Venture Cup

I want to talk a little bit about Venture cup which is one of my main focuses right now. I am a very busy person right now as I work full time to support my family, some kind of part time because it is fun and I find smelly memories is a project which should be made!

Any how I am busy working on the business plan for Venture cup, and I believe I have a fairly good chance to be successful. The biggest problem in my business plan is that I am not by far done with the financing or team. Those happen to be quite important parts in this competition but I think that with the right motivations it could very well be fine. (motivation in this case would be proving I have solutions for it).

It is a pretty thorough work and one reason for doing it is because it gives me a great incentive to get the business plan done within a time-frame. The good thing is that I can get help in some parts form Startup Stockholm which is a great resource, but I am waiting with it because I still have things I can and want to get done before doing so.

I have also created a color scheme to use for my company, I am still working on the gold-color but I am pretty happy with it. I believe that the devil is in the details as they say,  and I am keeping the color scheme throughout my business plan, and it is also why this blog post has got some new colors. I am also going to try to update the blog to follow the scheme.

Teh palette as is.

The competition deadline is 5 April so I will hopefully have great news lining up after that date!

In sickness and in health

Hi there,

Really a lot to do at work, some to do at the extra project and had some sickness in family. I have also worked on my business plan and it's moving along. I am focusing on getting the business plan ready for venture cup since that could really make a world of difference in moving forward. Further I am going to book a meeting at Stockholm startup and apply to the almi mentor program.

I am looking at Nordic game conference but it is a secondary goal, since I still don't have a company or money in said company. Perhaps I am going to wait with that type of conferences until the company is set up.

Starta företag dagen

Sorry to those of you not fluent enough in Swedish to understand today's heading. To make it easy I'll do my best to translate: "starting business day".

Ok maybe I could have done better but there you go. So why am I throwing it out there? Well because I attended it yesterday. The day before I were at the dentist -_-.

More or less all instances which help out when companies start in Sweden had a representant there talking about the basics or bare essentials. Much of it were repetition for me but it really were quite rewarding! I met some interesting people and I also had the chance to talk to some of the representatives from the authorities.

I had really one thing I wanted to take with me and that was to leave feeling motivated and having some new ideas of steps to take. (ok you all know it they never expect the Spanish inquisition!) And I did, I really did. I hadn't thought about it but some of the helping organizations represented and I feel that I have a much clearer view of what I want to do now. Which basically is that I want to participate in Ventrue Cup, I want to get guidance and go to seminars and meet people. And I want to get a mentor from Almi.

All really traditional stuff. But really there is help to get I can't talk for other countries but here we do have a lot of help to make use of, and for me I am self conscious and I feel super afraid to talk to all these powerful people getting feedback on my ideas and so on. I am really scared that they will say that it's not good or that I am way off in my thoughts, calculations and so on.

So I am working on and my businessplan and I am focusing on getting my elevator-pitch in shape so that I can proudly say: "This is what I am doing!" with confidence. It might seem silly but I find this super difficult, not because I don't believe in the idea, but because I am insecure in myself (not my ability but in my person). I have a lot to work on in this department, because I know that I have some really fantastic ideas and I don't want to waste it on being insecure.

So I am currently trying it out, I am telling people my idea and trying to lay the self consciousness aside and I have only been met by ovations, so soon I will be ready to talk to those scary people about it with confidence as well.

In the end if there is one thing I've learned in my life it is that mostly you'll only regret not doing things and to become something you really need to see yourself in that position to be able to get there. (and ruthless efficiency!). So, fake it until you make it.

Planning a business

As of late there's been a lot of things moving around, no news is good news I guess you could argue. Mainly I've been busy at work and the spare time I've mustered has gone into business planning. If you have planned for a business or otherwise know how it works you probably are familiar with business plan and budget.

Those are what I am currently working on and what is taking most of my energy and time. The business plan is coming along and I would like to have a draft to bring next week when I am attending a seminar for start ups. The budget I am being a bit more modest with finishing as it is a really difficult task, which takes a lot of time, best guesses and keeping your vision anchored in both directions. It would be easy to make both a failing and a winning budget on paper. The difficult thing is to make a well weight budget which you actually do believe in. First of all I believe that a three copy system is more or less needed in order to get close to that. The three copy system would constitute one budget where you look at the worst case and what you have to do to make it work, the average case where you see it realistic to end up and a good case where you would exceed your expectations.

The difficult thing about the business plan is to get into word the ideas filling up your head and making it without writing too much around the topic. What you ultimately want is a document which people actually want to read and which will deliver a crystal clear image of your vision. This is hard, it wont just happen it will mean a lot of rewrites, refinements and pure labor to get it done. The upside is that probably you will start out with a pretty good view of your vision and as you write more about it you will find new angles and ideas, some of them you will pick up on, work on and integrate into your vision while things that seemed like a good idea when starting out actually doesn't work when you look closer.

There we go that's some thoughts on it all, hopefully I am starting to refine soon, I still feel like I am in an initial creation phase where I am edging out the idea little by little. I am still trying to ignore too much language-related editing and layout, (which I think we've established is difficult to a stickler!), but getting there. I feel secure that I can bring a printed copy for my seminar even if it doesn't feel good enough it will have most all of the content.

Extra post!

Just when I am taking a step back I wrote this little "thinking out loud" type of discussion about network and how to reach answers to difficult to estimate type of questions.

So, I would like to know who you are? Please do make a comment answering these questions:

Who are you?
Why are you reading here?
Will you read more of what I write?
Is there something you would like me to know?
How can I help you finding value in reading this blog?

That's all, cookie to the once answering! (metaphorical for now, could well render a physical cookie at some point in time that has futuristic characteristics)

Community and network

I find it interesting to "analyse" how community or network can change the rule-set. And not only your network of known nodes, but your network in the bigger picture. I mean if you are interested in opening up a kiosk there is a lot of knowledge around you.

First of all you may have someone running something similar in your network, you can ask a lot of questions from this person. If you ask an entrepreneur how many customers they have per day and similar questions they will know. Why? Because they have done a business-plan for their business, they know pretty well their market and it is the numbers they use for their own business.

So then it's super important to know someone which runs a similar business? No, actually not, or that is not really true, the better answer is: "You already do". In this example we are looking at a one-to-one service sale, by service sale I mean that it's more an administrative, meaning no one is actively selling. It is different in other business but generally if you want to sell stuff to people you do know someone with a business. In Sweden we have Pressbyrån in more or less every subway station, you probably have some 7eleven, or the equivalent in your country around the next corner. If you aren't a patron of these stores perhaps you visit some coffee-shop or other lunch restaurant. My point being is that you probably do visit some place regularly enought so that you feel secure enough to ask: "May I ask you, how many people do you have on average per day?" It's more or less all you need. So let's summarize: You can get an answer to this type of questions if you find someone to ask.

Sounds simple enough right? Well it is, and in all honesty to keep the entrepreneurial mind happy, at least I need inspiration every day, I need visions of my venture coming alive and one great way to do so is to talk about it, to think about it, to talk about stuff related to it. I listen to a pod-cast produced by Venture Cup. It keeps me inspired.

Quite short and specific thoughts on network and lack thereof, all I am really saying is that seeing people and asking questions is a great way to both keep engaged and a great way to gain knowledge which is otherwise hard to get by. One of the most difficult things is to find specific information about prices, so go to someone having a similar business, ask what they pay ask from whom they buy, and bring a notebook because odds are that you will be getting answers!

