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.

Business

Business is (perhaps obviously?) different in different countries, I am focusing on Sweden for now as this is where my business will physically be. We typically have some different ways to register a company, I believe that there is six or so types. I will outline two of them to help you read the rest of my thoughts.

Enskild näringsverksamhet

In English I believe it would be called private business so it's the name I will be using from here on as I am writing mainly in english.

Private business is a form where you as a person register to have corporate tax. This basically mean that you will report tax and VAT and the likes as yourself. In Sweden we have a system where every person has a unique personal number, and companies are also handled as a person, oftentimes we make the differance between physical and legal persons. In this form you as a physical person is also the companies legal person.

You can have employees if you register to do so but out of the box this form is mainly meant for small one-person-companies.

One more thing to keep in mind is that you in many ways share your economy with your company. So if you want to rent offices you will have the responsability as a physical person. This is among the bigger disadvantages and if you would want to scale up in any way or even just rent office-space I would say you need a good insurance as any kind of faliur gets a one to one mapping to your private echonomy!

So in conclusion, this is a good form for many, for what I want to do it's not really an option, at least not in the long run. It might be a starting point however, but I wouldn't rent business premisses in this company form.

Aktiebolag

This is probably the most common way to run a business in Sweden. I believe that the correct word in English would be limited company but as it really is the the common form of company and in the scoop of all of this I will just talk about it as company.

To register a company you first of all need to raise a share capital of 50,000 sek. That is a mandatory requirement to start. You also need a board with at least one member, however you can't do it with only one person as you also need to have at least one suppleant. So at least two people, but if you have at least three members on the board suppleants are optional. It is also common to have a CEO (and remember that the Swedish word VD meaning CEO is quite inapropriate in English ;) ). The CEO is the executive officer assigned and trusted by the board to run the company.

In this form you as a private person doesn't have any private responsability the way you would in a private business. So the security levels are much higher for you yourself.

This is the form to strive for and it's pretty much how the system is built. Another really valid point to concider is that this gives a much more serious impression and there will even be companies which will not do business unless they are registered companies.

What will I do, and why?

At this point in time it's still to early to say, but the only way in the long run is to establish as a company. I might however start up small on the side of my current employment as a private business, the reson would be that I can still do a lot of things such as purchases and other things. I don't want to start too soon as I need to know that I can run everything while still having a good control of my personal life. I don't really have a situation where I can spend full-time on creating the company as I can't afford to do so. So that is not an option and then the option is to take it slow.

Exactly how it will play out is hard to say as I am still starting out and my business plan is not done yet, but all of the things I talked about here is highly relevant in creating the business plan. I am writing a quite thorough business plan and there are a big scoop to cover but in time the steps I need to take to get to a sucessful company will be more clear and the business plan is comming along.

Weekends

I thought a bit about how to do with my goal of blogging every day and realized that weekends might well be excepted. It kind of makes sense as when I tried it this weekend I realized that I just didn't have all that much to write about. This is partly true though, as I am still feeling in, still having many things I am not quite sure of and subjects where I am not yet ready to delve into here. So I might well try to just do week-days.

I wanted to use this day to talk a little about Inkscape which is something I make use of for much of my work right now. I use it to create resources for teh website, logos and prototyping/sketching and more. I am no great artist but I know much of the techniques and I have a pretty thorough knowledge in 3D modelling and even some experience in sculpting tools. So even if I don't see myself as an artist I still like creating resources and Inkscape is one of the tools I'm using exessively. Another would be Blender for 3D stuff, but that's not in the scoop of this text.

I thought I would talk about it in the context of creating a part of a logo I'm creating. I have the basic ideas for it and one part is kind of an outlined cheetah-face so that's the part I am going to talk about. I will not call this a tutorial as I don't intend it to be, but I believe that it still could be quite helpful in making use of the tools.

So first of all I make use of different tools but I believe that my main tool and my tool of preferens is the free hand tool "Draw freehand lines (F6)".

I learned to use this tool a while after learning to use Inkscape and I really didn't concider it in the beginning because I had no idea how to use it. Once you do know how to use it it acts a bit like drawing in Flash. And Let's all be honest, flash is bad at a great many things, but as a drawing tool (especially) for someone that's not all that skilled at drawing it's quite unique and really good.

