ello, ello, is there anybody in there? - first week on ello

One week ago I got an invitation to ello.co , a new social networking site with an impressive manifesto that I will quote in full here:

'Your social network is owned by advertisers.

Every post you share, every friend you make, and every link you follow is tracked, recorded, and converted into data. Advertisers buy your data so they can show you more ads. You are the product that’s bought and sold.

We believe there is a better way. We believe in audacity. We believe in beauty, simplicity, and transparency. We believe that the people who make things and the people who use them should be in partnership.

We believe a social network can be a tool for empowerment. Not a tool to deceive, coerce, and manipulate — but a place to connect, create, and celebrate life.

You are not a product.'


What an appealing manifesto. I registered my account immediately.
The minimalism of the site took me by surprise. There are only a few buttons to click, some icons to drag and two feeds to choose from. The other feed is your friends on ello, the other is called Noise, curated posts from the world of ello. As ello is new and in a clever way restricting the number of accounts, there is not much content in there yet. It's like people are holding their breath for the conversation to happen.

There is a discovery tool (how to use it is not obvious unless you have been following the development of html5-standard for the past few years) to find people on ello. You can try to browse for friends or  people you might know on ello but won't find very much there I'm afraid because of the invitation-only policy.

The noise-section is totally useless as well, apparently the moderators of ello are still too busy to make the system run somehow and have no time to curate the list. Actually the noise-list smells of abandon after you've hopefully reloaded it over the past few days and then you give up on it completely.

Some key things you have got accustomed to with social networking sites are missing. And I think they are missing for a purpose. There is no Like. This in my opinion is a pretty interesting choice. In my opinion, the Like button is a handy indicator of the amount of least possible interaction, acknowledging the author that you have read the post and feel like you want to convey your reaction.

Not having a like button might stem from an idea to make people use the comment function more. However, this does not happen. People are not commenting very much. I think partly this has something to do with most users still trying to get the feel of the 'ello world' and are refraining from commenting to avoid saying something stupid. This is wrong. I think we all have a constitutional right to make fools of ourselves on social media.

Another, way more interesting aspect about the no-like-button-disfeature is the way it sort of fights the compulsive need for acknowledgement that I think is one of the fundamental things that keeps people coming back to facebook or whatever. Of course one could argue that social media needs a way to convey acknowledgement. In contrast to having a real, face to face conversation with it's accepting nods and disapproving frowns etcetera, social media communication like a severely handicapped, deaf blind and dumb person who can only lift one finger to express approval or disapproval. The analogy might sound harsh but let's face it, computers are dumb.

On ello you can however see how many people saw your post but not who saw it. Was it a friend or a foe or a random person? How did they find me? When you keep posting things on ello (feels like you are sending letters in a bottle btw), sometimes you get a very low key e-mail that such and such is following you on ello. You can click on the followers profile to see what that person is all about. In 64 or so characters =)

Currently ello is a strange mix of twitter and facebook with more weight on twitteritude. I think ello has a lot of work ahead to streamline itself. The shroud of secrecy conveniently obscured by the minimalism of the site will put people off ello after the first login. It's ok to profile yourself as a 'not for dummies' service but come on guys, a few tooltips here and here will make things so much easier.

Likes and views are handy for facebook who needs to keep track of what kind of ads to display to you. I think there are plenty of things to experiment in this respect and ello can still keep experimenting for at least a year whereas facebook cannot do that anymore. They are stuck with views and likes and that's sooo yesteryear.

The real problem I hope ello would solve both have something something to do with the obsessive-compulsive nature of social media. How convey the reactions of your audience in a way that is more abstract and more gratifying that likes and views. It's different type of media of course but these are the things we're thinking of building Hoodownr. How to keep people coming back without resorting to predatory tactics. There has to be a better way and we have to find it.

Is ello redeeming it's obscured-by-minimalism hipster promises? Not yet. But It can. New beginnings are great for that exact reason: they are New beginnings. See you on ello!

Cheers,
Sami
@hoodownr at ello.co

Crowdfunding autopsy report for Hoodownr

Our crowdfunding campaing is finally Over! Now that was a tough 5 weeks. I thought I'll write a wrap-up immediately after the campaign and share it with everybody, maybe you can benefit from our experience. Here it goes!

The Premise

We chose Indiegogo as our crowdfunding platform mainly because it's the biggest one available for a Finnish startup. On the outset, Indiegogo figures for game funding look pretty bleak, only ten percent of all projects actually get funded. And only 1 percent of the funded ones are games. So Indiegogo is not the most obvious choice for funding if you look at the numbers only.