What I've done is that while working on my business-plan and budget I have a to-do list where I constantly put anything down which I need answered, then I find someone which can answer the questions and this way I can do a much more thorough market research. *I hope*

Thanks for reading, and do share :)

weekly updates

As the heading indicates, I am going to try for weekly updates. I guess that if you have read anything I've written you know that I tend to get pretty wordy. I love writing and I have a lot of thoughts and ideas which I want to communicate. But at this point I've felt like updating daily is more a chore that I need to do rather than something inspiring and any time I start writing I tend to spend more time than I really would like. I will try to make an update a week for now and see how that feels.

I have heard the idea that you should always write something every day on your blog even if it's just one line. That was the reason that I started off doing that, but I also believe that you need to listen to yourself in most everything you do. At this point in time I feel that it would help me utilize my time and energy more effectively and hopefully it would also lead to better content here, if I published once a week instead of every day. So let's do the listening thing and see how that feels.

I have spent much time the last couple of days actually visualizing my ideas and it's not too shabby! I really have a quite clear view of what I want to do now, I am working on my business plan and it's coming together and I am starting on writing my budgets. So perhaps something is already happening? As soon as I have those parts together I am moving on to the next steps. I have some ideas of what I want to do but I am not sure about the details. But one of the things I want to do is finding a mentor to really get down into the idea and talk about the values and pinpoint the entrepreneurial nerve through the years to come. I have decided to try for the mentor program at Almi which would be a great help.

Anyhow, those things are still a bit further into the future.

Keeping inspired, keeping busy, or simply heart and brain.

Big difficult questions. And to wrap it: is it worth the engagement, and why?

Those questions are questions I answer every day. Some days the first question is a week yes other days a strong yes. Some days it is a glorious super strong unquestionable yes. I still haven't had the situation where my stomach sais no. Good sign so far, but there is a long way to go and the question will be asked many times yet.

The why is also a moving target but not as much. Basically "I want to" is the simple answer and the one I will settle for at this for now. But to make it even easier the answer is "because I am saying yes to the first question".

Today I woke up super inspired and got a lot of good work done. I wrote a lot and visualized a scenario and my stomach were actually tingling from the practice. Usually I am very inspired when I have slept well and it's one of the most relevant factor to my inspiration.

As long as I keep answering these two questions in a positive manner I am pretty sure that I am also going to write here.

Phew

I have had a couple of tough days, many meetings and stuff. However I have at the same time had a lot of thought about entrepreneurship and the difficulties involved. I mean there are so many questions, so many uncertainties, so many dependencies and in it all you are all alone.

...or are you? I mean yes in many ways it certainly feels like that, but really you aren't or at least you don't have to be. I've been listening through many of venture cups pod-casts and first of all it is super inspiring. But secondly I realize how many people which did succeed had much worse prerequisites than I do. I know so much about a huge number of (development related) industries, I have already started companies and I do know pretty well how the steps look.

So that is something for sure, I stopped to ask myself what it is that I am really afraid of, the obvious answer is that there is no money, for a long time money would be tight, but again does it have to? I mean I am already doing this in many ways. I can't really see how I can get from the point where I am today to the point where I put the key in the lock and for the first time enter my new business. But there are multiple questions popping up right now. Do I need to vision that right now? Do I need to understand that? Can I still get there even if I don't know it today? and so on, and so on. (to quote my old Amiga which in itself would be the reason I fell in love with programming).

Anyhow, let's get back to that point about being alone and elaborate briefly. I feel alone in many ways, I do have the understanding and support from my wife so I am already not alone. She knows better than anyone the idea and still said: yeah, this would be cool!

So I will wrap this now as I have to put the kid to bed and I don't want to leave it unpublished. It all boils down to getting a mentor. That is what I want. Someone who understand business (even better than me). That I can talk to about the details.

Another thing that hit me is that listening to the venture cup pod-casts and the interviews with entrepreneurs I felt: "I want to get there, I want to be the person I listen to". I realized that nothing is really stopping me, I can act like it is so, delve into my idea and my business to be and just let it happen. If it turns successful and the wheels are turning then fine, if not well I haven't really lost anything at this point. So I am compiling a list of things I would do to further myself in that direction. Among the points on the list you will find: "Get a mentor", "talk to someone which has walked the path before me" and other thing. Now the kid is waiting, so talk more later! Share, and follow, talk to me!

Skipping single-player campaigns?

I never really loved the whole multi-player or competitive scene, or claimed. When I played games quite actively I mainly played two genres, jrpgs and platformers. I did on occasion play other games but the idea of first-person was just repulsive to me. And yes I actually mean that literary I hated fps. As the genre grew it became more and more popular with a strong multi-player mode and soon enough this were done over the Internet. I didn't care much about it and instead I played most every jrpg on the PlayStation. 

Then there came mmorpgs which actually tickled my interest and after resistance for some time I tried world of warcraft and played for years. Today I still love a great story, gameplay and general feeling of a game but I am not estranged to multi-player, esports and the likes it might just not be what I prefer playing myself.

On to the point, I've read some debate on dropping the single-player campaign in games which actually aren't even designed for one. Games like starters battlefront and the rest of the battlefield franchise, and games like that which obviously are designed for multi-player. I believe that it's super reasonable if anything it might ensure some well needed quality control (which in itself is a topic of discussion).

So wouldn't it be natural that games like starcraft, battlefield, cod and so on may well skip single-player? Actually no, many players feel ripped of without a single-player mode. I wonder why, just legacy or is there a need unfilled when leaving out single-player? I will leave those as open questions because I don't really have an answer. If we look at it the other way it's been popular to try and cram some multi-player elements into games which is obviously designed as single-player games.

Such as xenoblade chronicles x where there are elements put in which in ways help the gameplay but in many regards I believe it give the feeling that there were a meeting where some executive (it's always some executive! ;)) said: "ok, kids today like multi-player we need online options figure it out". Perhaps I am misinformed and mainly cynical.

Anyhow I feel excited about the growth in competitive gaming, speed running and the lets-play culture. I will talk more about let's play later since it's a fun topic.

Goals

I realized that I don't really have any achievable goals. Might seem strange or faulty buy really I am finding myself in a situation where I'm setting up for a  gnome business  with a "step 2: ..." situation.

So, this must be addressed before I can do anything else really. This means a couple of things:

1. I need good music and A.C.T's Circus Pandemonium is as good as it gets so all set.

2. Planning for lunch so that I have about one hour where I know I will have the time to think. Done I guess.

3. Outlines for what I actually need to decide before I have goals. This will be the focus of this post and the post will act as garbage in order to actually get the ideas down. (see what I did there?)

So what do I need to have in order to have goals? I need short term, mid term and longterm goals. Simple right? I will also define the vision into text and that'll be that!

However let's delve a bit deeper.

How can one make short term goals?
These are actually kind of sweet because they are really measurable, bit depending on time span of course. So let's here and now come up with a time span:

per month?
I feel that per month is to long for short term. Working only some of hour every day I am afraid that it might be goals forgotten rather than goals meet. So let's try again with that in mind:

Per day?
Woh that's too often for sure, as I said I only ever have the odd hour to put in every day so to have a goal to achieve might just make the pressure choke me. However I kind of already utilize that goal as I try to write here every day. However I've actively looking at it more as a chore than a goal as calling it a goal put pressure on it and every day I don't write it would be a straight up failure and we can't have that and hope to make progress.

