Over this time, I have learned.

I have learned that we can make Othercastles even better. I want to make Othercastles an archive of inspiration – no matter what your interest must be. We need more heroes that pushes for naive thinking and clears the way for the fact that success is possible, no matter who you are or where you come from.

This is why we are taking our time to rebuild Othercastles.

What will happen:

We are rebuilding the sites design
We are inviting more amazing illustrators

How can I stay updated

Follow Othercastles on Facebook, Twitter, G+ and our newsletter.

When will we finish

We have an amazing designer and developer on our team. The site will be done in a very short time, but until then keep chasing.

The post The Rebuilding of Othercastles appeared first on Othercastles.

It’s no secret that bicycle helmets are often negatively viewed! By creating an aesthetically pleasing alternative – the sensor-sensitive collar Hövding have not only stirred up an existing market, but they may well have changed how we think about bicycle helmets forever.

We spoke to Terese Alstin, co-founder of Hövding, on her experience of taking this from merely a bold vision to a successful product sold worldwide.

Hövding bicycle helmet before and after photo: Hövding

Q: What was your inspiration behind Hövding?

A: It started out in 2005 as a master thesis project at the industrial design program in Lund (Sweden) for myself and my co-founder Anna Haupt.

The reason that we choose to work with a new type of helmet was due to the introduction of a new law in Sweden: making it mandatory for kids up to the age of 15 to wear bicycle helmets.

We didn’t know what to think of this as we had never used bicycle helmets ourselves and wondered what the outcome would be if the law was introduced for adults as well: in fact there was a big debate (in Sweden) as to whether or not to expand the law to the whole population. That was the trigger to push us to develop the new era of bike helmet.

“… when you’re doing something that is brand new and other people don’t think it can be done, they don’t necessarily have the whole insight or picture that you do”

The inspiration for the finished product came from both market research and interviews with cyclists. We talked to people and asked their thoughts on the traditional bicycle helmet and why they thought so few chose to wear them – As well as discussing what their ideal bicycle helmet in terms of design and function would be

That gave us a really good overview of the problems. So when someone said: “I would like an invisible helmet” – that was a great motivation because it sounded like the perfect solution.

Woman wearing a Hövding photo: Hövding

Q: Hövding attacked an almost untouched market, at least when it comes to innovation. How do you go about convincing people that Hövding is a legitimate and safe product?

A: When you develop something that is radically new, there will be a lot of skepticism. There are people who want to think that what you’re doing is impossible – sometimes even a bit provocative because we are two girls trying to change an industry.

We have definitely had our fair share of obstacles.

At the same time, it´s very much polarized because you gain a lot of fans. You need to surround yourself with the believers, so to speak and try not to listen too much to the naysayers.

“I think being an entrepreneur is being partly naive.”

Just remember, when you’re doing something that is brand new and other people don’t think it can be done, they don’t necessarily have the whole insight or picture that you do, so it’s very easy for people to just say no instead of being positive.

Some applaud new ideas right away, while others need more time to see the markets reaction and to see the product work. Then there are the people who will never change their minds because they think the existing products are good enough.

That’s OK, there’s definitely room in the industry for different products. We don’t need to reach everyone at once and it´s OK for people to get used to us before making their decision.

Co-founders Terese Alstin and Anna Haupt photo: Hövding

Q: When you create a new product, what is the process of finding the right market and launching the product?

A: I think being an entrepreneur is being partly naive. But it´s good to be a bit naïve! If someone said to us in 2005 that this would take 7 or 8 years to develop: we probably wouldn’t be standing here today!

You need to take it one step at a time and see one problem at a time – Don´t try to solve everything at once.

We have never looked so far ahead that we have been scared or intimidated by the complexity of the project. You just have to focus on one thing at a time.

For many years, we didn’t even know if it could work – from a technical point of view. But by just believing that it´s going to work: you start thinking in a new and more innovative way!

Q: For those out there that want to create something of their own, what are your best tips?

A: I think that it´s important to find the right team and you have to know that you can’t do everything on your own.

