Group Test Party!

Last week was total insanity at Camp Hastur. A week before, mr Makkonen of Jo-Jo the dog suddenly crashed our party and told grim tidings about close deadlines looming, the shooting dates for our promo movie had been set and that meant we had to get the client and serverside ready for a playtest session with our friends. Makkonen left, party went on, I have a vague memory of Burt Bacharach compilation album coming out at some point followed by folk music from Toohoku prefecture.

On friday, we got our chainsaws out to kill our darlings to get a semi-alpha-proto-playtest build ready for wednesday, the day before the shooting activity. I called up everybody to join the playtest and we got a really excited response, one of the participants cancelled her luxury yacht trip to attend the playtest. The weather was crap but we pushed on. I remember almost freezing to death riding the hasturped on saturday night. brr!

The beginning of the week we were testing and bugreporting like crazy. Lukasz did a great job providing constant updates to the android client, I got a Nokia Lumia to explore the win phone platform and we walked, ran, rode all manners of vehicles and tested hoodo. Tuesday night Mr. Olli came over from oulu with his synthesizers to join the test. Whisky happened. Anyway, on wednesday we got a great group of people at camp Hastur, eager to do some psychogeography slash urban drifting without really knowing what they were up against. At 5pm we set off drifting.

boys and girls on a mission

now where do we go now from here. major confusion!

part of hoodoing is discovering cool joints like this

bright heads together now. it's a window to another dimension!

The field test went well, a number of bugs were discovered, all in all most people grokked hoodo and we got comments about how easy this game is to play. This time around we had the DB in place so people's runs were recorded for future fun and gps error trapping purposes. Many things we hadn't thought of turned up and there was a lot of writing of notes for future reference. The ultimate thing was Lukasz's autoupdater that took away a lot of pain installing new builds, thanks you very much for that!

I'm going to write another post about the video shoot which was fun (and HOT!) but right now I have to continue coding because: We got selected to present Hoodo at Assembly 2013 in Helsinki this week!

We're producing a special assembly build of Hoodo client and a fun mission to all of the assemblites who want to give hoodo a go. We'll be having the Osuuskunta Hastur Booth at the lounge (Baby, where else?) and you can meet us there from thursday to sunday, ask for the build and go test the game.
Still a lot of preparing to do but today's fresh build looks good and we will be ready to rock!

Catch you all at assembly 2013!

Sami
Hastur

Moving on

And getting closer. The last weeks have been hard coding and designing like always. We came up with a snazzy mission tray for hoodo that allows you to save your progress and pick up where you left off earlier. Our point is still to make our game as transparent as possible with the least amount of UI interaction during gameplay and that goal is getting closer.

The last weeks we've had a bunch of people visiting Camp Hastur and I've explained about Hoodo and even let a few people to playtest our current build. The idea about forgetting about your handset while playing seems to provoke quite interesting reactions from the playtesters. Like 'All i have to do is to hit start and put the phone in my pocket? Really?'. Except that later down the line you don't even need to hit start =)

We had Radio Perämeri visiting, they did a nice interview about Camp Hastur and what we're up to. There's a summary in Finnish here. Take a look at the strange lingo. =)

Our current pre-alpha build (.19) went thru some heavy shuffling about on code side, this weekend is for some field testing and bug hunting. Hopefully .20 is the one we can use for the first bigger test run with 10+ players on the field, a lot of coding but should manage. I'm hoping to have a team test run before the promotion video shoot thats later next week so the actors would actually be clued in what's happening on Hoodo. No sleep till the playtest!

One more item of interest: Bazzer suggested we'd allow people to work on the hoodo code and spin and mangle the game the way they want. We decided to build and publish a little modding API that allows people to make their own missions and things easily with HTML5+JS. This desicion worked quite well even before we can offer modder access. The mod view solved a few problems of testing and development on our side even now. We get to mod our own game now, how cool is that ;P

Anyway it will be quite exciting to see what people come up with. Beautiful things, spooky things. Again there's some modding news to tell later on.

This entry became quite short and dull but that means the game is moving on quickly. We'll post a few pictures of the team run test thingy + video shoot next week, keep them peepers peeled!

Catch you all soon
Sami
Hastur

more images

Fun news from the XBox world, a new thing called trollshards. Analyzing player activity and putting the trolls to play with other trolls, a brilliant idea I had 5 years ago, way to go Microsoft!

Playing games over the net, there's always these little things to take care of to be trollproof. On a computer, you can do a few things that start from running your own server on an old firewalled piece of junk pc. Just a little manouver to set up the thing and keep it updated and waste your time kicking and banning all these people with non-ascii player names, fun.

Things must be harder on the console side, not much you can do huh? And why would people have to deal with trolls anyway? A big welcome to trollshards! What would be more enjoyable than to play with other people like you, trolls with trolls, cheaters with cheaters?

I think a big part of the trolling problem stems from the lack of real world connection between players. A friend told me about this fat dude sitting on his arse, drinking beer and lurking near spawn points, killing noobs. The guy said it's the most fun thing in his life. What a life.

When we're designing Hoodo, we are keeping the trolling / cheating aspect well in mind. We had a long talk about the topic yesterday and sort of came to the conclusion that Hoodo won't probably be the game of choice for the fat guy at the spawn point. Or maybe it is!