So instead let's go for a per week approach. This may well be changed but now we have something to work with!

What about mid range goals? I guess some reasonable ideas would be quarters as the obvious, however again I feel that thoughts followup is preferable in this case. So I've settled for months. Could argue that a bi-monthly approach might be nice and it has some validity but I've chosen to go with monthly as it put some additional pressure on progress which I want.

Long term however I am going the other way with and saying loosely "in a couple of years I am seeing the business...". The reason for that is mainly because it allows for agility. I mean that I find it hard to say the goal this coming 6 month, or this coming year is... And by saying in X years this is what I want to achieve.

So let's start out simple and set the goals for this week. I have already an idea for the months which is to have the first draft for the business plan. Next month might well be the complete businessplan but I won't go as far as deciding that. However there we go I just created the month-goal for February 2016, which is to have the full draft with all information constituting the business-plan. phew that feels good! So this weeks goal is to finish up part of that. I am making use of the guide presented at verksamt.se as a base. I might add that this month is for the business-plan, not budgeting. The material at verksamt.se has the form of a check-list and it is quite thorough.

It might look like a lot of air in the choices I am about to make, but there is many parts in each and every one of those bullet points. This is how they separated it into modules, there are tasks under those as well:

1. Outline and test of business idea
• Your idea
• team and network
2. Develop
• your business idea
• is the business idea good enough?
3. Immerse
• Customers
• Competitors
• Name and characteristics
• Marketing and sales
• pricing
• identify and develop product range
4. Planning the company's start
• Organisation
• Business enterprise
• Facilities and equipment
• Rules and permissions
• Insurance
• Administration
• Register company
5. Calculate
• Budget

I proposed to make 1-4 for this months but realize the scoop is quite big, let's revise it. I will go for 1-3 this months. Making 1 the goal for this week. Half 2 next week, half 3 the week after and the other half the week after that, and putting it all together to that point in February. And that concludes this mid-range goal.

Outline of February 2016.

Producing garbage pt.2

I feel that I kind of missed the mark a bit yesterday, I set out talking about how to produce garbage. Focusing on how to do it, what to keep and some notions about level of garbage. I then got to the whole being a stickler aspect in this context. Somewhere around there I lost my train of thought and went in a tangent which more resembles failure and how to cope with it. Today I am going to try to keep more to the point, namely creating garbage.

So, I mean to present some garbage, and I want to warn you again even if I did in the beginning just to be safe, some people might consider this post to be a spoiler!

So I am no artist, if I give it time I can however produce ok things and with practice I could probably become somewhat good at it. But I don't have that natural gift as some seem to have. I am however trying to produce what i need, and what do I need? garbage!

I need garbage in order to visualize thoughts, I wish that it would be beautiful but it really isn't but I am trying to just say: "ok that'll do, it show what I want to make" and move on. As I mentioned being a stickler this is super hard and I guess writing about it is also a way to practice doing so. And i will therefore include a couple of images I've made which are most definitely ugly, I even try and intend for it to be just to make sure I let it be good enough.

So let's go through them.

sketch of corptown

First out is the earliest of the sketches I made for the starting point in my current project. It really isn't much detail but it was a way for me to visualize what I wanted to create. From the garbage I were able to focus some of the main points I want the design to have in a final stage. Mainly the central point which is the important place designed to sustain where the rest of civilization would not. Secondly I have the transport and the focus on it being steam powered. Finally I've pointed out the link between the "fancy" town and lower quarters as a point of interest. From this I can really start to visualize what I actually want it to be. I've identified some key elements which really are the product of this drawing. So this garbage really serve as the construct for all the design to come of the whole city and the surroundings. Quite important garbage indeed!

3D-sketch of corptown

 Next up was this 3D-sketch of how the town could be constructed, and it's not much to it. I wanted to get a feel for how the dimensions would work in 3D. I don't get much help from this really but it gives a feel, and it might well be used in white-boxing or prototyping later on.

alternate sketch of corptown

I actually found this sketch which were the "real" first sketch and the second grew form it, I felt like I couldn't really just take Final Fantasy 7's Midgar and rework that I guess. :P

sketch of planet

Also a small sketch of how the planet is layed out. This would of course make more sense in context, but basically it's the town in relationship to the rest.

I wanted to show that even bad reference art is super useful, I also wanted to include it here as some means of therapy. :P

Thanks for reading and spreading!

Producing garbage

This is one of the most interesting topics I know, so you are in for (possibly a incoherent ramble but still..) a treat!
Producing garbage the most difficult thing of the common stickler there ever was. I am a stickler and it makes it super hard to adhere to this principle. I find it super hard to do what I talked about before, namely to say: "well it's a box where the main character should be, but you know what that is still progress!". I tend to get stuck in the details and it generally only ever leads to no progress at all. Really I will actually go right now to pick out the hard-drive from my former server (as it died I have all my older git repos there so I can't access any of it), so that I can show some of the horrible attempts at perfection at first try I've done.

But first, I just want to say a couple of words about something different. I always felt a lack of resources about process, design and follow through I guess. I used to be super interested in game-engine construction. It is really fun and I kind of threw it all out once Unreal Engine 4 were released with modern business ideas, the fact that Unity followed right after is just gravy. Today you can even run it all in linux so that really makes my attempts at engineering a game engine seem pretty useless. However that is perfectly fine! What I realized instead is that I am of course a programmer by profession and I have a lot of experience, I identify as a programmer. However now I can focus on design which is an even older passion in many ways. I always loved to write stories and it makes sense. The designer in me is however a completely different topic. What I wanted to mention is how I always looked for a book which would teach me to "think" correctly and I am afraid I never found it. It came from experience and failure and even more importantly success. I would love to write a step-by-step guide to design but I feel that it is almost impossible to put into words how to go about it all. When I started my first game engine (yeah I have written a fair amount of half baked game engines) I wanted to find a flow of it, like "first do input module, move onto message system, get gl-context to prepare for renderer, do text module, start writing generic render object..." I mean it would be a huge guide of course, and I even read some books trying to achieve this. But I don't want to make Guy Someone's guide to write this game engine. And that right there is the essence, to build your system you need to use that as your guide. However gloomy as it may sound there are some great resources and if you had to just read one (apart from actual programming resources such as learning programming in the first place) resource Game design patterns written by Robert Nystrom would be what you are looking for. To anyone writing any code for games this is a great resource to have in your baggage.

Now back to the topic, and I have taken the liberty to get that hard-drive. And I am going to talk about some failures and why they failed.

Early model of a character, proving the point that as a bare essential you will need to know what you are going to create before you start.

First out is this image of a character I am not even sure what I wanted it to be, but I had a kind of cartoon looking cat in mind. The final but it is at a stage where it would have been reasonable to stop and think of a couple of things. First of all, what am I using it for? I mean sure enough this could become a decent cartoon looking cat so what will I make of that? Do I need a cartoon looking cat? Well as a matter of fact it was something I did need, how to use it not so much, and I didn't really have a clear enough idea of what I actually wanted to create. What I did get out from creating it (the garbage as it is today) is that I actually know what I want to do from that. I don't want to create a 10k-polygons half-good cat that's for sure. But I know it now, I know that I do want this type of character, and I know that I can't make it without a plan. I mean the last statement is obvious I know, but it is important and worth stating.

