Katariina Ruotsalainen

I have worked in the game industry since 2018 in various visual roles, including user interfaces, 2D and 3D graphics, marketing materials, animations, and particle effects.

It is important to me that visual elements not only look good, but also have meaning. I especially enjoy designing characters and environments and telling stories through visual elements. I am interested in what makes an object quickly identifiable and how far its visual style can be pushed while still remaining recognizable and becoming something unique.

I enjoy working across different media and adapting my visual skills to each situation. My work focuses mainly on digital environments, but in my free time I sometimes work with acrylic paints or experiment with a 3D printer. I also enjoy working with more traditional graphic design and am developing my skills in animation and video production.

Wanderwild is a digital world for children that includes therapy exercises as part of a fun game. The child chooses a character and explores world completing tasks that help them learn skills through play. Whether it's collecting items or helping other characters on their adventures, the game makes it fun to keep playing and rewards them as they improve.

I was in charge of designing and animating all the 3D characters and objects. My goal was to make everything fun, colorful, and easy for kids to recognize. When I joined the project, there were just a few placeholder models to demo basic functionalities, so I got to build the whole visual style from the ground up over six months.

As the only game artist on the team, I handled everything from start to finish: modeling, texturing, rigging, and animating. It was a big learning experience, especially since this was my first project where I was fully responsible for the animation as well.

Fortune Farm is a fun and colorful match-3 puzzle game where players solve levels to restore a lively farm, meet quirky characters, and unlock new areas. The game mixes classic puzzle mechanics with story progression and environment customization.

I joined the team to support the lead artist with 3D modeling. I created various game objects and characters based on concept art or my own designs. I also worked on VFX for both 3D and 2D environments, and created some background images for dialog scenes.

Working on this project was a great learning experience and I had a lot of fun improving my 3D and VFX skills in Blender and Unity. Adapting to another artist’s style was a rewarding challenge that helped me see visual design from a fresh perspective.

Photography has been a long-time hobby of mine, occasionally also part of my work. I enjoy shooting documentary-style images of nature, animals, and everyday moments. Pet photography is my favorite, especially when I can combine it with everyday storytelling and capture pets in their own familiar environments.

FilmFellow is an application where users can find information about movies, give ratings and reviews, and get recommendations based on their activity. This project was developed as an agile project for Buutti Trainee Academy.

Our minimum viable product included three user types (visitor, user, admin), user login and registration, movie search and filters, movie recommendations, saving watched movies, creating watchlists, and reviewing movies. We met these goals and even had time to add extra features.

My main responsibilities included visual design, responsiveness, usability, and working with Sass. I also worked a lot on the frontend components and learned testing with Vitest/Cypress and handling a PostgreSQL database with Prisma ORM.

Learning Next.js after using React took some time, but I grew to like it. I enjoyed designing and programming reusable components and CSS classes, which made building page layouts easier. This project got me interested in testing and made backend development less intimidating.

Project Management App is a multiuser application featuring a rich text editor, Kanban board, and calendar. It was developed as an agile group project for Buutti Trainee Academy.

Our minimum viable product included user registration and login, managing projects and pages, and adding various components like text and task lists. Users can label and move items within and between task lists. Additionally, projects can be shared with different access roles, such as Manager, Editor, and Viewer.

In this project, I focused on visual design, responsiveness, learning Tailwind and creating frontend components. I also contributed to manual testing and bug fixing to ensure a smooth and polished user experience.

This was my first project working as a programmer in a team of multiple developers. Besides developing my technical skills, I also learned about Scrum, Git, reviewing pull requests, and the importance of good communication and teamwork.

NoteNook is a simple planner that helps you organize your notes, to-dos, and memos all in one place. You can search or filter your tasks with fun icons and view all current month‘s deadlines in a calendar.

When I started this project, I had very limited knowledge of different frameworks and libraries, so I worked with what I had. It was my first web development project for Trainee Academy, and I wanted to create something fun and colorful that I could use myself!

NoteNook was built using TypeScript with React, and it uses JSON server as a simple backend. The layout is styled with pure CSS. The login and registration features were added towards the end of the project and do not have session handling, so you need to log in again if you refresh the page.

I plan to redo this project now that I have a better skillset and more knowledge. I aim to use a real database and implement user sessions, making it possible for multiple users to utilize the planner better.