So how to make the tool useful? Well I would add some smoothing, about 20-30 I found to suite me best, but I am sure fiddeling around a bit is the best way to make it work. It also depends on if I am drawing with a mouse or tablet. Next step is to set end-points or shapes as it is called. I like the elipse-setting which basically make a triangle line beginning and a triangle line ending on each stroke. and drawing now it makes my lines rounded and I like how the lines act, it let's me draw in a sketch-like fashion but the outcome is prety refined.

So for my cheetah I started out drawing the left tear-line (if you look at an image of a cheetah you will notice that there is black lines from the eye down round the mouth and I choose to start there as it give me a lot of propotion. The line looked like this after a couple of re-draws:

I then continued to outline the eye to my liking and copied the two lines and inverted the copy (i.e. set the width to negative whatever it was). I've tweeked the position, where as far as my measurements goes, it seem like a cheetah have about two eyes width between the eyes. In my drawing it's less as I thought it felt better and also because my eyes are a bit bigger then a real cheetah has.

I keep adding the nose and mouth and worth noting is how the cheetah has a quite heartformed nose which is a "simple" shape. So I am actually happy with the result even if I might go back to tweek it later on.

The idea is to use this as part of a logo. And I guess that what I wanted to get accross is the nice look and feel the freehand with smoothing and elipse edges provide out of the box. I did use the circle tool to create the nose and just tweeked the points some, I guess I will fix symetry of them before completely done.

Sunday evening

It's Sunday evening I am about to go to bed, but wanted to at least write something. I guess I outlined a couple of topics the other day talking about inkscape would typically be a bit too big in this forum as I am almost ready to get to bed so I'll put that one in the hat for now. I also said I wanted to talk about different forms of companies in Sweden and that's a huge topic which also takes some research I will put that in the hat as well.

So what does that leave? well let's see now I could try to talk a little about myself, no harm in knowing more about me if you are reading what I am writing, right? And it should be a pretty easy topic to talk about.

I am a programmer at heart and a developer, I am in a way an innovator and I always have ideas. I would like to use my creativity in games. I love writing and, hmmm, well creating I guess is the correct word. I have played guitar for many years and have basic skills in drawing. I love writing and as I already mentioned I am a programmer by profession. So lot's of creativity.

I am schooled and have my degree in computer science majoring in games, and I have started companies a couple of times. My first company was a game development studio which was called Colossai Studios AB, later the studio were part in creating pieces interactive. I have worked in many fields from medicine to games, from business to advertising and I believe I have an unusually broad background.

I worked with graphics programming (shaders and render-pipe), ragdoll, navmesh, ice and water, decal system and more on Magicka 2. I also worked on some smaller games and the never released game AIR based on the film by Skybound featuring Norman Reedus.

Today I am working full time and have decided to plan and create a new studio over time. I have unique ideas for it which I want to keep for myself for a little while longer but it's really interesting and breaking some new grounds in many ways. Both some of the game ideas and for the work environment as such.

I guess it's both a quite short presentation as well as mostly repetition for anyone already reading my posts. One of my goals is to update the blog every day and that means that I wont have new things always. But as I get things done there will be more and more to talk about.

speed-blogging!

Zoooommmmm...
That's it!

Nah not completely but almost, I just wanted to say that I have the initial website ready to launch in a way.. or I have somewhere to do so at least. I wanted to talk about some things but the lateness of the hour (and might I add the tidyness of our home which have been today's foremost activity), means that I wont write much this evening.

but I will give you something to be looking forward to, the long awaited hat will make an appearance, I will talk a bit about inkscape and how it helps me a bunch and why it is great. And also a bit about forms of companies and my views on it. However that will hopefully find it's way in tomorrow when I hopefully (again!) have more quality time to "think out loud".

So, for now here's a teh hat!

I might not be ready to show it in action tomorrow but I will try to write a bit about it tomorrow, and by god it feels like I am hyping this poor teh hat to levels where it wont be able to deliver. ;) But I have loads of cool ideas for it ready to start already but to be used for a long time ahead.

Thanks for your interest contact, shares and comments help a lot with my motivation, might I even say my high motivation!

