Discover the journey of Energy Audit 2, an educational mobile game created by three trainees—Jessica, Alma, and Samuli—during their internships at the Helsinki XR Center, under the umbrella of SKILLBILL Project. Through their experiences, they share the challenges, solutions, and personal growth that came with crafting 3D visuals, coding dynamic dialogue systems, and designing intuitive interfaces. Explore how teamwork and creativity turned a learning concept into an engaging game.
Text by Jessica Kivi, Samuli Haltimo and Alma Hoque
Hi, I’m Jessica Kivi and I currently study 3D-animation and -visualization at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences. At the start of summer 2024 I landed an internship at Helsinki XR Center as a 3D artist and Energy Audit 2 was the first project I got to work on.
In short, Energy Audit 2 was aimed as an introductory mobile game, for students who are going to be learning about installing solar panels. The game briefly goes over the whole process, from picking the right materials to inspecting the site for installation. After completing the game, the player should have a general view of the timeline and needed steps for the installation. Energy Audit 2 is a sequel to Energy Audit 1, which targets teaching students how to conduct an energy audit in a company.
Energy Audit 2 development team.
This project was carried out by a team of 3 interns. At the start of the project, it was just me as a 3D and 2D artist and Samuli Haltimo as a coder. Later, Alma Hoque joined us as an UI artist.
Let’s start planning!
We started by dissecting the script and mapping out what needed to get done. Regarding art, I laid out the scenes and wrote down needed assets to get a good look of the overall picture and to see what I needed to be prioritized. Since we only had 3 months to make the game, I had to be very meticulous with how I used my time: not all ideas were possible in the given time, and I had to get creative with my resources. A huge timesaver was the fact that visually I could reference Energy Audit 1, so there was no need to make a style guide or think about color palettes.
Scene layout: pink boxes represent 2D backgrounds and everything with a green background is a possible 3D scene.
Optimization first, when making 3D assets
I used Autodesk Maya 2025 for 3D modeling, since I have the most experience with that program. Like any 3D scene where there will be multiple assets, getting the scale correct is important. Making a block out helps with this and quickly highlights if there are any big issues with how the models work together visually. At this point I also began to think about how the tools and materials would be best presented in the game and if there was a need for any other assets.
This was the first time that I got to make a mobile game, and I knew that keeping optimization in mind throughout the whole process was key. The goal was to make the models very lowpoly so every added polygon needed to be intentional, and details would be achieved with textures. I found this to be challenging, but also a great learning experience.
First picture is the rough block out and in the second one are the final models.
All the tools and construction materials got unique textures that were fit together to best use up texture map space and to save up memory. This used up quite a significant amount of time and meant that I needed to work quicker with the other 3D assets. Other addons, like shelves and the workbench, were using seamless textures to speed up the process and to keep texel density uniform, which was important since there was a lot more surface area to cover. For the unique textures I worked with Substance Painter and for the seamless textures I used Photoshop, which has a great feature to preview seamless patterns in real time.
A unique texture map that has pliers, a drill and a sledgehammer in it. Two seamless textures and one trim texture that were used for the workbench.
After modeling and texturing I headed over to Unity to import all the assets and to construct the environment. Again, I had to bear in mind that this was going to be run on mobile phones, meaning that I had to keep an eye on the patch count. In practice, this meant that all the lights had to be baked, and the scenes needed to be kept relatively simple. This was also the first time for me to be using glTF file format for importing things into Unity, and I can wholeheartedly say that it was a very stressful but rewarding learning curve.
Finished Unity scenes with baked lights. First one is of the tools and the second one is of the construction materials.
Tie it in with 2D
I left most of the 2D art to be done last, since it was the easiest to time crunch. For the 2D backgrounds I worked in Krita and focused on making quick progress, which meant that there was no time for revisions. I lifted colors from backgrounds and characters in Energy Audit 1, which sped up the process. This also ensured that the look would be coherent, when the backgrounds would be used up against the Energy Audit 1 characters that we were reusing in this game. I also partly reused backgrounds from Energy Audit 1, by drawing over them in my style that matches the rest of the game.
The upper images show a screenshot of Energy Audit 1 and how I repurposed the background by making it in my style. The lower images are from Energy Audit 2 and show the overall 2D style of the game.