However, Indiegogo has brand recognizability and many european people tend to follow and sometimes even pledge. Our goal with the campaign was to reach as many people as possible and see what kind of reaction we could get. From that angle Indiegogo was a good choice.

Human network asset

Basic thing with crowdfunding is the idea of utilizing your existing contacts to help with the promotion of the campaign. Our total facebook contact amount was almost 800 people. Also we got to know a whole bunch of people thru all the gaming and investment events we've attended so far. There are many old contacts from the past, including a few prominent people on television and a bunch of internationally known rock stars we thought could at least put one tweet in for their fans. Looking from the social asset-point of view, we felt quite confident that we'd get some organic views thru our contacts.

Publicity stunts

It's vital to try and get visibility also outside the campaign. For that, we managed to get a co-operation deal with the Night of Arts here in Oulu, having our booth at the event and distributing a custom demo build of Hoodownr to interested people. This was really hard work, really burning the midnight oil for over a week with the team to get the build ready. We got print media attention and lots of backlinks to our site. The effort resulted in 2000 pairs of eyes on the project. The night of the arts was a success, after the event I keep bumping into people who have at least heard of Hoodownr. A few hundred people checked out our website out of those 2000 people.

The spammers

As I mentioned in the previous blog entry, once you start a crowdfunding campaign, you will be approached by professional spammers (they call themselves publicity specialists). They promise great success in exchange for a cut in the project proceedings. We conveniently ignored those guys because we wanted to try the spamming aspect ourselves. Spamming as in 'community outreach' or 'public relations'. The fact of the matter is that you won't get anywhere without spamming everybody. Out of 5 weeks we spend 2.5 weeks only spamming hard to get people to like our fb page and to take a look at the campaign.

Game Genre related

As our game is a totally new idea, there was no specific genre to target really. We found that power pushing to a generic category like sports games or android games is time wasted. This should have been obvious of course. The best response we've got from the urban exploration community, followed by the live-action roleplaying crowd. This took a bit of experimenting though, starting with a more generic target group was not such a bad idea as it forced us to rethink our approach all the time. I think the bigger and generic groups produce more views but no shares or pledges.

Who did pledge?

Going from the social asset point of here again, the most likely people to actually pledge are your friends and contacts. I read a study that says 60-70% of the pledges come from inside your own social network. That is, people who have already heard about your product and react when you give them a cue in the form of the campaign. This was indeed the case with us too. Just getting a reaction from one of your friends is challenging, you have to really push to get a like or something. If you are planning to run a campaign, do the FB like+twitter follow begging round well before actually launching the campaign. After you've done that, your target group only has two options for their reaction, the sharing or the pledging.

Amping it up

The fact of the matter is that no matter how good your campaign is, when you are not getting people to see it, it's not going to work. Getting visibility is vital. And that is going to cost you money. During the last days of the campaign we had a chance to talk to an ex-black hat spammer who gave us a quick tour on finding your audience. Boosting up your views and getting the campaign video featured in youtube is numero uno. In a country the size of Finland the gig costs maybe 200 euros (how it is actually done is via porn site clickbaits and other dubious methods). If you pay YT for the feature, most people will just ignore it as it is clearly just another advertisement. There are also a few other very effective black hat strategies you could use for a relatively low cost. Google is your friend.

Summa summarum

As this is getting quite long and there are a number of good guides to run your campaign on the net, I'll just wrap this up real quick. Rules of thumb for your campaign.

1. Crowdfunding for indie games is not about funding, it's about promotion
2. Spend 10k to make 10k. For your 10k you need to reach at least 100.000 people. simple.
3. If you know a thousand people, 2-3% of them will consider pledging / sharing your link
4. First round of spamming is the most effective. After that one start spending money.
5. People in the position of helping you out by tweeting etc, won't do it.
6. Use flexible funding. People who care about your project won't mind. honest.
7. Find a way to get coverage outside the world of internet
8. Not doing it is worse than giving it a try. Just do it!

These rules apply to all us real indie devs. If you have big bank, a proven track record or celebrity endorsement, you can totally defy the laws of gravity. If not, do it anyway!

What we got out of it (the good parts)

The campaign really made us focus on how to reach people. It's so much fun just making the game and testing it and it's easy to get lazy about the promotion aspect. Indiegogo made us make great leaps promotionwise. New concept art got created, we got thousands of views instead of tens of views and thru our organic approach (no black hat shit, no paid advertising) we reached numbers that are above our own projections of our market share. The days when Facebook likes kept coming on and on were really encouraging. We were really happy to get a message from Pepe Deluxe and made a few new friends along the way. All in all good times were had.