In the making

So this is a super important post for me, and I hope I can get it right. I mean to actually shed some light on the topics I am trying to discuss here! Very important and also in many ways difficult.

However I want to first of all wrap that git thought from yesterday, turned out that I had not merged and committed my local branch! (embarrassing but it happens). So basically I tend to work in a pretty structured way even when just fiddling around. And I most commonly work with tasks by identifying them, branching for them, implementing them and once done I will merge the new changes and be on to the next "task". It is a super simple way to keep focused to put it simple. I could really elaborate on this topic but the idea is that I should not.

So back to the topic of what is it that I have got in the making?

Basically I have a quite grand vision to implement a game-studio, It is a dream to do this "my way", and even if it at times seems so far away and at times even completely unrealistic I have decided to make this effort. So I am still figuring stuff out, but working on it, thinking of it and dreaming of it, it all makes me super happy. And that right there is my driving force to keep this dream alive and keep reaching for it more actively than I previously have.

The balance is all about being realistic while being completely and utterly unrealistic. I mean I know lot's of limitations and difficulties making the whole vision kind of unrealistic but at the same time I think that the way to reach it is to plan for it. To chase after a dream as big as this you kind of need to stop feeling embarrassed to want it, not letting your own critic hinder you and I guess that it also boils down to accepting that you are completely (or at least somewhat) insane helps. I think that being realistic isn't really a counterpart for being visionary, and in the end without a vision I am pretty much sure the journey would already have ended.

To start with I have already got some pretty well defined ideas about work environment which has grown into a huge topic on it's own. I have already implemented parts of the website, made some efforts toward a logo and I have a pretty thorough start on the design for what I would like to be the first game produced.

I believe that all of this is completely possible and that the underlying ideas caries huge potential, not only to make unique fun games in a way I think that gamers will enjoy them, but also the bigger picture of the corporate environment and the way I want to involve and engage people which has an interest in development and games.

I will not go in depth on the specifics purely because I am not there yet. I have ideas but I will present them all as they are becoming more refined and I know that it is actually what I want to do with the idea.

What I do know is that I want to make a game studio which is a place where the workforce love to be, I want to find creative ways of involving everyone and put trust into that and offer something quite unique. I also know that I want to bring the consumer up close to the development, and I actually mean really close not just being active on twitter or some forum, answering questions. I also want to create amazing experiences in virtual worlds as well as the once I want to offer in teh real one.

At the moment I'm putting most work into the website as I believe it to be a good start and it keeps me motivated at the moment. I am also working on a business-plan which is a quite big task. Other than that I am doing research in different arias such as company form (well it's obvious which form it should be in Swedish society but there are always layers, like when should I actually consider registering, how far in planning should I be and so forth). I am also working on game design and story writing for a project and it all keeps me quite busy. I can't spend as much time as I would like right now but my goal is to be able to do so in the future.

Hopefully I am giving you a taste of the vision even though it's still far away and I try to at least touch some of the subjects even though I am not yet comfortable to go into details about them. If you have questions please comment. If you do feel with me and want to contribute please share the things I am doing, follow me at twitter @qrikko, and perhaps also the @teh_tweeter account. If nothing else that keeps me motivated.

Tireda

Today I won't write much because I am really tired.

I will just mention something that I seem to do every now and again which is tiresome especially when already tired. I use git for all my personal projects and it is my favorite version handling tool. I have used perforce and it falls (imo) just short of using the old "new, newer, even newer" approach :P I really don't agree with it. In Magicka 2 we used HG which I did like almost the same as git. And subversion is nice and we use it where I work today, it's just way to dated and unforgiving.

However Sometimes I do stuff, do
git add . 
followed by a
git commit -m ""
finishing up with
git push

I get home and do a
git pull

everything up to date, but that commit is missing. I guess it boils down to forgetting something but it\s annoying. I blame it all on stress :P Had hoped to get a little work in on the webpage but as I have too little time to re-implement I will get no work in this evening.

On a brighter note it's going well and soon the hat will be ready! and awesome and... magical! So soon I can show that of.

That's all for today.

AGDQ

...or "awesome games done quick" is an event currently running. Basically it's loads of talented speed-runners playing games and my sister in law used to date one of the participants so I know him somewhat so I usually try to watch speed-runners when he is playing.

