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.

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