I'd recommend other indie game devs to try crowdfunding. Even if you won't meet your goal with the funding, you will most certainly move closer to other forms of funding and towards the release date. That's the real goal of it all really, to reach your players with your work. Just do it!

To be continued!

Sami
Hoodownr

Haeyundae beach in Korea, let's do a bit of Hoodowning there =)

Doing the things you love

Hello All! A short update here would be in place. It's been a few weeks since we released our indiegogo-campaign and there's been a lot of e-mail typing etcetera, my typing brain has been exhausted many times over but here we go again.

Maybe a lot of people have written reports about their crowdfunding campaigns but here is ours I guess. One thing that happens immediately after releasing the campaign out to the wild are the spammers that contact you and offer their services to boost your campaing, starting from 5 bucks and going up from there. In an attention economy, these services make sense I think. But it's all very shady and vague, the spammers don't show much data or metrics about the effectiveness of their efforts. Promising to spam people and making 5E sounds like an easy way to make money. I think many people fall for that kind of scam when their campaign hits a standstill.

I had a good chat with the creator of Asmo-charger, they ran a crowdfunding campaign on kickstarter a while ago. Asmo got really nice publicity thru their campaign and almost reached their goal. Of course they had a way longer preparation period, a physical product and marketing power behind them so that is natural. We chatted about why their campaign didn't quite get there and the reasons were obvious: A bit too high price for the gadget (postage costs from Finland were 17E a piece).

Another factor is that they're from Finland (strange foreigners selling their wares to the american market). Makes perfect sense, if I turn the table around, a strange Turkish guy trying to sell some stuff with a weird Finnish accent, hmm, I don't think he made too many sales over here. Selling shit is all about making appearances in the modern world. No way around that.

Our campaign has become to a bit of a standstill after weeks of spamming, that was expected. Insofar we have contacted a big number of 'industry professionals' including the Pope, Lady Gaga, Ron Jeremy, Pepe Deluxe and everybody who's on our Facebook and the names on the stacks and stacks of business cards from the previous events we've attended. Not getting a response from the Pope was a bit of a disappointment, the guy's got 4 million followers on twitter, come on, tweet about our campaign!

Besides messing about with the campaign we've also messing with code. We got a deal with the night of the arts in Oulu and spend a week building some new features for Hoodownr. The adventure/notification thing took many steps ahead and the game stabilized with many bugs squashed. We had a good time at the night of the arts despite not being able to leave the booth for a long time to see all the action. Got a bit tired with the gargantuan push towards the arts-build, I think on the pictures taken from the booth we look like zombies..

Another fun happening was the visit by three Graffiti artists, Ruskig (Sweden), Clean (Denmark) and Tasso (Germany). They came to Oulu for almost a week to partake to the street art project and painted 3 really magnificient walls here. Ruskig and Clean camped at our place and we got a glimpse of all the hard work involved making the pieces. No boozing or staying up late, oh no, the guys left early in the morning and came back when it was dark, covered in paint and dirt and fell asleep in like 3 minutes after the evening tea. I went out to film the painting process on few of the days and I got all this guilt-inducing footage on my hard drive waiting to be edited.

Since last year when we begun our wild parade with Hoodownr, quite a lot of film footage was captured. I'm planning to make a short video about the things we love in case anybody gives a shit =)

Ok, gotta move on. THE CAMPAIGN IS STILL ON guys. MAKE A PLEDGE, SPREAD THE WORD!

Move lovely things later,

Sami
Hoodownr

A design meeting with Clean,Ruskig & Flop

Encouragement from Friends during Night of arts

Building our demo Booth

Tasso painting horses

First five days into the campaign

Hello and welcome to more randomness from Hoodownr!

I thought I'd write down a few thoughts after 5 days into the campaign. We originally got into planning a Kickstarter campaign over a year ago (probably said this already on the previous, Please-Make-A-Pledge-To-Make-Hoodownr-Happen, post). Jumpstarting the campaign last friday, we have learned a lot about crowdfunding.

First thing: It's a lot of work! We spent the first 4 days from morning to evening sending emails and things to people asking them to check the game out. So far we've got almost 1000 visitors on the campaign page which is quite good when considering that we not yet famous =)

Thousand visitors have translated into 3 contributions totaling 80E as of today. That is not a lot but most of the indiegogo game campaigns that started on the same day are still stuck with zero. Yes, we follow the other projects to see how everyone else is progressing, maybe we can learn something.