This time he did a 4-way batman run, where he is actually keeping the world record. I loved how intense it was and *SPOILER ALERT*
In the end it was 1 second that differed!

I guess I was just excited enough to make today's update about it. It's something I recommend looking into if you are not familiar. Good place to start would be Games done quick.

I also had the day off today and I have mostly spent the day with my wife and kids but also did some work on my upcoming website related to all of what I am doing. However it's still some time before I have something to show I feel that I will try to spend some writing time describing what I am doing with it soon enough.

There is a lot of things I want to start talking about related to my goals and visions and hopefully I'll be ready to talk more about it all soon, but my goal is to at least have some updates here, at least daily which means you'll never know what topic will come next, bit it will most likely be game, development or business related.

About that hat... It's sort of done, however somewhat less physical then intended and more digital. (at this point in time it's an Excell sheet, but I will make it a bit more fun as soon as possible and allow for anonymous contribution to it!)

The knowledge around us

I am not sure what I will be writing before I do, it's a way to bring some well needed chaos to the mix. If there ever were a tool to record thoughts blogging is as close as I've gotten. I believe I have two things occupying my mind a bit more than other things currently so let's make use of that. One of the parts is a talk I had with my wife yesterday about mathematics and paradoxes especially infinity. The other part would be an event that made me think about the availability of knowledge at large, I believe.

So about mathematical paradoxes and infinities I received a book for Christmas on paradoxes. It's a popular science piece which isn't usually something I delve into but it's by all means interesting enough to warrant some interest. My wife on the other hand reads a lot and she doesn't mind the occasional popular scientific piece every now and again. So she picked up the book at once and yesterday she was excited to talk some infinity. I guess my favorite part of the discussion were the example from Hilbert's Hotel which gives some examples of pretty concrete infinity. Basically the idea is that you have a hotel where there is infinitely many rooms and all rooms are booked. Now someone enters and ask to book a room you would answer: "Well, there is an infinity of rooms, so that shouldn't be a problem", right? I mean there is an infinity of rooms there can't be a problem, on the other hand all rooms are booked, which would pose a problem if you had a finite number of rooms. So to solve that initial problem you might for example, ask all your guests to move one room up, so everyone moves from room n to room n+1 that way the first room is free right? So your new guest can move into room 1. I don't mean to go in depth of this problem, but wanted to give an example of the type of problems could evolve and solutions.

So more interestingly, I started to realize that I have made use of infinity in solving problems in game-development. Actually, it is assumed in many cases even if it isn't really true, it becomes a finite infinity in many ways and I found it interesting how I haven't really reflected over it and I guess I realized it's paradoxical infinity that messes with my brain while "normal" infinity is more closely related to abstraction. As an example, perhaps the most obvious I can think of, you have ray-picking, for example when clicking with a mouse cursor "into" a 3D scene. There are some steps involved, but I am specifically thinking about a common step used as a test to see whether a polygon could be in the set of possible hits. Here it is common to make use of the equation of a plane (i.e. an infinite plane) to gain information on the possible collision with the ray (in many regards, infinite ray). I hope that it is simple to see that if the ray and the plane are parallel no hit can ever be found. If, however the ray and plane are not there must be a collision somewhere in infinite space, and here you would select a finite length of the ray for the collision-point. However, before we know that there is a collision to find we can abstract away all limitations on the object and only handle infinite planes and infinite rays (or vectors if that help you to think about it). So what I am getting at is that the vast and scary infinity in many cases actually is an abstraction which makes it easier to visualize and wrap your head around the problem, whereas I have always seen infinity as something scary and pretty much just thought of it as one of those complex, difficult subjects which I don't understand. Much like what Georg Cantor did to the findings about infinity by Galileo Galilei really!

So I guess I got a bit cough up here, very specific subject and perhaps some will find it boring, others might think "didn't you already know all that!?" and so on. And yes, I kind of already knew but I realized only now.

So about that knowledge availability I feel tempted to save it for another day as I wrote a bit more about the paradoxes and infinities than I intended. But I am a follow-through type of person, so let's go.