In Real-life social interaction there's the strong factor of reputation. Of course in the virtual sphere the same rules apply but more loosely. There's a huge amount of dumbasses hiding behind the anonymity of the internet, wasting people's time. Hoodo drives people to actually meet the other players and show their faces. I think that's the strongest antidote to trolling, better than any software / algorithm based measure.

On Hoodo, you won't get anywhere far without any interaction with other players of the game. You and the others monitor your reputation and your achievements, just like in the real world we all monitor each other constantly through some subconcious process.

I believe that actually meeting another person helps better to catch that persons vibe and to understand his or hers existence more fully. I don't know if anybody does lan-parties or such anymore but there was a great idea, a degree of civility abound. In the respect of trolling, having a lan-party with people you know is so much different than playing pvp at a korean pc-ban (net cafe). It's all about the non-anonymity.

Of course our players are security conscious and careful about exposing their location and too much personal information. Hoodo will accommodate for that, be assured.

For many years my programming approach has been of the 'how to make an inherently faulty system work to a degree' kind. On Hoodo, the GPS data is inherently faulty. Any GPS developer can tell you the same story. You have to deal with all kinds of noise and blackouts and things and still make sense of the data. For me, that's a big part of the fun. Our bots are built to deal with all kinds of corrupted crap that comes thru the pipeline, making educated guesses of this and that. Fault tolerance extreme!

Same thing with the actual players. The general assumption with a person playing is that he/she is misbehaving for some reason or another. Just like in real life, when you realize that so much of your energy goes on dealing with the faults and failures of the people around you (and their energy goes dealing with yours), we have adopted an approach that focuses on players reputation in the game.

A sort of a personal revelation that came a few years ago is that in the real world people won't care less about your self image. How could they, they're not you. So it's all what you put outside. How you direct your energy to build your reputation. People that are not you are looking at you thru your reputation as a person and that in many cases is the difference between a go or a no-go. Of course everybody has faults and everybody acts stupid and irresponsible at times but it's about the big picture. Gauging your reputation can be very healthy at times, prepare to make some shocking discoveries. =)

It's been very busy again at Hastur with many things moving on with Hoodo as usual. After some exhaustive in-house playtesting we've come up with a few more vital features for our android alpha, an interesting plug-in interface for modders and prodders and a scheme to field test our game with people who have no idea what's it about. Lot's of talking and bouncing off ideas as usual. And coding too!

Being spread all over the globe we're holding meetings via skype. Not the most convenient thing with time zone differences of over 10+ hours but that's the way it rolls with us. Skyping in a few hours, what's the time in England again?

See you soon again at the spawn-point!

Sami
hastur

Moving pictures

Summer is chugging along and so is hoodo and many things we're doing at Camp Hastur. The last week was mostly spent hacking with geoCouch, coding javascript and negotiating, writing proposals and things like that. Our man in England, Basim, is getting ready to dive in proper, invaluable resource for marketing and ideas, really looking forward to meet up with the Baz in a few weeks.

I'm not going to start a 'so you want to produce a game' rant here but oh boy, there's so much work you wouldn't believe..

Besides all the mechanical things related to game production and decision making, camp Hastur has had it's share of visitors. Last week we talked with jo-jo the dog films about producing a cool infomercial about hoodo. Very lifestyle, very in your face kind of approach with the short film. Jo-Jo hails from my home town Tornio and they have produced excellent stuff in the past, including a short film called 'Bunny the killer thing' that got international publicity and high acclaim across the board.

We talked about some ideas for the film with Mr. Makkonen and again I noticed the benefits of not trying to do everything yourself. His questions and ideas about the narrative and so on were fed back into our game, there's so much to say about collaborating with people from various fields.

I remember the long years I tried to do everything by myself and think back, collaborating with other creative individuals is the best way. If you dear reader, still have the silly notion that you've going to get your thing (game, movie, what-have-you) exactly the way you envisioned it, stop immediately, get in touch with other creative individuals and find ways to collaborate. It's so much fun and you'll have to think from a bigger perspective. It's great to hear how other people see your product and yourself promoting it, bouncing off ideas and the like.

Everybody that came to camp Hastur that I talked about hoodo had many good ideas, information was passed back and forth. I've been talking to a couple of youth councillors over the years and even more this year, we got Mr Miku to visit our camp and we had a good chat about what he's doing in his field and what we could work out together to get the shy kids out of their rooms and out there to play and make friends and to collaborate. A few new ideas for collaborative gaming on hoodo popped up, some involving rescuing penguins. Interesting stuff..

The weather's been good this summer. For saturday nights kickback, we took the camera and went to an old abandoned warehouse to film a short. Too much inspiration from bunny the killer thing maybe. Anyways, lots of fun acting like a teenager with a video camera. ;P

More interesting things happening this week, a local radio is coming to interview us, the word has spread about camp Hastur and they're doing a feature about our space. Trying to think of interesting points to talk about, should be good!

Catch you all soon in the next installment!

Mr Makkonen, jo-jo!

the camera rig all set up. lights, cameras, action!

Mr Miku grabbing the attention of troubled teens =)