Expedition mode

Really busy week behind. Wrapped up stuff for hood-o, arranged a live event at Kobe Shonen and after a few sayonara parties, it was time to head back to Finland.

A really interesting thing happened last week, I got out to climb a nearby mountain to test hood-o. As usual, GPS signal didn't work out on the samsung (the device has no cell network so I'm relying entirely on the built in GPS, great for worst case scenario testing). I left the house, GPS icon blinking on and on and on.

Getting closer to the mountain, the icon still blinks and my voyage had no starting point. It's hot, i'm getting sweaty and climbing the steep hills, all the way to the top. There's a small temple up there with a magnificient view over Kobe, the sun and the sea. Took out the device and yes, it had found GPS and we were in business.

I wondered around the mountain on my hood-o mission and sat down below the plum trees, the noise from the city was really quiet and the scent of the forest simply breathtaking. Heading down the hill I stumbled down the narrow rocky paths and made it back down. Venturing on, I headed towards the place I started (I remembered they had a vending machine over there), climb climb climb.

There was no vending machine. I sat down exhausted. Another gaijin walks down the hill. In Japan we rarely talk to the other gaijins who threaten our gaijin uniqueness in the country. But this time around I said hello, the gaijin said hello and we had a nice chat and headed down the hill. I told I'm testing a new game that's about experiencing things, he told me he's an experimental musician from Scotland.

Moving on, the scotsman got intrigued about the game and asked me If I have heard of Psychogeography and I had to admit I hadn't. Sounded very intriguing. We parted ways, I went home and read the wikipedia article. Bam. This is exactly the thing. So bizarre that on the only day I actually could be bothered to climb the local mountain despite exhaustion and hangover, I met this dude who knows about this thing that's exactly what I'm trying to do.

Hood-o in action ladies and gentlemen. I'm not going to say too much but.. we're working hard here setting up Camp Hastur in Finland to build this thing for you. So you can also experience the wonder. Wait.

Here's some music from the man on the mountain at the right time. Me name dropping? Never. =)

The pitch

So the past month we're been busy at work with our super secret project, codenamed hood-o. As things moved on, we've build the handset proto to test the game and our ideas in the real world and so far it looks very nice indeed! 

So what is hood-o all about? Here we go.

Hood-o is an unique game of exploring one’s surroundings in a meaningful way. People in general are stuck with a very small range of movement and experience boredom seeing the same things every day. Hood-o challenges people go out of their way to experience and engage in different things within their environment. Instead of being just another augmented reality gimmick, Hood-o is engaging and keeps people finding new context with their environment and the people around them. Hood-o has the makings of not just a game but a social movement that changes people’s perception about the world around them.

What I think is wrong with the gaming culture these days is that the virtual friendships and connections hardly lead to any real-life activities. Maybe it's just because I hang out with geeks. The sports/outdoorsy people tend to have a stronger real-life connections than gamers thru sports clubs and sporting events and they gain social value from it. I think the problem of computer games is that no real incentives to form real-life connections outside the gaming forums or chat rooms are presented. 

The games companies want their people to form communities because Communities Are Gold, they bind people with the game and create a sense of commitment to the product. And that is all fine and well. What we're trying to do is to have the real-word interaction built into the game and produce all these little opportunities for even the geeky or shy people really to meet each other and Do Stuff. 

Hood-o is designed in a way that it's perfectly enjoyable when played alone but to get further in the game, actual interaction with real people is imperative. We've designed a number of little play-related tasks that vary from simply saying hello to running events with thousands of people in the game.

So the focus of the hood-o is in bringing people together. It's about gamifying a very ordinary activity, making it an extraordinary one. There are no space wizards from Uranus, all that stuff that appeals only to nerds is done away with so even people with no interest in computer gaming can pick it up and play.

Without saying too much, hood-o is for the body and soul. Our game will get the masses moving. I'm sure we've discovered a very interesting concept here and we're pushing hard to finish the proto and do a few VC rounds this summer along other things.

Todays build of hood-o looks very good. Dr Lukasz has really been rocking it on android studio this week, now it's our (the designers) turn to get of our butts and playtest.

Finishing the blog and heading out for my pre-alpha hood-o kicks now, catch you soon!

Updates for the sake of future customer security

It's the most beautiful day in Kobe, very warm and pleasant and I'm indoors writing this blog. There must be something wrong with the world.