Most of our friends responded to our call-to-arms to spread the campaign link thru Facebook and twitter, thank you so much,  you know who you are! While mercilessly spamming everyone we're also taking time to read more about other campaigns to find ideas how to improve. It's very think-on-your-feet and we like it.

One interesting thing that we didn't know to expect was the amount of comments that promoted campaign spamming services. Promises of guaranteed funding for X amount of euros. Blah, nothing we couldn't do ourselves. Some real comments would be nice. Please write your comment here now!

Despite the campaign promotion madness, we have managed to take some time for testing the game everyday. On friday, we drove to Hailuoto ferry, left the car by the seaside and ferried ourselves across to the island. It was really warm still. And dark. Dark and warm seldom happens this far north and it was really magical, felt a bit like a David Lynch movie. We walked around, waded in water and found that the little kiosk had closed when we came back to the pier. It was really quiet until the distant sounds of the ferry diesel broke the silence. Relaxation happened. Take a look at the video clip to see how it was like.

[DANG:] blogger cannot find the video, google loves google not. Click this to see the thing.

Ok guys, gotta wrap this up now. More marketing madness follows. Thanks for reading, please make a pledge, comment and spam your friends about the game!

Sami
Hoodownr

Crowdfundicity!

Hello again and welcome to Hoodownr-newsflash!

After a long time of scheming, we decided to release an Indiegogo-campaign for the promotion of our Indie game! If you are an indie publisher or for some other reason have looked into the intricacies of designing and running a crowdfunding campaign, you know that running crowdsourcing campaings is becoming a bit of science these days.

The preparation requires countless number of hours on excel to optimize the timing of your posts and content and public image and so on and so forth. Everything should be thought out down to a single pixel. Every move you make must be smooth like Jagger.

I think all that research and preparation that goes into designing the campaign and it's assets are critically important. However, there has to be a number of good campaigns from brilliant people with great ideas but without megabucks to spend on honing the tiniest little detail or the literary skills to impress the general public. There are heaps and heaps of projects coming in every minute and only the most pledged or whatever float on top. Does this mean that all of the rest is rubbish? Maybe not.

Last year, we took way longer than we should have fiddling and obsessing over stuff and decided not to launch a campaign. The events that followed, presenting the game to a great number of people, getting great feedback to improve it and seeing the general response and excitement about Hoodownr came into fruition with this campaign. It means less time fiddling with the code which is a bit of a bummer because we want to focus on Making the Darn Thing instead of just talking about it and spamming, spamming, spamming...

So crowdfunding has become of age, turned into something thats just used as an extension of your marketing effort, requiring huge amount of effort to pull off gathering even the tiniest sum to help to complete your thing, with or without additional funding from other sources convinced by your crowdfunding campaign. I know of few projects where the companies had received SUBSTANTIAL funding while preparing for the campaign just to gain marketplace visibility. Why not use some of that SUBSTANTIAL funding to market your thing like every other company with SUBSTANTIAL funding? And paying salaries to your campaign team?

For whatever it's worth, the future of Hoodownr hangs with the result of the campaign. We Believe that we've got something great to offer, please check our indiegogo-page, make a pledge or tell a friend!
There's other stuff going on at our facebook page and on twitter  for those ones who like more fast paced information. We'd like to keep you informed about the ins and the outs of the campaign.

Ok guys, this is it! Make a pledge and help something beautiful to happen Today!

Sami
Hoodownr

instead of slick promo pic: Me and friends doing what we love. This is it!

Summer of eventfullness

Wow, a long break from the blog again. Some timely information for youz guyz now.

We attended Ropecon! It was fun! It was hot! Fliers were passed, sauna and medieval swordsmanship in the blazing sun was enjoyed!

I had a very interesting two weeks, first volunteering at H2Ö alternative music festival in the beautiful Turku, lugging stuff around in the blazing heat and entertaining ticket buyer folks at Lippakiska (small kiosk in front of Turku station that worked as some kind of unofficial H2Ö-headquarters) and trying to desperately find a chiropractor for these two norweigian artists. A very welcome break away from the computer just doing real stuff like carrying things, eating sandwiches and drinking copious amounts of coffee to keep awake thru the long nights of unpaid slave labour (i mean volunteering =) to build the grooviest festival in Finland.

And groovy it was. 100 artists, 9(!) stages in two days. And we pulled it off too! Nice crowd of hippies wondering about (I think the attendance was like 7500 people) without no fuss whatsoever, nice maze of a festival area, things were arranged so that there was a new thing to see everytime you turned around a corner. And heaps and heaps of mirrorballs. And a weird, huge, string chtulhu thing hanging from a tower crane. The preparation, festival and teardown days were easily the most fun I had this summer. Mark H2Ö down in your calendars ladies and gentlemen, if you happen to be in Finland next summer and need some groovy time with like minded entities, H2Ö is for you!

Being quite exhausted after all the work (and the heat!) I finally dragged myself down to Helsinki, the grand capital of this wonderful country. More heat, intense coding to get a sample adventure module ready for ropecon. Result: did not make it in time. Perfectionism never helps with a tight deadline. Anyway, made good progress with the thing so it was all good. Took walks around Herttoniemi, very nice part of the city near the sea and enjoyed some nice Nepalese food. Dream!

Friday happened, mr Z and about fourty others rolled out of the ropecon bus in Dipoli, espoo. They'd left 6am in the morning, the bus's air conditioning had conked out very early on and it sounded like they had a lot of fun in the bus with air temp rising over 40c with people getting sweatty and panicky by every kilometer that passed. But they made it!

Ropecon was bustling with life, two blacksmiths banging away on the parking lot, thai foooooooood stall, this and that and a long queue. We had our sailor merchant passes but joined the line with everyone else (actually that's a lie, we went to smoke with this resin doll maker and tried again when the lines were much shorter). It was hot! Getting inside the dipoli we noticed how bit the event was. And hot! We got a place at 'kokemuspiste' (the experience zone) to promote our wares and set up the table with video facility and fliers. It took about three minutes for one of our permanently stoned friends to finds us and start dispelling any non-hippies around. And there were a plenty =)

Running the test booth was a hard exercise, it was so hot inside and the air was so bad, it was easy to tell that the building was not designed for any summer activity. But the people Gamed on! On every floor there was something going on, Boardgames, Card games, Japanese mahjong, MTG tournaments.. you name it. Being stuck at the booth was a bit of a bummer in a way, I wanted to LARP!

Towards the end of the night me and the Tornio Hippie equipped ourselves with some beers and headed over to the sauna. Skinny dipping! It was still ultra hot but refreshing anyway. After the sauna we dragged ourselves to a nearby seashore, somebody had brought a boombox bicycle and people grouped to drink and relax. Maybe it was RPG people this time around but the beard and long hair situation hadn't changed much comparing to H2Ö. And they played Michael Jackson. And it sounded awesome. =)

Saturday morning was more game promotion, the feedback was very good and people excited to hear about Hoodowr. All I can remember is the heat my aching bones after sleeping for few hours on this dorm kind of thing without no mattress. H2Ö won that round, at least the accommodation (some random commune where it was OK to crash at even nobody knew you) on a proper sofa doesn't kill you like a hard concrete floor. My bad tho, I foolishly thought that I would go back to the apartment for the night. Note to self: Next time prepare to be lured by Beer, Sauna and MJ and bring a mattress, even a tiny one.

The evening got too hot for me and after a brief visit to the DISCO LARP (of course there is a disco larp!) I headed back to get some shuteye. Sunday was just coma and softdrinks sitting on the lawn and listening to people ramble on and on about matters of extreme importance for roleplaying folks.

The bus aircon had been mended and we headed back to Oulu in relative comfort and more explicit moobs than you can shake a stick at. Our accountant and bassist Olli was kind enough to come and pick us up at 4am-is and dropped what was left of team Hoodownr back to basecamp. There was no milk for coffee, disappointed, sleep!

All in all a lot of fun was had and now it's back to the old grindstone to finish and release the game, Last week was fiddling about with webGL again (I made a crappy summer intro at hoodownr.com in a fit of nostalgy for summer coding when life was new, take a look if you've got a webGL browser like Chrome). This week is more coding and planning and an announcement. Huuum. Ent-like.

Hope you enjoyed! To Be Continued!

Sami
Hoodownr

mahjong at ropecon

lounge bar with swings and h2Ö

the real lawn lounge seating area

your arm's off!

more gaming at ropecon

the signmaker dude at h2Ö art department. it's all analogue

more mirror balls please!

h2ö accounting dept with the latest gadgets!

wish I had more shots of the site and the lights.. kick ass!

preparing for Ropecon!

Hopefully less vitriolic this time around =)

The last few weeks have been a lot of fun, had more time to focus in the game itself, got some proper coding time in that is always good. The droid client has undergone major improvements, a long weekend was spent completely overhauling the app structure to overcome a nice android feature that flushes stuff out from the memory when mem runs low. This little operation was a major pain in the butt and we're still testing to catch all the little bugs and crashes the open-heart surgery might have resulted in.