So let's talk about the future of this cat, I mean I want to do something with it, perhaps this model as is is doomed but it does kind of act as a reference and there are things with it that I want to keep. So how to move forward from here?

I guess first of all I would just say: ok, I am done with it, let's create a simple two-or-so-hundred polygon version which I can rig if I need to or leave without animation for now. Yeah, it's really what I am saying, we are done for now. So I would tuck it away, perhaps I will write some facts and stuff about the character, give it a name and perhaps even make some doodles to edge out the ideas. I would also want to work it into the bigger picture which is the story of the game. This character I am talking about here is a bit special as it is intended to be a main character. So I already have loads of ideas for it.

I meant this post to be about creating garbage but became a hybrid towards handling failure and learning from it. So, there will be a part 2 focusing more on the topic. This was meant to be a bit longer and focus on multiple examples as might be seen from the text at times, but I feel this is quite enough for one post.

So for now, thankful for the reads, and do share if you like it. I guess we are nearing more "real content" now and figuring out how and what I write here. The ideas in this specific post is for a game which I will be a subject many more times. I will try to make it clear when you could expect it having a spoiler like quality to it. Thanks for reading, and for sharing.

Getting focused

When I write here I generally (but not always) have an idea of what I want to write about. From that I put a heading which become some kind of vision or what to call it. However sometimes it does miss the mark and sometimes as I am writing it turns out to be something completely different. In the latter case I might well change it. However today I've chosen "Getting focused" and the loose idea I have is to talk about something I actually already did talk about, (and really with the idea of trying to write most every day it is inevitable). I have now worked on the prototype for smelly memories and am putting it to the side because we are going to have a review of it before we do anything else. So that frees time up to work on my own projects again. And the question, and nuisance I feel tempted to call it, is what did I do last, where to continue, and how to get in the mindset again?

This is difficult and most times I feel that you might have to compromise your previous flow and just get down to it. So I know I were working on the hat thingie which I feel would have some interesting perspectives and a first way to tie it all together. I also am writing a pretty involved story, (i.e. takes more effort to get back into). The other things I've been doing is logotyping and designing and well I guess the place to restart now is the web-page (and ergo teh hat).

So that tells me where to start at least. I wont talk much more about it now as I rather get to it and not talk too much more right now as I don't have much to say, but that is where my focus will lay going forward for now. So I can soon introduce the website as well, I will do so when it is still super rough. But it's still a little ways before it is at a level where I can make use of it.

That's it for now. I do intend to make the next about producing crap content and the importance of it, fascinating subject and something of great importance in the process of producing epic content. So if I have produced enough garbage when I write next that might well be the topic but I might change my mind.

Props and some thought on that.

How to know what content one need, and how to produce it, and what quantity, quality and how do I know what I need? I mean it might be quite easy to create many of the needed props and there is most certainly props you can be sure you will need. But you'll still need to figure out what you need, and what I am getting at is that you need to know what you are building beforehand, then plan what props are needed and then you can start creating.

I find this to be a bit of a catch-22 as it would help tremendously to have a props-library with the correct look and feel to build levels, but on the other hand to know how to build the props you need to know how the level will look and feel. So one option is of course to build the level and refine the props and adept the level, and this is actually quite close to (not to say exactly) how I prefer to do it. Other options might be to just start out making some props that you know you can make use of and go from that end.

It comes back to the way I like working with projects the "make a complete game then refine till done" approach. So this means do no props at all to start with even if it is (and to me it always is!) to start with. I mean the look and feel you really want concept-art to get any way. And concept art at this stage is a great thing, but it is not a deal breaker to not have all the concepts clear. I would now like to focus on level design. It depends on a lot of factors of course the games I focus on at the moment put importance into level design and it is reasonable to focus on level creation. In other scenarios it is less important, depends on the game.

So I would go on and create as much as possible with simple geometry. This in itself is an art form and it's super difficult to not feel compelled to start edging out the roughs and getting detail in. But it's kind of important to keep it in your head, or in your vision for now as progress is more important! When the rough design of the level is created it is time to start with props and make reality of the vision. You can already kind of play your level and you will have a good feel of how your vision fit into the design you've made and this way you already know what props you will need (or at least most of them, and most of them is enough).

Since you already have all the game play in place the next steps will be in creating and molding the visuals and of course expect some tweaking until finished, and here finished is really up to you yourself, as you are already done before you start.

I like to take a level from Super Mario as an example, or even better the Captain toad levels of New super Mario 3d Land (I think is the name). The Captain Toad levels are really limited and will have a set number of elements to work with. If you decide first what to do in the level, and the steps to clear it, it is easy enough to build the level with that, form there it is easy enough to build a working version of the level with simple geometry and from there it is again a simple task to replace graphics to land in the right look and feel.

The reason I thought about this now is because I just finished up the level implementations for Smelly memories and while I've been keeping busy doing this my associate have been keeping busy animating (the games graphics is made from built dolls and stop-motion animation so there is a lot of work going into that). So first she would put together a sketch of a level, in a step by step manner, draw it with simple graphics and we then break up the graphics and build the level. And now all the levels are done with the functionality and sketches so we'll be hard at work soon enough to replace the graphics and create game-animation and so forth but it is a huge milestone really, and the way we've worked is the reason it will be finished.

Sick Leave

I am sick and have two kids this is reason enough to not focus on writing for a couple of days, I guess I am starting to feel a bit better however, and perhaps I have more to say tomorrow. But for now I just wanted to write something. And this would be it.

Me, me, me!

Ok, so I hope you are starting to get as tired of me as I am as this post will tie together the last parts which I still haven't talked about. And I can start writing about other stuff after I am done with it!
It will be great.

I am writing this with a man kind of standing a couple of feet away, it's a bit unsettling but well what do you do, I helped out trying to find people and I don't really even know what I was asked to help with. Now he is talking in phone and I am starting to think he might be contemplating something devious against me! :P

Anyhow, me and my family were done in Skövde, my efforts on Magicka 2 was all in place and I were quite excited to read reviews and hear comments on the game. However as you might know those things you spent so much time and work on never seem to be what others look at. I read reviews and stuff and nowhere did anyone say: "...and you could see the work which went into making that liquid go solid under your spray and the AI would adept to the circumstances" instead they might say: "The AI is a bit predictable and a bit too aggressive in it's chase!". However it's how it goes really, I mean I may also choose to be proud that no reviews took any of the stuff I worked on as a bad example, I mean if they didn't say anything bad about it when critically reviewing, it couldn't be too bad at least.

So I got a job working in advertising and mainly worked in javascript to create html-banners, and it might seem boring but it was actually a lot of fun. You really get to make use of the powerful tools and ways to work with them creating really awesome content! It is super fun doing banners, it's fast pace so you don't spend too much time on the same project and you always have something new to work on. It is generally quite rewarding.

At the same time I started out working on a project called Smelly Memories which is a small traditional stop-motion animated game with feminist values. I am really happy to have that on the side and I am in the last stages of finishing up the mock ups for the last level!

I however got an offer to work on a game which I couldn't say no to. I really didn't want to leave but at the same time I am a big fan of Robert Kirkman and his works, I am a fan of Skybound and the job I said yes to was one where I would work with a Skybound IP with connection to Norman Reedus. I felt like I had to take it. I however weren't at all happy with the work environment or the feeling I had at the place and I only stayed a month because I felt that it really weren't what I had hoped for.