Today there was an update on the Parallella Blog. They've managed to run Ubuntu on the test-run version of the board. Mr Olofsson tells us to keep checking the site in the next week or two because there will be SIGNIFICANT updates. Excited!

I've been checking on their site for like six months now. And the forum. Especially the forum. Today's interesting bit was about wiring the HDMI transceiver to the Xilinx chip. Some of the readers pointed out a possible problem with the current wiring and Mr Olofsson himself reacted and the problem was explained to him in detail. This little interaction could make parallella even better and more efficient. Oh the miracles of open source. Why did it take so long for us to get here?

I don't follow too many blogs (the designers do) but I do check whats going on with Haiku-OS, parallella and the couchDB world a lot. It's quite interesting how much anticipation builds when you follow somebody doing something interesting, you feel like a little boy again, bicycling thru the frozen wastes of northern Finland only to check if R-kioski has the latest issue of Your Sinclair. Except you sort of don't have to do that anymore and everybody's getting fat. But that's a side point really. Plus we're making a game that helps you to not get fat. ahem.

So here are some updates from this week at Camp Hastur. Dr Lukasz indeed whipped up a nice pre-pre-alpha of our super secret project (handset edition). I walked around a lot, playtesting. Immediate health effects right from the start, I got a flu and was down for three days. Don't let this happen to you kids. But that too is a side point.

So we tested and debugged, version after another and now things are pretty good even with a shaky & wobbly Samsung Galaxy mark 1 with no network. This week the pre-pre-alpha will be more or less finished for our purposes and the work shifts to bombing geoCouch with interesting queries and conjuring up sexy views to lure in investment. Interesting stuff, well worth keeping us bookmarked ladies and gentlemen.

There's nothing yet I can say is SIGNIFICANT (at least any of the stuff I can reveal here, it is a super secret project after all) but it's not that insignificant either. All these little jittery movements inside the mass of Osuuskunta Hastur contribute to the thing SIGNIFICANT later on.

So basically you can all go home now and ignore us for a few weeks at least. Or read the Parallella Blog. Or check out what LLamasoft is up to. There's a whole wide world outside Hastur I tell you.

Darn. Gotta take another look at the parallella forums. Can't wait. =)

Back in Black!

First blog entry in like two months, woo-hoo! A brief report of things that are going on with Osuuskunta Hastur and The dead of the dead follows..

Two months ago I packed my bags to spend a few months in Japan, meeting friends and working on DeDD. Getting organized took a lot of time, dusting off the part of my brain that can handle all those Japanese situations took even longer. It was fun to come back tho, seeing all my friends and going to hundred different live shows. DeDD documentation and players guides were crafted along other things. But as there was nothing really to show, I just postponed writing the blog. Sorry About That!

We got into talks with my programmer friend, Dr Lukasz, about another project that would be more lightweight than DeDD, one that we could whip up and test in a few days. Dream on, that little project got our designer and myself really excited and we were banging away on the design docs and related things. Nothing is as simple as it looks.

But now the preliminary design of the Super Secret Sideproject is wrapped up and Dr Lukasz is blasting away on the compiler, we will have a pre-pre-alpha testing version for this coming saturday. Using a hacky command line dark side manouver, the binary will be planted on our android handsets and we can go out and test the thing. Next week will be used for fixing bugs and finalizing stuff that's going to be needed to make a bit of a video demonstration of the game.

I'm almost tempted to post our elevator pitch (yeah, we still believe in elevator pitches and we wear bell bottomed trousers as well) but because of this and that, that's going to have to wait.

It had been a year since I met Dr Lukasz and he told me he's been involved in gps/geospatial data application development. Well that's a curious coincidence I thought, we've had an idea for a game in the geospatial world for a quite a long time but for some reason (DeDD?) had done nothing with the idea. I talked to Lukasz about the idea, he was excited and wanted to jump in and code some. Whoosh!

I'm spending the rest of the month here in Kobe as there is a lot of stuff to do and people to meet. When I leave, there'll be a nice thing to show back home, i'm sure we'll get an excited response with the Super Secret Game demo. =)

So time passed, we're not dead and the Dead of the Dead is not dead. More stuff here soon, keep your peepers peeled!

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Greetings from the land of the rising sun, strangers!
Sami