As Dr. Lukasz was crying blood refactoring, I compassionately refactored our bots, there was a lot of hasty copy-pasta code where a shared libs were needed, some really nasty hacks and all kinds of concurrency mayhem inducing duct-tape and prayer-solutions there that were dealt with. Still hacky as hell but at least not destructively hacky.

Preparing for Ropecon I wanted to make a little LARP-quest for Hoodownr. The idea is based on a game design from like 5 years ago where the players are agents with specific, overlapping missions. I had planned the adventure to be redundant in a way that if a few of the players leave the game, the remaining players can continue their missions and finish the adventure. This, needless to say, adds a layer of extended complexity. =)

As we never had a real LARP test for the spy adventure, I felt I should test the game flow with intelligent bots with a bit of personality (read: level of paranoia). The whole game is based on information and how trustworthy the players regard others and the stuff that comes to light. I was quite tired after the big bot overhaul but still sat down to tinker about with javascript (great for lightning fast prototyping). And went on for like 38 hours straight. =)

After that 38 hours, the bot players roamed about locations, learned about other players and tried to syphon out information from the other players and tried to compute the trustworthiness of the information received. OO is really great for this. Gandalf enters and sees Thorin that starts to sing about gold. Except in our case it's Barry that enters and enquires the lady in the purple helmet if she is indeed Mary. The lady tells that she is actually Steve, a hobbyist female impersonator. This contradicts with what Tom and Dick told Barry and he has to evaluate his next move.

I think I could spend ages tweaking the thing, it's so much fun. Not really sure if the adventure part can be finished for Ropecon but gotta try! =)

This weekend we're filming another little hoodowning video and trying to improve our site a little bit by taking massive shortcuts. So much to do,so little time. Next week I'm off to Turku to help out at h2ö-festival, see Hawkwind and enjoy the summer. You do the same!

See you at Ropecon guys!

Sami
Hoodownr

intricacies of proper Indie development rant

Yet another fascinating update from the world of Hoodownr!

Again, the past few months have been a blur of activity for us. Earlier this spring we got into a program that prepared us for the Midnight Pitch Event to present our game to potential investors. Yep, who wants that honey as long as there's some money kind-of. The training program was really good, we got a lot of feedback and ideas about the game from people on the business side of things and managed to clarify our goals etcetera and so forth. Vital importance!

The pitch fest came, we had a flyer and t-shirts printed and all that stuff thanks to KM's lovely guidance, no hippie rugs this time like at Assembly, professional edges all around! =)

The actual event was held in sandy Nallikari, we pitched the game in front of a live audience and held a show-and-tell booth backstage, giving out fliers, showing the video and luring investment. We got a really great response from players and govenment people who are involved with activating nation to have more exercise. A coordinator from the Finnish occupational health institute was very keen to co-operate. One investor popped by to tell us specificly that this is not their field, thanks for the info, asshole.

As always, we're targeting this blog to indie developers as well as gamers. Hence the rants. Hmm here we go:

Any regular studio would report their Midnight Pitch festival experience as a resounding success. In a way, that is true. The number of new connections and new information that came to light is awesome and we also had a great, private afterparty at Kulttuuribingo with a DJ flown in from Japan and a kick-ass jam session till 4am in the morning. Party: great. But looking from the goals point of view it was a disappointment. We went in to find funding and that didn't happen. So that bit was well fucked. Moving on to pocketgamer:

We decided to do Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki and went there a few days after Midnight pitch. No booth this time but the engines were well warm to pitch the game. Again so many people were met, so many people wanted to sell us their shit but in general it was good, the feedback we got from Hoodownr was great. People love it =)

On the afterparty side of things, our PR lady km got herself on the Rovio table while I was talking to Fingersoft and a bunch of Chinese publishers that are looking into new games that already have a track record of ten million downloads. That's just fantastic, chinese install expectations scale well in Finland with less than 6 million people. Anyway those guys were funny so that was good enough.

Met loads of other devs and had good exchanges with everybody. I really loved this new game called Pako, it's out on for windows phone, check it out! There was a few more interesting titles out there, cannot remember the names now but I guess I'll save that stuff for a tweet someday =)

We met Oscar Clarke and Bob Heuel again and had a really nice word with them, Oscar was happy with our flier and said 'I'd buy that for a dollar' =)

Not being able to take people for a test run was a bummer, it was raining cats and dogs in Helsinki. But showing the video and our alpha worked out fine. No investor love this time around either, people at pocket gamer are looking for a copy of an existing succesful product which is always the way forward. The logic goes: It's angry birds with a twist == angry birds is making money === this could also make money for me. It's bad form not trying to copy anything but to build something original.

