Copyright 2025 Nina Tepponen
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About
I am a software engineer with an interest in game development and UX.Games
Thus Sang The Trees
In a world where spirits and ghouls roam the lands, infecting them and leading nature itself to rebel against man, it is your job to appease those spirits and coax the plants back to health.
A narrative-focused farming game with elements of survival horror made with Unreal Engine. The game was a thesis project for several master's students in game design and development. I joined in as a programmer.
My roles: I worked in the project as a programmer and game designer. My contributions included creating a dialogue system integrated with character animation and a system for simulating plant growth.
Absinthe Tails
As Claude, a detective with a penchant for spirits, your task is to unravel the mysteries surrounding your quaint town. Armed with photographs from around the town, you must piece together the clues to solve the case.
Absinthe Tails is a detective game with a dash of absinthe and missing cats. It was made with Unity.
My roles: I worked in the project as a programmer. My main contribution was creating a messenger app for texting one of the game's characters. I used the YarnSpinner plugin for Unity to manage the dialogue flow.
Apogrowth
You, a spore, are the last drop of life essence in a post-apocalyptic world. Set off to discover the past and bring the world back to life.
Apogrowth is an atmospheric third-person exploration game. It was made with Unity.
My roles: I worked in the project as a programmer and game designer. My contributions included gameplay programming and player research on our character movement mechanics. I also managed the project's version control and worked with sound designers to integrate the Wwise audio software with our Unity project.
Mykola
Traverse to the afterlife and play a mysterious card game with the sad dead cowboys to save your brother's soul.
Mykola is a 3D narrative-driven deck-building adventure game. It was made with Unity.
My roles: I worked in the project as a programmer and game designer for the card game. I created the backend system that runs the card game and resolves user actions, and created an AI opponent for the game.
RoboRescue
You are a RoboRescue unit with a simple task: save the child in danger. But something in this decrepit amusement park is not how it seems at first glance.
RoboRescue is a third-person puzzle adventure for Bit1 competition 2024. It was made with Unreal.
My roles: I worked as a programmer in the project. My contributions included general gameplay programming as well as building a dialogue system for the game using Unreal Engine's behaviour trees.
Publications
Towards Understanding Waiting in Video Games
An article published in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.
Waiting is an everyday activity that is often present in video games. Waiting situations in games can take place during, for instance, loading screens, turn-based action, and cutscenes. Experiences of waiting can encompass a variety of emotions in players, such as anticipation, frustration, and boredom. Thus, understanding how waiting relates to players’ overall experience can be beneficial when designing or analysing games. However, academic discussion on waiting in games is quite scattered, and there is no comprehensive overview available on the subject. This paper contributes a semi-systematic literature review on the topic, augmented with a follow-up survey study. Based on the survey findings, we outline five perspectives from which waiting experiences can be analysed. These are 1) causes of waiting, 2) player goals for waiting, 3) player behaviour when waiting, 4) felt experience of waiting, and 5) player reasoning and decision-making. Our findings give an overview of sources of waiting in games and highlight that, in addition to affecting players' emotions, waiting is an aspect of gameplay that has an effect on players' decisions and behaviour.