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.