hello and welcome!hi! i'm elias, and i also go by siffrin online.some kinda quote here? wld be funky

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about me!hi! thanks for checking out this site!
[hhuhwuhhuh]i've been told that "the closer something is to "Weird Horror Thing" the more likely it is [i] will either know it or be interested in it".some examples of the above and inspirations of mine would be- Anatomy by Kitty Horrorshow, and really anything about Haunted houses or architecture that "rejects humanity"- Mouthwashing by Wrong Organ. the medium of a video game beautifully working with the idea of seeing what you want to see.- Hello Charlotte by etherane. i've experienced the game multiple times, but still cannot make sense of the surreal last episode in the best way possible.

illustrationsoftwarelanguages (all fluent)
Paint Tool SAI 2GameMakerEnglish
ProcreateUnityDutch
AsepriteBlenderRussian

for one of our projects, "show me", we worked together with a client and had to come up with and pitch a game concept that fit the criteria they gave us. we did not have to deliver a finished product, just a pitch we gave as if we were actually planning to make it real.our client ended up being Galaxy Grove, who wanted us to come up with a game that would fit in their "[X] to [Y]" series (eg. Station to Station).
we came up with Port to Port, a game where you manage a port town, trade goods and explore at sea.i made the UI for a "fake screenshot" of the player being in their own town:

i do like how it turned out, although some parts look very 2D and pasted on top. the mode buttons do fit in, as does the item bar, but the scrolls do look off in my opinion.
it's likely the flat colors contrasting with the fully rendered voxel art town.

other art

a somewhat silly three-page comic i made for an art lab assignment where we had to get across/communicate how we experienced being neurodivergent.i'd heard that people thought it visually got the point across right away, despite me being the first person they'd met who described their experience as "a wheel of fortune focus being spun in my brain every day".
and one of the people even said they'd like it as a comic or a print which i'm really happy about!

something i also do besides making games is sell merchandise of designs i draw! i have been running a small etsy shop since november 2023.while the designs are all fanart of existing pieces of media, this does mean i have experience working with a manufacturer, setting up sale listings, managing preorders/finances and everything else that comes with owning an online store.

solo games

group projects

inspirations:
- The Magnus Archives:
The Spiral
MAG183 - Monument- House of Leaves- BEDROCK.ZIP I + II-MyHouse.wad

currently not uploaded on itch.io or anywhere else. link will be added when it is available!

"what lies beyond?" was an incredibly self-indulgent project, as we were told to make something relating to a topic that fascinates us.i chose something fairly specific and niche, but close to me: The Spiral from The Magnus Archives, a "name" given to the fear of not being able to trust your own mind, of reality as you know it being wrong.the highlight of its presentation for me was one of the evaluators thinking there was some kind of pattern to the doors in a certain area that would lead you the right way.
afterwards, i was absolutely delighted to tell them that there was no pattern at all, and the path was being randomly generated.i would definitely say this was a success - the above scenario was the exact experience i wanted this project to be in its entirety.

process:

my "proper goal" for the game was to create a sense of repetition, a recognizable pattern, and then to break it. one of the ways in which i did that was keeping the colors of the three main areas tied together.it was a deliberate choice to use GameMaker for this project, as I was interested in trying something new and we had only been taught Unity until that point. grhjdfdhjf code instead of visual scripting bc Code, uhhhhh what else.

i could not decide on a direction to go in with this project for a long time,
until BEDROCK.ZIP II released right after our study trip to Berlin.BEDROCK.ZIP is essentially
House of Leaves translated into the format of a Minecraft ARG, a combination of three things i love a LOT.part II provided a new character's perspective on the events from part I, which made me want to create something based on how i experienced and interpreted both parts in turn...so i did!

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click on the thumbnails to go to the itch.io page!

this subject consisted of three weekly classes - one three hour long game jam upon the reveal of the prompt, and we had the rest of that week to polish the project and publish it on itch.io.

"context II", where our team worked with Impact Makers to reimagine the questionnaire on the CreaTures Framework website, was another time i specifically worked on a game's UI and item assets.our game, Sculpting the Future, was set in a small town, where the town square statue was recently destroyed. the town looked empty without it, so it was up to the player to sculpt a new statue that represented the town and its inhabitants using the items they received from the NPCs and picked up around town.

process:

the sculpting minigame UI and the illustrations for those items were my tasks.
we ended up using a font that i made of my own handwriting, as that fit the game's vibe more than a default font.it was very funny and a little jarring to see the in-game text "handwritten" by me, but it did look more cohesive and personal.something that ended up being very useful was me providing a layered .psd file with all the UI parts separate, so the developer could move and resize things in-engine without me having to send a new version every time.

we ended up going with a very warm color palette for the entire game, which we got by applying a filter on top of the original colors associated with the dimensions.we kept the items "vague" on purpose so that one item could reflect multiple dimensions, and so even if an item was connected to a certain NPC, the player would not have felt forced to include it.

the items: (variations can be found in-game!)