I then started to look for a job, a job where I would like to be, where I could have more responsibility and where I could still have the time to see my family. In some kind of broader perspective I also wanted a job where I could start and make realistic and serious planning for a business-idea I've been carrying for some time. So I went to a couple of places but landed at the university hospital working in registries. And it's where I am at, the reason you are reading here is because I am at a place where I see a long term situation and I am starting out planning for the business I want to create.

It will still be some time before I am ready to move on, and I will be writing here daily because it is fun and rewarding and it is nice to see that people seem to read it. Now I am super tired and almost at home I added some parts so that I can publish this post, soon I have to get off the subway.

Me, me, magicka2!

So on we go as travelers in the endless (it seems) sea which represents my life. We have talked about school, early years, living abroad and a lot of stops on my career. And we will journey on now to that new job I was offered.

As the title might have told you it went to Skövde to work for Pieces Interactive hired on contract to work on Magicka 2. And I got a nice and well rounded role in a manner only a small/mid -sized company offers. I got to work in a lot of different parts such as tech-art and rendering/shaders, more pure gameplay, physics such as the rag-doll system, decals and the decaling system, water and how it freezes (this was a big one as you basically freeze water dynamically in Magicka so that you can walk on frozen parts, AI accounts for frozen parts, physics collide with frozen parts and so on, so basically it is no small task to implement the system to dynamically do this).

Anyhow I wanted to like have a stop on each of those listed topics and talk a little about my experience from them.

My role as technical artist

This is a bit of an overstatement as typically the technical artist is also an artist. My role were more in the render-programming family. I mainly worked on shader-code but also things like bringing in SSAO to the renderer and defining render-passes. Mainly I became sort of a consultant for the artists which defined as best they could how they wanted effects and I tailored them as best as I could. We basically had two options one über-shader and specific shaders. The bigger works I did in this area were for decals and for the water/ice shader.

My role as game-play programmer

I didn't do all that much gameplay actually but I worked a lot with the status system, which basically was the system handling statuses. Such as burning, wet, electified, frozen and so on and as anyone that have played any of the magicka games will tell you, there is a lot of deapth in spell-casting and statuses. I also feel that I might push into this scoop the game-pad work I did. I made the input handling for game-pad for the GDC exhebition and there are some pretty difficult-to-get-tight mechanics there. Basically you may tilt a percentage on your right stick to rotate but tilting full starts charging spells, and triggers beems and the likes. However when letting go of the stick there is another percentage threashold indicating casting the charged spell, or canceling the beam.

My role as physics programmer

I did some work on physics and the main area were for the ragdoll-system. Magicka is one of those games where spectacle things, powerful spells and whatnot is quite common. The ragdoll-system is in it's easiest parts just that, turning enemies (and the likes) into ragdolls upon defeat. So I didn't do much with that. The system I designed however were a bit more involved in how forces would effect ragdolls and how to apply forces on enemies becoming ragdolls. So every explosion and the like depending on type applies a huge amount of directed forces on ragdolls and this system ties it together.

My role as decal-system-developer

Best picture I could google showing some decals, and there actually are a lot of them it's just not always obvious.

This is something that kind of grew a bit bigger in a feature-creep fashion. Basically we had a system which didn't really do what we wanted. There is many decals in the game and there is different types of decals. Mainly there is static decals and dynamic decals, where dynamic decals are what you get for example when spraying fire. The system is a box-projection type decal and while I was doing it we realized that we might as well extend the decal shaders to make use of normal-mapping and specular-mapping. And this is not trivial as normals doesn't easily map in this fashion (because the idea of the boxed-projection becomes difficult as normals move up on the sides of the box). However I am quite happy with how it turned out.

My role as liquid-system developer

shows some of the effect of ice in the edges the alpha reference become lower and so you get the small islands.

This were a huge effort and it touched so many parts of the game as a whole that I were almost overwhelmed before putting it behind me. Basically there were liquid i.e. water which is a plane with many polygons and a shader to render water. However it also has to be a shader that renders ice. So first of all I had a bit sent to the shader defining how much frozen each vertex would be. So zero frozen would render water while moving up toward one (i.e. 100%) to be completely frozen. However how to handle the frozeness isn't trivial, I mean you can't really make use of alpha blending or anything because it will not look good. How we solved it is by using a "cracked" alpha from 0 to 1 and using the amount frozen as a 1-bit reference into that alpha-map telling us if we need to render or not, giving us small ice blocks when it's not solid, so when sending zero no ice will be visible, and when sending 0.5 we would have islands of ice visible while sending 1.0 would give a solid ice. This needs to render in two passes as we still want water in between the islands. So between two islands there is a kind of alpha gradient from one at one island, to zero in between the islands to 1 again reaching the next island, and the frozen-amount tell us which alpha-value to render a lower value goes toward rendering none of it, a higher value "creeps up" and make it feel like the ice builds up so to speak.

Adding to this physics need to be calculated if the polygons are frozen, but splashes and the likes needs to be created for when there were no ice. That was also a bit of a painful experience. :P I also had to create a way to interactivelly model the navmesh for dynamically change so that enemies could and would chase you out on the ice. Most work actually wen't into this system during my time at pieces and it must be one of the most complex and biggest systems I've ever written.

In the end we actually render highlights in a specific map on top of the water to get the white high-lights on the top of the waves, just to add to the complexity. ;)

It was really fun and I got to do so much different stuff working on Magicka 2. I will if it is possible get some development images and perhaps videos in later as edits or in a later post. Next time I will continue on telling you how we went back to Stockholm after my year at Pieces and how things progressed up till today. Then I can start focusing on the future once more!

Me, me, me!

Phew,a lot of content last time, and today I am going to try to progress a couple of more years. Otherwise I am hard at work with my day-job and my extra-job. For my extra job, (smelly memories), I am finishing up the last levels mock-ups. There is still some job to be done but it is coming together nicely. We have been working in a fashion which I really like a lot and it's a bit of a way for me to test ideas about how to make progress without pressure focusing on it being fun rather than a focus on progress. It is most fruitful I must say.

We do also work in parallel with the graphical resources and the game. Mimi has a background focused in films and animation and is really good at it, while I have the background focused in games and programming. Since we can't really do much for each other we try to make everything needed in order to put it together. For me this provide a nice way to work. What we've done is that she in the role of designer and the person with the vision, Mimi put together a cutout sketch of each level along with a document outline of the level-flow. So basically I know how the level is meant to progress and have all the resources to make it happen. The resources aren't animated, it's just stick-figure quality placeholders. But the thing is that I can do most if not all game-play with this and we can start bringing in the real resources which will be a pretty small step once they are produced. So the model pretty much looks like this:

Some notion of the process just a quite rough sketch of how it is put together. The main idea is that much of the resources are developed in parallel to the game's development and the two are mashed together ending up in something quite close to the finished game.

 Anyhow this isn't really what I meant to talk about today, but it's fun and it's some great ideas behind the way that we work with this project. And I am nearing the completion of the whole first part!

So back to the beta of the selling knowledge online idea. We had the investment round and it dragged out on time and so I were offered to do a job as a consultant. The job were to create the iPhone e-shop application for Dustin. I did have some iPhone experience and it seemed reasonable to make use of that. I made the application, (this time using UI-Kit and the likes which I had read up on by now), in just over a months. It still were a pretty full featured experience complete with listing categories, search-functionality, shopping-cart and login and user handling. The app itself were a hit and it saw the first spot on free downloads in the Swedish app-store!

However after my contract I had the offer presented to go to Switzerland to work and we decided to do so. I still worked spare-time on fruit snatch and we moved to Switzerland. I only stayed 3-4 months or so because it really weren't what I was looking for. And so we came back to Sweden where I started working at a company making software for 3G-dongles. I got the position as Apple-developer and I loved it! I had all the responsibility I could ask for and my boss put complete trust in my ability. I still remember the interview where we mainly talked about games, Buffy the vampire slayer and other common interests. I were there for around 1.5 years I believe. I also had my first son during that period. And I had now left Fruit Snatch behind me, and did get some payment for the job but mostly I felt glad it was shipped and off my back, and I believe that's how the rest of the people involved with it felt as well.

After this period started a somewhat turbulent (yeah, even more so!) time. I wanted to get back into games for real, I have this fiery passion for game-development and it just didn't seem to cease. I got a job at blocket which I hated, I wont go into details but it weren't for me to put it quite simple. I then decided to take a breather staying at home with my son for some six months, and there it were an old friend from my old gaming company asking if I wanted to come there to work on a project they had landed. It was a quite big ip, (in the million-copies sold region). And after looking over our economy we decided to take it even if it weren't the best step as far as stability we decided that my dream were more important, and my wife also saw an opportunity to do some studying at the university while we were at it.

I will stop here for now as we are entering a bigger chunk of events where I want to delve a bit deeper into specifics. As this post is already a bit lengthy I feel that I want to save the rest for next time.

As always I do appreciate the increasing number of readers, as it either means more people stumble onto here, or that you as readers are sharing which I am quite grateful for. Please do share, follow me and interact with me on Twitter and keep reading as it makes it so much more fun writing for every little digit representing visitors I see.

Me, me, me!

Ok, I ended up writing a quite thorough anecdote yesterday so I had to go back and look through it to understand about where I left off. I guess I had talked about living in Brazil, studying a year in Luleå and should pick up from when I moved to Stockholm.

So I actually weren't all happy in Luleå, my student loans were all used and I really didn't have a very good prospect forward. I didn't know how to solve that situation but one thing were clear to me and that was that I really couldn't continue in the current direction. I more or less had decided that I would go to Stockholm as I always wanted to do so, and I figured that the work situation was much better there. Add to that mix that I was talking to a girl which seemed quite interesting I really had nothing keeping me in Luleå.

So as soon as my contract were canceled in Luleå, I moved to Stockholm. I moved in together with the girl I mentioned in a two month contract for a student room while looking for a more long-term living arrangement. I still didn't have a job but she did, so we actually had an arrangement where I worked on stuff to show off my skills and most of my time I wrote applications for jobs. Being desperate for something makes you look like a quite unattractive option. And that was most true for me. However after a little while I got lucky and got a consultant type job working at a start-up on their initial release of a new service on the web. The basic idea were to trade information in a way similar to eBay, where the presumption were that people have a lot of knowledge and others are interested in it and perhaps even willing to pay for it? It may sound like a crazy idea in some ways but actually at the time I still believe it was an interesting thought and a quite interesting experiment if nothing else. I also had gotten a small contract from "friends and family" to update a domain for a company. I kind of went over the top on that one and created in php and javascript along with mysql a quite deep system where they would be able to customize and create as they wanted more or less. I would argue it was a early CMS and it actually ended in me feeling that I just wouldn't get much money from it so I gave them the code and said that they could do what they wanted with it as long as I didn't have to do more with it.

I mean I was kind of desperate for work at the time and as it weren't enough with an under payed contract and the position as architect of the start up I had been in contact with a British company which I felt were really cool, I liked the people and what they were doing and we kept in contact more or less back from when I stayed in London where I had an interview where we had a mutual interest but they didn't really have the resources for hires. However they came across doing an iPhone application and felt that it was something they could out to me. I am not sure why they did it perhaps they felt that we had a good thing going and wanted to be kind, or perhaps they actually had some positive effects of hiring me to do it. Any way I did it but I had no idea how to work on iPhone so I made the soundboard applications (i.e. buttons with sound-files coupled) in opengl as it was what I knew and the sounds in openal. If you aren't familiar with the platform or the concepts I can assure you that it is a lot of work to do quite simple things. It took two weeks or so to get it together, but I got it done and got payed for doing so, and it led to the opportunity for another project.

So at this time I were doing full-time start-up during the days ans working on this new iPhone project on the evenings. I weren't super engaged in the start up but did the best I could and we were nearing the investment round for witch we would show the beta of the platform. And I was hard at work on the iPhone game during evenings.

Let's take a sidestep to talk a little about the iPhone game. The game design I got was for their own IP about Leon the Chameleon and the game were to be called: Super Yum Yum, Fruit Snatch. The design outlined a game where Leon was moving on a flat landscape a bird was dropping fruits for him to eat. And basically the idea behind the super yum yum games is that you can only eat the fruits with the same color as Leon. Leon typically starts out green. If he eats a green fruit he will turn into the color of the tops of the fruit. The original games were puzzle games where you had to figure out in which order to eat the fruits to eat all and clear the levels. So something like this:

Green Leon eats green fruit

Green fruit has red top

Turns Leon red, now Leon may eat only red fruits

 Ok, simple enough right? So the game I were asked to do this was pretty much it. I however saw potential and wanted it to be a bit more. So my first addition to this were to give the fruits some physics. As the game play randomly picked the next fruit you could end up only getting the wrong colored fruits, so I also wrote an algorithm to favour fruits of correct color. So it's more likely that you will get a fruit that you can actually eat, but still the reason you would miss a fruit is either because the pace is too high or because you were unlucky with the colors. I had a hard time letting that be the criterion for success. So I added in that you could still lick the incorrect fruits but instead of eating them it would apply force in negative direction i.e. give them a push in the other direction. So now you could play squash with the fruits!

I kind of got carried away and added more and more features such as power ups you could collect, we also added (I can't remember but I don't think this one were my idea) a chili fruit which would basically work as a power up where Leon could eat any colored fruit for a short period of time.

The game grew and sadly the technology and renderer I wrote started to be quite strained and we started to experience performance issues. Not severe but still noticeable. I actually kept on working on the game for evenings for some time after the mentioned beta of the selling-info-online project were done. And in the end it mostly just felt heavy and boring to wrap up the problems still persistent in fruit snatch. However the last steps, such as advertising and "packaging" were done by another developer. But I am still quite proud of the game and it was fun to have so much freedom and creativity in creating it. I wish I had limited the scoop so that it hadn't become so cluttered and difficult to work with in the end. I will put up some screens below for every one's amusement.

Phew these posts are becoming huge and I still feel like I am just skimming over all of it. But it's nice to write, and seeing the numbers of reads I get on the posts I get a notion it's pretty fun to read about as well. Please do share and follow me on twitter and the likes if you do like reading it all. I will be making progress on the underlying stuff which were my reason to start blogging as well, but as I've said before I am too busy at the moment with other engagements to really focus on it, so for the time being you will have to make do with the Me, me, me! texts. I am writing down my ideas for what I want to blog about when I've freed up some time and I have some rather interesting topics building up. But yeah, do share, and if I don't know you too well I would love comments and interaction as well!

here is a review of the game.

And let's wrap up with some game-play!

Next I will continue from where we had the beta ready and how we progressed from there, and that will take us much closer to today's date. But I am convinced there is a need for a couple of more posts before we are at today's date.

Me, me, me!

 Continuing on the path set yesterday I will talk a bit about a strange period of my life, not a lot of game development during it so slow in some sense, however so much other things going on so really hectic in other ways.

After Colossai I moved back to my home town where I played a lot of World of Warcraft, and the only programming I did were mods for World of Warcraft. I made one mod which tried to calculate threat for dps (and tanks) to help out in raids, for the curious you may have a look at it Here. I also had a more fun-project which were an virtual arcade machine of sorts I implemented a version of the classic game Breakout complete with level-editor ^^ again the project can be found Here.

 I had other small development projects but mainly I worked flipping burgers and raided in World of Warcraft. It actually was a great time and I would argue it were exactly what I needed at that point in time. I have always had the ability to understand my own limitations and my own needs, which in many ways been a bliss. I have also always been impulsive and done everything I wanted or got the chance to do. And many times I have created the needed conditions so that I may do what I want while knowing where my limitations are. So I am lucky in that way having an exceptionally aware insight.

However during the years to come I moved around a lot. First I moved to Gothenburg and attended Chalmers University where I studied algorithms and took some other classes. I moved to Brazil where I did some web development, but mainly worked on things for searching other jobs. After a less lucrative career in Brazil with a short stop in England I returned to Sweden and studied some more in Luleå. After a year I moved to Stockholm where pieces started falling into place.

I will stop there for today and provide you another anecdote from when I did my military service going on university.

I did my military service in Boden, north of Sweden. I did for ten months and for me at that point in time it was actually quite rewarding! I met people which believed in me and helped me starting to do so myself. I also learned something that I didn't really get before that and it might seem simple but basically the idea that if there is work to be done, your mind wont rest until you've done it, sure there will be other work to take on, but it won't haunt you once you put it behind you. As I said, to others it might seem trivial but for me this was an eye-opener.

I finished my military service and with the help of a fellow I had found this education I wanted to attend, however my grades weren't good enough. So I decided to take a year to improve the grades. And so I did. I took classes to improve my grade, among them Mathematics A, B, C; Swedish A,B; History A; Nature science A; some computer hardware course, some c++ programming and I believe that when I add it up I almost did what normal people do in three years of high-school that year. And sure enough my grades were improved a bunch. I applied to a couple of schools but I really were only interested in the video games education and I really had it in my grasp now. But my grades were still not great. I didn't get in on my grades.

I spent the summer contemplating what to do next, I knew what I wanted and anything else didn't really seem attractive at all. I decided to not go to another school but keep working on my grades for another year and try again.

However something happened, and a reserve spot became available and I happened to be next in line. So one Thursday or Friday, I can't remember, the telephone rang and it was from the school. They told me they had a spot for me if I wanted it. At first I thought it was another school where I had been admitted so I started off saying that I had thought about it and I was going to try to get in to computer games next year so I didn't really want to enter another education. The woman calling sounded a bit confused as she said: "I .. well, I am calling from that education, we do have a spot for you." After a little more confusion my stomach felt like a professional crew of somersaulters. She continued to explain that it would be preferable if I could come next Monday and my stomach sank once more. I asked to have the day to figure it out and to call back the next day to give my answer, because I just couldn't see how I could move to basically the other side of the country without any money, without anywhere to live and so on. I basically didn't even have the money for the train ticket to be honest. She agreed to it but stressed the importance of getting the answer soon as they had to offer someone else if I couldn't attend.

I went out of my room, explained to my dad which assured me he'd get the money I needed to get started, hinder #1 out of the way.  I called the local housing host and they answered that they had one quite big apartment to let. However the price were pretty good even if it were much bigger and therefore a bit pricier than I wanted, but it was the option at hand. I said I'd take it and we arranged for me to pick up the keys coming Sunday, hinder #2 out of the way. I called the train company to get a ticket which weren't any real problem, hinder #3 out of the way.

I remember hanging up after that last call, knowing that I had one more call to make and I was so scared that it would be too late. Perhaps I should just have said yes, and figured out the rest perhaps they had already filled the spot.

I called back and asked if I still could have the spot as I had solved everything and could be there on Monday. The spot were still mine and I packed up some stuff and sat down all night to finish the last couple of hours of Final Fantasy X which I were playing, because who knows when I could have done that with all that was going on, who could know when I would even have a TV, I couldn't really bring anything like that as it was more then 1000 km away and I would be going by train. I mean a semi-big bag with a survival kit were more or less what I could bring. I didn't even bring a computer. I went on the night train, as it was the cheapest alternative and when I went out from the train I remember two specific thoughts: "what is these magnificent trees!? (I later learned that it was willow-trees)" and "I am in some place which is magical, the nature is beautiful, the town feels like something completely new and exciting and I really, really wonder where I live!"

Next up I will talk about some really fast changes in my career in a period where I tried different things.

Me, me, me!

Or well.. some info on me at least, I am not sure at which level I will write this, but I intend focus about my previous work first of all, mainly game related but there might slip in other parts as I've actually done quite a lot of different things. If I feel the flow, or urge or what it might be, I would also extend into the future and talk a bit more focused about "future" work as well.

These are big enough topics to keep me with topics for some days now so this is what you can expect from the days to come.

So the short background is that I lived my life and turned some 23-24 years and went to university of Skövde majoring in computer science and computer games programming. I was part of setting up the Föreningen AGES where I were the treasurer. After I turned in my dissertation I got my degree and somewhere in the same time-span I were part of starting a company called Colossai Studios AB.

I worked mainly as CEO but tried to do some programming as well at Colossai, but only stayed for about one year. During my time we had full focus on a project called Storm: Frontline Nation A turn-based strategy game set in an alternative contemporary Europe. My work as a programmer were mainly in tech for that game and all I really remember doing was a per polygon ray collision algorithm for picking countries/regions and troops and "stuff". Otherwise mostly writing business plan, contracts and doing some (less good, less successful project planning). However I kind of learned a lot, especially about startups, about business-planning and about myself. The things I learned about myself were how I found it rather satisfying doing organisation and planning which in many regards were news to me.

Cover art for Storm: Frontline Nation.

I left after a while mainly because my gut were telling me that this weren't really what I wanted to do at the time and more importantly I didn't fully believe in it and I constantly felt like we (mainly myself) were ready to run a company. I felt like I wanted experience from working and gain better understanding of real-life development which I felt I couldn't know just from school. More or less I had the feeling "this can't be the way it is done, with experience I would be able to run a company but without it felt like a lie.

I also did feel a bit depressed and had a lot of more personal perplexities which all in all pretty much made the situation untenable.

So that will conclude this first stop in the me, me, me! posts, And my first ever game developed! Though I will not take much of the credit for that game but I were certainly part of making the game possible and I also were active in starting up the student association AGES which seem to still be active today!

The title of the post

 I don't have so much to write about as it is a bit slow here at the moment (as I mentioned I am working full-time and have previous engagements which I need to focus on at the moment).

So I will not say much today, had alot at work today, and tomorrow I'm going to Uppsala for work.

I will spend the time on the train working on smelly memories and I might write some about that.

I also want to say how excited I am to see kojima tweet the picture with del toro's name on it, the fact that he is spending a 10-day thingie with cerny which by the way almost instantly followed del Toro upon creating his Twitter account. Perhaps PT has a future in a new less silent Hill like skin.