In the beginning, you’re so scared to talk about the idea because you’re afraid that someone is going to steal it away from you. You need to let people in, and you need to do it early – especially if you’re trying to develop something more complex.

Woman wearing a Hövding photo: Hövding

Surround yourself with the right kind of people. If you need funding, you need to find the right investors. If you need technical expertise, you need to find the right engineer. You need to understand what your big challenges are and focus hard to solve each puzzle as and when they pop up.

Also don’t listen too much to the skeptics. They will always be there and it´s really easy to be put down and start thinking that they might be right, it´s been a huge benefit for us to be two co-founders. That way, if one of us had a bad day, the other one had to be the positive one.

Q: How well has it gone since your launch?

A: It has been amazing; we´ve reached a lot of new countries within Europe. Next spring we will be in Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium and more.

Its been great to hear about people who’ve used the products and in turn survived crashes and accidents all thanks to Hövding! You can´t get a bigger motivator than that: I feel lucky to be a part of it and I truly think that I have the best job in the world!

The post Terese Alstin appeared first on Othercastles.

Noi Siamese 3 is tasked with the job of creating artwork that will last and be wanted for a lifetime! Having created his own unique style of tattooing he has not only become world renowned but also has 140 tattooing trophies to his name.

This is his story about how he has achieved so much and how other aspiring artist can too.

Noi Siamese 3 portrait (photo: Christine Wendelborg – wendelfoto.no)

Who are you, how long have you been tattooing and why did you end up tattooing?

I’m Noi Siamese a Tattoo artist living in Norway. I grew up in a poor family in Thailand and out of four kids I was the only one who attended school and university. I was given this opportunity as the smartest, maybe knowing this has helped me to work harder? I feel I owe it to my family to be a success.

I started learning to tattoo at the late age of 31. It started when I got my first tattoo. I’ve always been interested in art and majored in art at university but somehow I ended up in the tourist industry instead of continuing with it.

Noi Siamese tattooing (photo: Christine Wendelborg – wendelfoto.no)

After getting my first sleeve I went back to start the second one – it was done by traditional bamboo tattoo. About half way trough I stopped – I wasn’t happy with the work and decided that I could do better. That’s how I ended up on my search for a master who could teach me. I luckily found my master Sid Siamese who lived in Sweden at that time, every time he came back to Thailand he would teach me. At first I opened my own shop in Phuket – I had the money for the shop but not the knowledge, so I hired a tattoo artist and slowly learnt to tattoo from them as well as Sid Siamese. After some years I moved to Khao Lak and opened a shop there and ran it for some years before the Tsunami forced me to move to Hua Hin. This is where I met my former wife (from Norway) and the reason why I ended up here.

My first year in Scandinavia I worked mostly with Sid Siamese in Sweden, after a year I opened a small shop in Oslo, Norway. It was a real risk to take – but I believed that if I did good work people would start talking and the business would grow!

Noi Siamese tattooing (photo: Christine Wendelborg – wendelfoto.no)

What I didn’t know is how fast this would happen. I believe in hard work and work 7 days a week, 12 hours a day – I can safely say that I’ve worked hard to get where I am today and after just 1 year in my first shop I moved to a better and bigger location with space for 5 artists in Grünerløkka, Oslo. I still have it today and In addition to this I’ve just opened a new shop “1969 Tattoo Thailand” –

It’s always been a dream to open a big shop in my home country. I will still live and work in Norway but I’ll also spend 3months of the year working in Thailand: the rest of the time the shop in Thailand will be run by an amazing team of Tattoo artists.

Why have you chosen to do oriental style? Do you see oriental style as the greatest style for tattooing?

I started doing traditional Thai style tattoos and had a dream of becoming one of the most famous artists using this style. One problem with this style is that people outside of Thailand aren’t very familiar with it. I slowly moved towards the Japanese style, but with my own take on in – that’s why I don’t say that I do Japanese style – I do more of a new oriental style that’s inspired by Japanese and other Asian art. In the last year I’ve started mixing other things into my style – I’m open to changes and love to try other styles as well – but oriental is what I know best, and what people know me for: especially the strong colors I love to use in my work.

Full sleeve by Noi Siamese 3 (photo: 1969 Tattoo)

I have a couple of new projects in progress that aren’t oriental style – I´m really looking forward to finishing these to see how people react to me doing something different, and to see what they think about my work in other styles. But these won’t likely be ready until 2013/2014.

How important is it for you to stick to one type of style and should aspiring tattooist master one style or try to become great at multiple styles.

My style is Oriental and that’s what I’m known of – it wasn’t what I started with: I started with Thai style and moved onto Oriental style: this is, and will be my main style and what I specialize in. But when you do a lot of the same style, sometimes it’s an extra challenge to try others.

Noi Siamese tattooing (photo: Christine Wendelborg – wendelfoto.no)

I believe that an artist should focus on doing one style well and when he has mastered that: he should focus on that; if customers are willing he can experiment with other styles. You may have to try different styles on the road to finding “your” style. We all need variation in our work but there are probably only a few artists who are able to master multiple. Most good artist specialize in one style.

On the road to you being as good as you are – how much credit goes to your master and how much goes towards your own training?

I of course learnt and a lot from my master but if I’d been lazy: I would not be where I am today. A teacher can be good – but unless you want to learn, listen and practice on your own, you will not improve. Of course having a master and learning from someone is the way to go – but this doesn’t mean that it will be easy. But you will have someone to guide you on your way, sometimes you listen and take their advice and sometimes you have to follow your heart and do what feels right to you.

Full sleeve by Noi Siamese 3 (photo: 1969 Tattoo)

What are your tips to people who wants to be better at tattooing? How should they start off and how do they for example choose their gear?

First of all you need to be working in a studio with someone who has experience in the business. The worst thing that you can do is to think that you can do it on your own – it’s a tough business so a big advantage is having someone to learn from, not only the first year, but maybe even the first 5, you never stop learning.

Choosing gear is difficult as there’s a lot to choose from. It depends on what style you work in. You should always buy your equipment from reputable suppliers and not order copy supplies from China – especially not machines and colors. Order from the suppliers that follow the rules and regulations – not ones that you don’t know the contents of. Watching other reputable artists and seeing what they use is a good idea!

Noi Siamese tattooing (photo: Christine Wendelborg – wendelfoto.no)

Do you have any tips for where people can find resources on drawing, tattooing and the art in general?

For drawing you can pretty much draw inspiration from the Internet. You can use other people’s tattoos, photographs and other art as inspiration – but remember not to copy. Its one thing getting ideas and inspiration from others, but try to put your own twist on it. It’s not only more fun for you but also for your customer who will get an original tattoo.

When it comes to actually tattooing, this should only be done in a professional studio. It is illegal to tattoo in places that aren’t approved by the Norwegian health department in advance.

Noi Siamese 3 portrait (photo: Christine Wendelborg – wendelfoto.no)

What’s your ultimate goal as a tattooist?

I was really happy when I first opened my shop in Oslo, Norway and also when I started winning tattooing competition. One goal or dream I had that I set early on was to reach 100 trophies… I’m now up to over 140! Another dream was to open another shop in Thailand – and I just had the official opening in October 2012.

My next goals are now to try to get a trophy from other countries outside of Europe. I want to try to become better known in the USA, as well as around Asia and Australia. I hope to open a tattoo school in Thailand at some point in 2013 where I’m going to start a 1 year program for those who want to learn more about tattooing and possibly one day become tattoo artists themselves

My biggest wish is that people will remember me, and my work in the industry after I’m gone. It probably sounds stupid, but maybe if I work hard enough it will happen. I believe that by having goals you can reach for will help you to work harder. My biggest motivation for working hard and developing, is tattoo competitions – it’s kind of what drives me to work harder, just as an athlete would when working towards a sporting event.

The post Noi Siamese 3 appeared first on Othercastles.

With that said, Adam Atomic is no one-hit-wonder. As the creator of 15 games, collaborator on 17 and contributor on 13 it’s safe to say that Adam has a ton of experience. Experience that he´s unveiling right here.