Not only did the 2D elements need to match, but also the shape design needed to be lucid with the 3D renders. In this part of creating the game art, I think it was especially beneficial that there was only one artist. Going back and forth between the 2D art and the 3D scenes, to make them visually pleasing and to ensure that they worked together, went fast because there was no need to explain the vision between multiple artists.
Process pictures of how one of the scenes came together. The first one is a Maya render, the second one has the added 2D background and some touch ups on contrast and saturation. The final one is a screenshot from the game with the characters and UI on top.
Final thoughts
All in all, this was a very interesting project and I’m very proud of what we were able to produce as a team in the given time. I feel my skills in both technical and on planning level improved immensely, mostly due to the time constraints and the target platform being mobile. This project was a great introduction to the internship and has me excited for new projects to come!
Now over to Samuli, who tells us about coding…
Hey, I’m Samuli Haltimo, a game developer intern at Helsinki XR Center. I’m currently studying game development at Metropolia and expect to graduate early next year. For this project, I was responsible for both code design and development. My work built on the foundation laid by Ville Varhala, who had developed the code for the prequel in this two-part game series. This game focused heavily on narrative and player-driven dialogue choices, so much of my time was dedicated to managing the dialogue database.
Dialogue System and LUA integration
To handle the dialogue, we used a specialized plugin, which offered a built-in interface for database management. The plugin utilized LUA, so I learned a lot about LUA scripting and integrating it with C#. Although the plugin provided useful tools, it could be somewhat cumbersome to work with at times. I’m fairly certain we could have created a cleaner codebase by building our own dialogue system, as the plugin imposed some unusual limitations—such as restricting parameter types, which prevented us from passing actions or non-double numbers to functions called from the dialogue. This caused quite a few challenges, especially in certain levels where these restrictions led to unexpected issues.
Two examples of complex dialogue structures: some nodes contain embedded code, adding to the logic’s abstract and layered nature.
In this image, I expose specific functions to LUA, allowing them to be called directly from within the dialogue.
Learning and Collaboration
Overall, the project progressed smoothly, and collaborating with Jessica and Alma was seamless. This project was a valuable learning experience for me, especially in understanding the importance of thorough game testing. Fortunately, we had ample time and enthusiastic volunteer testers, which led to the discovery of an impressive number of bugs. I’m glad we had the time to polish the game and ensure a high-quality experience for players.
And last but not least Alma tells us about the UI process..
Hello I’m Alma Hoque and I came to the rescue a little bit later into this project. At Helsinki XR Center I am known as the UI master but I do work with anything 3D/2D related. I started as a 3D artist trainee in January 2024 and ever since I have had the opportunity to enhance my skills in such amazing projects, one of them being Energy Audit 2.
I was focusing mostly on UI elements and designing info cards was one of the many UI elements I did. My design process involved drafting the actual visuals in Adobe Illustrator and gathering everything to Photoshop and then importing UI assets to Unity. As a little perfectionist I would’ve wanted to redesign also the reused UI elements from Energy Audit 1, because they were not aligned style wise with the new UI elements. Unfortunately, we had a limited amount of time on our hands so compromises were made.
Here are some early drafts from the info cards in Photoshop among other UI elements that I got to design. On the right side you can see the before and after pic for one UI panel that I designed.
In general, I am happy that I got a chance to work on this project and have such an amazing team working together and always ready to give me feedback whenever I needed it. Truly amazing work from both Samuli and Jessica. And a big appreciation to everyone that was involved.
Key Stakeholders and Collaboration
SKILLBILL is a three-year project (01/09/2022-31/08/2025) supported by the European Union within the framework of the Horizon Europe programme. Its main objective is to enhance training and education across various sectors to address the evolving skill needs in the renewable energy sources (RES) field.
SKILLBILL is supported by a network of partners from 7 European countries, whereby each partner has important and specific roles. Metropolia University of Applied Sciences and its subsidiary – Helsinki XR Center (HXRC) have a main contribution in WPs 4 and 5.
SKILLBILL is a collaboration of:
To see previous news about our trainees’ projects, head over to the Trainee news section.
Follow us on social media for more posts: Facebook | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram