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