I bought coffee this morning, it happens that I do and I find it quite convenient. When paying I used my master-card a service my bank offers me for a yearly fee. I am happy to pay for the service and my coffee store in turn has a machine which may be used to do the actual transaction. To provide me that service so that I can actually pay using my card the shop keeper pay the bank. I always wondered why the bank isn't paying shops for offering their solution, for me as a consumer I guess it's positive or else there would probably be one system for every credit card issuer and every bank and it would be different in different countries and it would pretty soon be quite bothersome. (or it is at least one way of seeing it).

However, I meant to touch on the subject of embracing knowledge floating around us at all times, I mean it is reasonable to believe that everyone knows something that I don't, right? If it's difficult to get that idea to stick, look around yourself and ask yourself "what is she thinking?", see everyone has at least some knowledge that you don't have. However, I am going to focus on a bit less abstract type of knowledge, just wanted to make the point.

So, back to the payment, (would be embarrassing if I forgot to pay now!), I wondered how it works, what does it cost the shop-keeper to receive my payment? I mean, obviously there is some money going into buying the coffee, providing a place where I can go to pick up my coffee, mugs so that I can actually receive my coffee and there are costs for staff, so the cup of coffee is already quite expensive as an entity. So I want to know how this equation actually looks, and I mean I will have to read up on it if I want to offer that service in the future (which I might, hinthint), so I asked the shopkeeper, I was the only customer and I mean doesn't everyone like small-talk? (Not the language, even if it is pretty cool as well). So I asked him: "What fee do you pay the bank to provide this service?" He answered (and were excited to do so) that it's a one time fee in order to get the machine and the link to the payment-service, and then there is a fee of about 1.50 Kr per transaction which goes to the bank. I implied that it is a pretty backwards system where he actually is providing a service for the bank and that perhaps they should pay him to do so. He laughed and proclaimed that the banks are powerful and make the rules, he continued to say that it is different in different credit-issuers where AmEX is the "worst" as they take about 5 Kr for a transaction. So in effect on my 20 Kr coffee AmEX would get 20% (!) and that is before salaries, paying the products, locale and so on.

Point-time, from a joyous conversation which I believe that were rewarding for both me and the shop-keeper I received some quite valuable information from someone that, I would argue, really is an expert on the subject. I know after those minutes that there is a one-time fee that you have to consider and that you need to take the cost of transactions into account when doing your margin-calculations. Further, I even got a pretty good hint of how the costs look. So if I were to set up shop with card-payments I know that I need to research what the fee to start out is, I also need some statistics on the most frequently used payment-methods and credit issuers for my business would be to estimate the cost it would have on my transactions. I mean it's a huge difference in margin if everyone use 1.50 Kr services compared to if everyone make use of the 5 Kr service.

That's quite enough for today, don't you think? I will try to keep a bit more to the point next time. Again, to write like this provides some well needed chaos to my brain.

Cheers.

Back to work

Today I am getting back to the reality that is going to work. I work at the hospital with childhood cancer registration. I choose this job for many reasons among them were the security, pay and the way it might just enable me to put work into my own projects while still having time for my family.

Apart from my "day-job" I am also doing a project called smelly memories which is a super fun and rewarding project. Currently I am finishing up on the mock-ups for the last level, which has taken a bit longer than I had hoped. But that's how it goes with extra work, it takes extra time to do it and time is difficult to get especially the flavor which is extra.

I started writing my business plan yesterday and I do write it from ground up. The rain for that is that it is in many ways huge and specific. I have written numerous business plans and it is in many ways routine by now and I find it fun, where the most difficult part always seem to be the economics. However it is fun and important so I am actually looking forward to that part this time.

I will leave this post at this for now, (still no hat!?), partly because I will arrive at work soon.

Again I do appreciate any sharing from whoever is reading this, as people taking an interest really is my biggest reward-system at this time! So if you find it interesting to see where I am going with this and want me to go further sharing is probably the best way to help right now. You might not think that your mom or aunt would have much interest in reading but it's the thing with social media, reaching your mom potentially reaches her friends and their friends and..  yeah you get it. In business there is the notion of "friends and fools" which is a bit of humorous saying basically boiling down to the importance of people in your network which help you out either supportingly as "friends" or risk taking as "fools". Bottom line is that spreading is key so please be my friends and my fools here and build minions of both friends and fools and we'll do something unexpected and crazy which could be an amazing ride for all of us!

For now, cheers.