osuuskuntahastur: WÄRK is my Fest!

Hello all, busy week behind! Last week we headed to Helsinki to attend WÄRKfest. After a day or two of coding and cat-keeping (R.I.P poor pussies), we jumped on a train towards souths to Helsinki that reminds me of a city when I'm really stretching my imagination.

We got invited thru SITRA after participating their Gesundheit-health game competition. Us runners-up (5 companies out of 120+) were invited to hone and improve our ideas and present them to the general public. We decided it's time for another alpha test version and grinded hard to put out a WÄRKfest build of Hoodownr.

We planned a special party-mission called 'Taking of Vallila 1-2-3' and created many things to enable the happening. Towards the end of the week we had a spanking new droid build with all the bells and whistles, had walked 50km in total when testing and preparing for the mission and had no trouble at all falling asleep at night of sheer exhaustion. Healthy!

On saturday we went to the venue, it was very different from Assembly where we got invited in august. Very DIY, hippie, anything-goes type of a situation where the main point I feel was of expression and creation rather than established brand names and the usual work-consume-obey tradeshow thing. I felt we were in the right place.

After some haggling we got a booth to present our wares and distribute alpha builds and to radiate the Osuuskunta Hastur spirit. No rainbow rugs this time but we did find a fluorescent magenta paintpen on the streets and rocked the informational signs in three languages. Situated between the t-shirt booth with a loud man and the BDSM-equipment-out-of-recycled-material booth with a considerably quieter man, we got a lot of attention and people willing to test the game.

On the serious (SITRA) leg of the event we presented our video and concept to an all developer audience. People were impressed with the video and asked contact information of Jo-Jo the Dog films to have them working on their own projects. Cross-promotion galore!

Then there was a workshop with all of the teams. Judging of the icy feeling of the presentation round, I wondered how will the workshop turn out as the 5 companies involved are in direct competition with each other. Will we just sit down silent and talk about the weather?

The workshop worked out just fine. Visitors of the event were invited to join different idea groups and everybody mixed and mingled, idea bubbles were drawn on huge sheets of paper and we got ideas about where to focus in the next coming months. Out of the information we managed to acquire at the workshop, it became apparent that most companies there did not have a clear focus on who to sell to and why would people would buy their product. I felt a bit like Jean-Louis Gassee in mid nineties, promoting hoodowner while everybody else is basically lost at sea or copying each others ideas. Whatever happened to JLG I wonder.

We got a good idea of our focus group. The thing with hoodownr is that it can be done in so many different ways and to so many different audiences. And with the help of our playtesters and everybody who came to our table, we nailed down our focus group. The idea thrown on the table is absolutely brilliant. More about that later.

We learned many things with the new alpha and the playtesting that took place and know our next goal. And we're going for a beta now. It's going to be sweet. The coding backbone is working on the thing as we speak. Hoodo project is kicking into the next level of grooviness, there'll be something really interesting happening at the end of the month.

The trip to Helsinki was great, we met a few friends and managed to talk about arranging visiting exhibitions to Camp Hastur, drink and even chill out a bit. The 13h drive from Hel back to Tornio in the middle of the night was a total killer so the beginning week went by in a haze of tiredness and skyping to England.

We were intervieved by a local newspaper about Camp Hastur yesterday and there's going to be another interview by a bigger paper next week. New people are joining the hoodo project and to Camp Hastur, the invisible numb leg of our co-op.

There's a lot of things to tell, promote and the thing but I'm going to save it for a bit later. Tech meeting tomorrow, gotta give those design docs a bit more LUV.

All the best
Sami
Hastur