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Livin' With The Sims
theAntiELVIS explores the wild and wacky world that is Will Wright's The Sims, asking the inevitable quesiton, "is The Sims the first step toward a virtual life where everyone is Swedish?"

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Josh Vasquez on Omikron: The Nomad Soul.

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Sumaleth: What happened next?

Joachim: Myself and 11 others at Funcom left to make our own company called Dimaga. But, unfortunately the game dream never came through because no one would buy our game. It was too old fashioned (3D games were beginning).

Sumaleth: How much of the game did you make?

Joachim: Actually almost everything. All the animation was done and a lot of the backgrounds. But of course there was a lot of gameplay tweaking left to be done.

Sumaleth: Is that where the blue girl with the tubular hair comes from (there's lots of pictures of her on your page)?

Joachim: No, that was our first concept at Innerloop. We wanted do do some sort of modern version of Space Harrier but with bigger gameplay. But, as it happens in the game business, the ideas never became a concrete game.

Sumaleth: Ah, so Innerloop happened when Dimaga didn't work out?

Joachim: Yes, Innerloop is a merging of two different teams that broke away from Funcom. So, now we work for Eidos doing one game, and for Sega with another.

Sumaleth: Things have been going well for Innerloop then?

Joachim: Actually, it's going very well.

Sumaleth: What have you worked on at Innerloop and what is your current project?

Joachim: Well, after the lady-alien-game thing we decided to follow the 1st person military shooter wave :).

Sumaleth: Well, why not, everyone else is :).

Joachim: Yes, and it sells too :). But our game has many very original aspects in it. We are also doing an Extreme sports game which I'm doing animations for.

Sumaleth: You're actually doing some 3D modeling and animation for the Military game too aren't you? Do you enjoy doing 3D animation as much as 2D?

Joachim: Probably more so. I love doing 3D animation - it's actually easier to focus on the movement more than when drawing lines. I love doing 3D objects and textures too, especially characters since it's great fun drawing draperies, faces, and muscles. Also, the creativity of making original characters with personality is always a great challenge.

Sumaleth: Is the 1st person game (working title is "Project IGI") more like Quake or Rogue Spear? Or somewhere between?

Joachim: More like Rouge Spear I believe. (There are no aliens) Or, maybe GoldenEye?

Sumaleth: Is it action or strategy based gameplay primarily?

Joachim: More strategy but I think there's a bit of both.

An early sketch for the cover illustration (52k).

Sumaleth: Lets go back to 2D art now; with the loonygames cover this week you've returned to the finely-rendered artwork style that you left behind all those years ago, did you find it fun?

Joachim: Yes! (Since you and many others said you were disappointed that I've stopped detailing my pictures I thought I would do it for the challenge :)

Sumaleth: Now that you've tried it again do you think you might do more work in this style?

Joachim: Well, I think people expect me to :). Actually, it's really fun and as long as there is motive I'd like to continue doing detailed pictures for a while.

Sumaleth: How did you approach drawing the cover? Was it all done in Photoshop?

Joachim: Yes. Originally I started doing a "fantasy" dragon drawing on paper which I started to brush in PShop, but I have always found dragons extremely boring to draw so I thought I wanted something more refined. Then I came to think of the only thing I remember from Origin's games (since I'm not an RPG fan) - those three magicians, or whatever they were, which I found pretty cool.

Sumaleth: Who are your favorite artists? Are you still influenced by other people’s art these days or have you found your own style?

Joachim: I'm very influenced by other artists in the way of inspiration but, actually, I have no favorite artist. At least not that live today. But if have to say someone, then maybe Moebius, because of his imagination, and Michelangelo, because of the heavy lines in his humans.

Sumaleth: Thanks! You can find a ton of Joachim's work at Joachim's Place (check out that crazy disco action), including drawings, screensnaps from games he's worked on, and some 3D game animation, and to find out more about Innerloop and the games they are working on, follow through here.