Currently there appears to be lot of investment money around for games business. Investment events pride with the amount of capital the attending investors have in total. In reality, a very small part of that translates into actual investment I'm afraid. Slush, pitchfest etc. from the indie dev perspective are mostly about complacent, rich penguins coming to hear other rich penguins talk and then watch the trained monkeys and village idiots (us indie developers) trying to amuse them with elevator pitches. And it's all very serious business and costly too.

The benefit of connecting with people cannot be denied. If you as an indie decide to put the money down to attend, I think thats a good thing to do. You need to meet people and talk about your game. Go with that expectation only. Finish your game, have an alpha and marketing materials and business plans all ready, create sales, you have a chance. If you only have a paper napkin full of doodles, stay at home. The events we went were all really hardball. I saw many Indies who had flown from across the world getting increasingly more sad at their demo booths when they realized that this is not going to help with finishing their game. Uh-ah.

The problem I feel is that with the current situation here in Finland is that money and talent don't meet like they should. Small studios talk about the shitty publisher deals they were forced to make, bigger studios talk about the shitty investment deals they had to make where they do the work and somebody gets the money if they do their work well. This is quite an oppressive climate for the newbie: Aren't games supposed to be fun?

Best piece of information at pocket gamer connects I heard in the toilet, two Finnish game enterpreneurs talking while taking a leak: Don't waste your time with Finnish investors, take American money, you get more and easier. I made a note to self about that. =)

So summa summarum, if you want to make your own game and release it, remember: Nobody is going to give a shit about you or your team or your game until it's almost finished. After over one year of development we're getting there. And it feels good. It's worth it!

There will be another foray into demoing Hoodownr and that is going to happen at Ropecon 2014 in Espoo, 25-27.7. We'll be there, come over and Say Hello!

Boom boom!

Sami
Hoodownr

get amplified!

the Pitch team. Don't mess with Texas!

burning calories and getting fresh air

Hello all, it's time for an update again. Needless to say, things have been very hectic here at Hastur headquarters, trying to unroll a few of the latest events here.

A month ago, I flew to Krakow, Poland to attend the Digital Dragons event to take part in the Big Indie Pitch and to talk about our game. It was still very cold in Finland but pleasantly warm in Poland, arriving to Krakow airport I was greeted by this great summery scene, a huge picture of the pope printed on the parking lot wall and bus ticket vending machine that didnt't work. Welcome to Poland!

After a bit of shuffling about, I hopped on a bus to the city center, the old town where our hotel was. Turned out that the hotel was really close to the spot where the bus stopped, the room was nice and I went to sample some mc Donalds, my first big mac in a new country. I'm sorry if you hate maccers, I tried to find KFC but got too hungry and frustrated.

Spent the day in the hotel room obsessing about our pitch for the next day. In the evening Mr Z came from Lomza and we hit the old town to eat some nice pasta and drink heaps of white russians. Of course we had to, they were tasty and inexpensive and nice and the Polish are not skimpy about their vodka so the caucasians had a nice bite to them. Catching up with mr Z was a lot of fun, he'd been away for a while to take care of some stuff in Poland. I got a warm welcome and in a true Polish fashion got very inebriated. Disclaimer: Kids, inebriation is not good for you, drink responsively!

Wednesday was more pitch preparation and in the evening we headed to this club where the big indie pitch was held. Loadsa people queuing to pitch, long, slow moving lines and of course, beer. We met our friends from Createrria and hung around waiting for our turn.

The pitch was not the usual auditorium affair but this speed dating thing where you were assigned to a table with two people and had to state your business in four minutes until the gong rang. There were like 7 tables with various people, publishers and the press and some people who were there just to try to sell you their shit for your game. For a first timer it was a jarring experience, we went in to discuss our funding situation but the speed-dates were only interest in a release date and what to write on their sites and so forth. Generally it looks like pitching at pocketgamer events such as Digital Dragons is good for promoting your game and nothing much more.

Maybe the speciality of DD was that it was mainly geared towards Polish projects that are looking for a Polish publisher with Polish publisher budget. In our case, presenting the game is quite difficult as you actually need to get out and play it, problem that we've experienced along the way, so we showed the video and chatted about the game.