I would like to start by finding out more about you, your age, where you’re from, where you work and what some of your most notable milestones are.

Sure, so I think I´m 30 years old now, It´s mattering less and less every year! I´m married and have a kid named Kinsley: he´s almost two years old and I´m expecting another child sometime this spring.

I live and work in Austin, Texas: I have my studio in our house in a kind of dedicated workspace, full of comic books, Street Fighter, drawing utensils and my laptop and headphones.

I tried to get a real game programming job when I graduated from college and failed pretty hard in that regard. So I started freelancing back in 2006, eventually I left my day job and went freelancing full time as a game designer and pixel artist.

I didn’t do anything that anyone had heard of until 2008 when I made a game named Gravity Hook, it was a web game that some people played or at least saw. About a year later in 2009 I made Canabalt, which a lot of people have heard of.

A couple of months prior to Canabalt coming out I did my first public release on my flash game framework Flixel: since then I´ve been working on iPhone and iPad stuff. I made a game for the Hunger Games show that was free for iPhone (iTunes link). Our new iPad game is coming out around the 10th of January. That’s a collaboration between myself, Greg Wohlwend and Scott Morgan who is an ambient musician and did all of the sound.

You´ve created a lot of games, Gravity Hooks as you mentioned before: Flixel and Canabalt to name but a few; have you always known that you wanted to make games? 

It’s something that I’ve been obsessed with for a really long time. Probably since I was 6yrs old, I actually found it really difficult when I was in the “achievement age”, I had some computer knowledge and wanted to build things, but I didn’t have a lot of ways to do it. I did a lot of modding on FTS games for years and years.

“I had some computer knowledge and wanted to build things, but I didn’t have a lot of ways to do it.”

That was the easiest way to do level design, to do artwork and put it in the game and see how it worked. I was never particularly good at it, but that was my first exposure to pixel art, level designs, 3D modeling and that sort of thing.

Now you can just go get Flash or Game Maker and make like a totally awesome game for free – its ridiculous.

Were your friends and family supportive of you being a game developer and do you think its easier now for those starting in video games to justify their career choice?

I think it’s much easier for small teams to make video games for a living right now. It´s probably close to 30 years since it was this easy to make video games as a small team and actually sell them.

Screenshot of Gravity Hook

But the technical barriers back then were even higher then, so it´s a really awesome to doing things.The only problem is because it’s so fast and easy and fun to make games now, relatively speaking of course, there are so many games out.

“If you just make a game that has a neat gameplay hook, that may not be enough”

It´s not traditional competition in a business sense, but there´s competition in both quality and for gaining peoples attention. It’s not enough to just make a video game anymore. If you just make a game that has a neat gameplay hook, that may not be enough. It´s gotta be something very special in order to stand out. That’s my sense of things.

Is that why you have chosen to do indie games instead of “mainstream” games? Do you think it´s better to work on an indie game? 

I think it depends on what your goals are, but there are definitely some strengths to working in a small studio or on a small game, you get to do things that you wouldn’t otherwise. You can take more risks and you have the freedom to use those risks to make something that will stand out – which to me is increasingly important.

To me, it feels like a lot of AAA games, although the quality is getting up, there´s a sense of convergence, or like a homogeneity where they all these real obvious distinctions. Quake and Unreal are extremely fast paced vs Medal of Honor which is slower and more tactical vs Half Lifewhich is a more narrative-based experience.

Image from medalofhonor.com

You could really see cynical that there are these meaningful variations within the genre, but especially at a AAA level, looking at the budgets and schedules they work on, there is an almost unavoidable kind of convergence where features and ideas and approaches.

I think the vast majority of your AAA action games are heading towards this string of pearls, set piece based Uncharted-style. When you’re doing that framework you do really, really cool and interesting things, but you’re also put in a kind of a box.

“… you can make things that are weird enough to make an impression on people”

It’s really hard to stand out and that is why I think you see big AAA publishers, having serious financial problems and shutting down. Indie has its own giant host of problems and tendencies to convergences, clichés and things like that, but one of it´s great strengths is definitely that you can make things that are weird enough to make an impression on people.