Pac-man dinner

Food time, I had to go to pick up some stuff for work and I decided to take the opportunity to have lunch out. Reason being that I can't always easily do so, working at the hospital severely limits my options in that way.

So I tried the have-a-light-lunch-at-some-coffee-shop approach. It really seemed like a good idea and I ditched Mac Donald's and the likes I mean it's noisy and the food is in all fairness not all that great. However I found something that seemed like a pretty nice lunch, some kind of French toast I guess and generally something I would enjoy.

But here started the problems. The ordering went fine, except when they told me they'd call out my food when it was ready. I don't even know what I ordered, some, errr.. "French toast like entity" could that be what they were going to call out? Anyhow I did remember there being grilled paprika so I had some notion. It came down to me going there to have a look if there were something no one else seemed to pick up and I took that.

What I got was a somewhat French toast thingy wrapped tightly in paper. Quite tightly, I struggled to find a way to eat it as it were like twisted around so that when I lifted one half the other followed in a none-physical manner. (granted I am no physics expert but I know enough to feel safe when claiming that a möbius strip is in fact not equivalent to a piece of French toast!)

I soon realized that I were in dire need of cutlery, so I took most of my stuff (bag with computer, telephone and so on) as I didn't dare to leave it by the table as I didn't know how far I would have to go before finding cutlery. So I limbered up and went around the whole place and found a knife and a fork and returned back to the table, needless to say it was obviously no good spots and I had to make do with a quite small unpleasant table. To get in or out of the spot were in itself tiresome at best especially as I had to move all my stuff around the small table and through hordes of hungry patrons.

I were able to carve out some food from the tight paper package and tasted it. it tasted: "Meh" and my disappointment were total.

I would have loved to have a place to sit, perhaps use my computer while eating and doing so without all that noise (music and murmur mixed).

The pac-man dinner I made for my son. there are ghosts and a pac-man and the small pieces are intended to be the "dots".

I prepare the food at home and this weekend we had pac-man sausages as my four-year old is currently absorbed by games. He's got it bad, and everything he want to do is play Mario, read about video games and watch let's plays and the likes. I guess I were about the same age when my life-long passion started. I will tell you an anecdote which I have told many times but it feels relevant right now, and that will be it for today. I will not talk business or anything like it as I currently am way to engaged in other stuff and can't find the time to work on this project, will probably be like that for some days/(weeks?), it's how it goes. But I want to keep writing anyhow so if I bore you I do apologize but as long as I write here I am in many ways keeping this active.

Anyhow the anecdote, and this is my first memory of the passion for games that I still today live. I were around five years old and my mom, sister and I were invited for dinner at my mom's fiance to be. He lived in the same apartment building and we went there and rang the door. He opened and I got a view of the entrance and the living room. I saw a computer (C-64) on the table in front of the TV. He greeted us and introduced himself to us kids, I on the other hand forgot my manners and to the greeting I answered: "Is it possible to make games on that? o.O".

Thanks for reading.

Day of the dentist

Dentist today, in just about two and a half hours. And actually time passed since I wrote the first sentence and now I am leaving in thirty minutes! But yeah, soon going to the dentist, a new dentist and I am super nervous that they will not be nice. It's actually one of my main concerns when going to the dentist, that they will "complain" and be rude about my dental conditions.

To put it simple and not too personal I don't have the best dental situation because of many reasons which I rather not go into in this forum, but you are free to contact me on twitter or whatever way you see fit if you for some reason take an interest in my dental situation. But it's something I feel rather self-conscious about and I really want to go to the dentist, get the help I need and not talk much about the situation, no blame, no guilt.

I will therefor not talk much about anything else today, I am doing development on smelly memories and of course my day-time work and the small window I might get in on the side of that I am using to write my business-plan. The business-plan will be quite big and thorough in a way I've never written a business plan before. It is fun, rewarding and really time consuming but I think it is all job well spent.

Now I have to prepare for the dentist appointment mentally and also I actually have to start moving out.

Please share, and follow me on twitter and whatnot, I am not sure how many people already reads this but I have indications that there are some and it would only be fun to hear thoughts and so on from people putting in some time to actually read my ramblings. I know some of the people reading and I am not so much shouting out to you (I bet you know who you are) but I am super curious about anyone else which I don't already know, and you might well be part of some really cool stuff if I am successful in some of my ideas in the future. But don't get me wrong if you like reading my ramblings and just want to be alone doing so, by all means! :)

Wish me luck :P

Day off

I guess I took the day off yesterday, from blogging that is. Kind of ironic how full my day was with the being of off. Well it's a goal I've set up to write every day even if I won't promise I'll be writing during weekends. And I am sure there will be days where I don't write such as yesterday.

I had meetings yesterday and a pretty busy day at work and I also have another project I am working on, which started as a final-year project a student was doing. She needed someone to help out with programming and we got in contact and I loved the project and we really both felt like we would want to work together, so with limited time I committed. The project is a old school point-and-click type adventure game, set in a Stockholm suburb where the main character is a 115 years old lady and how she is looking back at her life. The game's graphics are almost completely done with dolls and animated using traditional stop-motion. I encourage you to have a look at instagram and tumblr.

So I am still spending time on this project and will do so for some time still. We have a very open environment and we use deadlines and things like that more as a motivation when needed rather then a measurement of success. We work in the broad sense and I find that it works pretty well. I have however gotten a bit behind on the last level which is what I am currently implementing, so we are discussing where to put a deadline in order to put some pressure on it so that it will finish.

When I say that we work broad it's a concept I've kind of come to love. Basically I got some super-basic none-animated resources in a layered image. That image serves as the resource for all graphics and while animation and building is done I use only hand-drawn doodles representing the graphics, but still implement the functionality. So once I have the current level done we actually have the full game working, not done but working. And this is something I really like, and I would argue it is teh way to build games. I mean graphics, animation, sounds and much other things are completely disconnected from the game play. So you could do most any game with basic shapes really if you have a solid vision and when the game is mostly done you could replace all basic shapes with real resources and tweaking to complete the game. I believe that this is a great way to work, pretty related to the basic ideas from test driven development, specifically the idea that you put anything you are about to do into a problem or question, then you solve or answer that then you can measure how well it fit the description and how well it solves the problem or answers the question. So I am saying that when using a basic shape instead of real graphics you first of all may focus on making it work as intended, and when creating the resources and implement them you already have the problems to solve at hand.

Anyhow, busy day and I guess I will be a bit occupied in the near future with all of it, I am however intending to blog anyhow, and I am constantly working on business plan and if there is any more time I would love to get the hat done which turned in to a web-application to be used in  which the simple idea which also is the basic idea behind what I want to do with my business: communication and magic! The hat is a way to communicate more or less anything to us and also a way to influence decisions as it connects to the project systems so it can even be used to place orders which is monitored and it's highly possible that they will end up in the backlog. This also means that the backlog has to have some public visibility so that it becomes easier for anyone to actually participate in a meaningful way. This is all about balance of course, I mean I still want some secrets and the element of surprise and still I want to involve the fans on a level where I give them a tool to actually write tickets(!), how does that add up? Well it actually aligns quite nicely and I believe that the audience is super ready for it. Where I think that the general interest in the development is pretty big.

Actually I will stop this post now as I feel I am starting to talk about a lot of different concepts delving deeper into them and I believe this is well enough to chew for now.