbian language and would have a bit of a bureaucratic feel to it. When I started writing the text I realized that I was instinctively typing it in masculine form, because whenever you don’t know the gender of something it’s usually male. Especially because from my perspective it’s even more natural to write it that way. However, because the character is not a human being, there’s no reason for it to be male so I wanted to think about using the female gender. And then it stayed that way, as a trial version I wrote it in feminine form. Some people liked it, some didn’t, but it just stayed that way. I was pleased that we managed to avoid something that would instinctively be male. I think it’s interesting that way, it gives a different kind of reading.”

“I’m attracted to games as some sort of abstract interactive molding, and whenever something has to fulfill some canons, for instance of a specific genre, it usually turns me off.” I asked him if he wants to continue making video games, although I assumed there is not a simple answer. “I’m interested in creating interactive content. In general, I’m interested in games but I have a problem with fitting into the scene so that I could make something commercial, which is important so I don’t starve to death.”

However, the game scene is now maybe more diverse than ever and is open for new types of games – the ones that don’t really fit any of the known genres or that are molding them into something new and distinctive. By making something different, game designers are expanding the world of games and getting more people interested and that’s why it’s important to not give up if you can’t find your place. Who knows how many people are out there, waiting for that first game that will spark their interest.

Game screenshots courtesy of Luka Tilinger

Copy-edited by Ana Čomor