It also seems as though, contrary to the mainstream community: the indie game community is much closer and help each other. For example you having contributing on Fez, is the community knitted together or is it just for show in the public and you’re basically all on your own? 

I think it´s a little bit of both really. There´s the general sense of community and all the good and bad things that brings with it, its very natural for people who have like-minded tendencies to have a pre-established understanding of likes, dislikes and passions in a lot of ways.

Screenshot of FEZ

The thing that I love is that getting together with people who are in the game industry: I have an immense amount of respect for which is actually whatever they are indie or AAA; if we’re all hanging out, we almost never talk about video games, It´s always about other creative passions and interests for example: international politics, gourmet cuisine, sports, board games, books and movies – it almost seems as though being a passionate game developer is a good sign that this is somebody who is a veracious consumer of creative culture, a creative thinker who likes to make things, whether digital or otherwise.

So let´s say your starting off and making a new game. Is it important to be one of the community or can you do success without being in the core, lets say.

 I don’t think it hurts to have lots of friends who also make games, but it’s not by any means a necessity or a pre-requisite. I was certainly trying to build games and technology, not having much of a game centric community.

When I first went freelance, the online community that I was apart of was a pixel art specific community- which had some overlap with games, but very few were really interested in game design as a discipline and it was a really artistic, creative community.

The advantage that that had, and that communities like this still have, is that communities can give you real critical feedback and help you grow as an artist.

“I think it helps to move out of the bubble you’re in and into the wider world”

The classic example is that I grew up in a very small town, in the rural Midwest. The town was small enough that if you could use a computer at all, you were like some sort of computer genius.

In a way that was good, because you would get a lot of praise and a lot of encouragement to pursue this, but you would also get this skewed view of what was possible and what your peers in other, more challenging, or more educated environments were capable of doing and actively doing at the same time.

So in some point of every discipline, I think it helps to move out of the bubble you’re in and into the wider world and think “OK, I´m ready to step it up a notch, I need people to look at this and tell me what I can do and do it better”. Then the community of people who are activity are pursuing the same kind of feedback and pursuing the same kind of art form is a really positive thing to have the start of your sort of cultural ecosystem.

It seems like you hit the nail on finding your community, build a lot and fail and just work hard.

Yeah, and there´s a risk to any community becoming an echo chamber in a way, getting hung up on a single idea or discounting ideas from the outside, but in my experience, especially with the wider independent game communities having so many ideas, there are so many diverse view points and diverse people who are knowledgeable on the idea that communities can become a echo chamber that its been a really healthy thing to be a part of the last couple of years.

One of your games, Canabalt, had such a huge success and it´s really one of my favourite games which has brought me a lot of joy and sorrow. Were you alone on that project and how was the process of making that game?

Kyle Gray and Kyle Gabler revised the experimental gameplay project which was an old thing they used to do, and Kyle emailed me, brought it back to life in 2009 as something for the wider internet participating in, I emailed them right away to the original gameplay project to actually be pretty influential in the development of flixel and my own work on small games before Canabalt and I was like “Oh man, can I participate? This sounds great” and they where like “suuure” and randomly the first months that I was able to participate the theme for the sort of distributed game jam activity was minimalism.

“I started to think of a very simple game.”

A lot of my freelance work up until 2008 involved doing artwork for mobile phone games. One of the holy grails of traditional mobile game development was trying to make really intriguing games with very simple controls because the keypads on pre-touchscreen phones where horrible. So if you wanted to make a game that was gonna be successful on old traditional mobile phones, you really had to boil the controls down.

Screenshot of Canabalt

I definitely thought about games with simple screen controls for a long time, but I didn’t have anything in particular in mind, I had just replaced my broken NES and was playing some Super Mario 1 and watching speed runs and somewhere between those things came the idea of: This is the game where you keep running faster and your jumping across rooftops and its sort of like Gravity Hook; your just trying to run as fast as you can before you die.

I hacked together a really simple prototype. Just a little white box with some big, green boxes: occasionally you jumped through a window and that’s all really. I then went to this Swedish artist named Arne Niklas Jansson who did the artwork for a game called Cortex Command. Dan Tabar, the other developer on Cortex Command, lived in Phoenix and was on the road to other friends in the indie community that I was already friends with through random meetups.

Screenshot of Cortex Command

Nikolas was a huge inspiration for me and on the process of my art and how I think about game design now. But he rarely leaves Sweden, so I convinced him to leave Sweden and come work in Phoenix for a couple of weeks! We even held a game jam in honor of this strange foreign visitor.

It was a cheap, short flight from Phoenix at the time so I went out there and brought my prototype with me and made almost everything in Canabalt that weekend. And in that, there was this faithful conversation with one of the other guys named Steve Swing and we where talking about how he loved how I had this open ended design in where you where flying through space, kinda big warship approaches you, you could say “wow, I´m not ready for this” and you could fly of to a different quadrant of space and find an easier challenge.

“If you wanted to write an article about Canabalt for your blog, you didn’t have to go get a press kit.”

It seemed like it would break the game, but in fact it made the game really fantastic, interesting and accessible. We were trying to figure out how you could do something in a game that had a structure like gravity hook and what you do to enable the player to choose to do sure challenge level and really put it in a transic built in way. That’s where Canabalt sort of react in a city came from.

How does a game succeed, despite it being a good game? Is it by luck, or use by followers?

It depends on the situation your in. For Canabalt, I didn’t really do anything. I just submitted it to the Experimental Gameplay, as was expected if you were a participant in the workshop that month. I also posted it on TIGSource forumswhere I’d met a lot of people in the indie scene that I´m still friends with now, but that was it. I really didn’t do anything else.

“You don’t have to give anything to the game before the game starts giving back to you”

It kinda spread on its own and I think a big part of that is basically luck, but something I strongly believe in, is that it doesn’t waste you to much time. When you start playing it, you press one button and there´s a guy jumping out of the sky scraper and glass falling out everywhere with cool music. The game is just going. You don’t have to give anything to the game before the game starts giving back to you. I think that something that is really important.

Usually you refer that as a “generous design”, and I think that’s really important in general.

The other advantage that I think Canabalt has is, it’s also an advantage that a lot of 2D games have, is that it´s fairly difficult to a bad screenshot of Canabalt. The game is cinematically framed in a deliberate way for gameplay purposes, so most screenshots kinda look cool. It wasn’t in the design plan, but I´m suspicious it helps the game spread. If you wanted to write an article about Canabalt for your blog, you didn’t have to go get a press kit. You can hit play, take the screenshot, write two paragraphs and throw in a link and you have an article about Canabalt.

Last question: Is it possible to beat Canabalt?

Absolutely not! Theoretically there´s a kill state. I haven’t done the math on it, but you have to be on the same run for weeks if not months.

It will eventually break, but no one has done it.

Illustration: Mijowi

The post Adam Atomic appeared first on Othercastles.

This project has been a long time in the making. When you start to notice just how many inspiring people there are in the world, each doing their own amazing things OR each with their own truly amazing story. You start to realise that if we can learn just a sum of what they do: then we would see the world in a truly amazing way.

The goal is to allow you to get an insight into how your role models have made it, thus allowing you to follow in their path to success, there are no boundaries as to where you can learn from: be it from music, technology or photography meaning that you able to take something away from every one of our interviewees.

“To build a castle, one should see how their successfull peers have built theirs”

The main purpose of these interviews is to understand how you can best achieve your goals in life, in essence: this is your free ticket to awesomeness.

To help you receive the full impact of our amazing interview, each interview will have its own custom illustration made by the very talented Mijowi

We release new interviews on a weekly basis, to make sure that you don’t miss out: why not subscribe to our newsletter in order to get the latest interviews straight to your inbox.

To build a castle, one should see how their successfull peers have built theirs.

Illustration: Mijowi

The post Welcome to Othercastles appeared first on Othercastles.