The following day's stuff was good tho, we went to see many presentations about how to release an indie title and what kind of moves to make to get there. I went to see Julian Gollop (of x-com and chaos reborn fame) and he showed some really nostalgic stuff from the eighties. Did you know that his first game, chaos, was published by Games Workshop for the ZX Spectrum back in the day when they were just a two man and a donkey operation working at their mums? That was way before they trademarked the words 'I' and 'And' and 'SpaXe maXines'. That was cool.

Julian told about his trials in the regular games business and why he wanted to try kickstarter to fund his 'indie' game Chaos reborn. Sure enough he's the guy with the fame but even for him it took considerable effort to plan and run his campaign to reach his goal. Julians famous buddies had told him that if he'd kickstarted a year ago, he'd probably pulled in money in the X million range instead of X hundred thousand range. For us N00b indie devs you'd probably be able to pull 20K if you worked really really hard on the campaign, more if you get Ricky Gervais and Lord British to tout about your idea on twitter/reddit whatever. Anyway the thing that had worked for Julian was to release a browser-playable preview of the game on the last stretch of the funding run.

We listened to quite many indie devs and their experience is that get testing early, get a closed beta or stuff like that started really really early to get feedback and so such. We re-evaluated our strategy considering the tests and decided that is what we need to be doing, giving people the alpha to play.

So after DD, besides training for the Midnight Pitch fest and doing the business stuff, we've been hell bent to produce a playtest build and have a few playtesting events near Oulu to get people to see our thing. This means that most of the stuff that goes into the primeval basic Hoodownr is ready. And that my friends is a lot of stuff! And that lot of stuff has translated into lot of frantic hours to prepare our next alpha over the past few weeks, a total chaos of coding, testing, walking, cycling, changing diapers (two members of the Hoodownr team just became fathers) and so on an so forth.

We're hoping to wrap up our next playable for this week and have a playtest event at Kulttuuribingo here in Oulu. There will be an annoucement about that on our FB page in the next few days, keep on close watch ladies and gentlemen!

All in all, DD was a good experience and We had a lot of fun in Krakow. Meeting Oscar 'lost on location' Clark was groovy, as a LARP-person he was really digging Hoodownr. Bonus!

I wish I could go for a proper holiday to Krakow some day, the city is full of history and amazing things to see, time to shake off any Poland related prejudices and see for yourself I say!

Many more things to tell soon! Come and be blown away by our pitch at the Midnight pitch fest next week and have a chat and a spanking new Hoodownr flier while you're at it. See you soon!

Sami
Hastur

Mr Gollop!

the Polish ministry of Economy-booth

we had to pimp our passes

back in Oulu, fun stuff at Kulttuuribingo

The Bingovision Hasturphonic zx-6000!

There'll be Dragons!

Hello again, it's been a while since We last embarked on a public relations effort in the form of a blogpost. Well here we go again.

Some news about the Hoodownr-operation, we got accepted to pitch our game at the Big indie pitch -event in Krakow, Poland (Out of all the places in the world). The date will be 8th of May, next weeks wednesday. Big indie pitch is organized by Steel Media, the powerful force behind Pocket Gamer and 148apps. Lots of international press, bling, publicity and so such in store.

We'll get a chance to meet our assembly (and the associated shadow-event boozembly) friends behind Createrria to talk shop which is always fun: meeting people you've met along the way. A personal highlight would be listening to Julian Gollop's presentation, he's the dude who started coding turn based strategy games on a ZX Spectrum a million years ago and created Chaos, Laser Squad and X-Com later on.

Julian's now working on a reimagining of Chaos for pc's, please take a look at his website and check the game out on Kickstarter too! Looks like the Kickstarter was a great success, the game is really going to happen!

Motivationally speaking, if we really push it, there might even be a chance for an ubergeekish photo opportunity with the guy =)

Getting quite deep in the business side of things these past two months it'll be great to actually get to talk about the game and do some Hoodowning in Krakow. You couldn't believe how many daunting things there are when it comes to making a game. And how many ways to get there, I'm getting the sense of the old Lauryn Hill song Lost One that goes 'There come many paths and you must choose one'. True that. The Krakow trail is yet another one.

Well the adventure considering Hoodownr continues. The past weeks we've talked to a few really interesting people about the live-action role-playing aspect of the thing and a couple of dudes who do some freeform esoteric psychogeography here in Oulu (Out of all the places, again).

Heading to Krakow with our sharpened pencils and the general idea that Jeff Minter shared in his twitter feed a while ago:

'Game design should be about creating something that you passionately believe should exist, that you really want to share with others.'

We're doing just that. Catch you further down the road, people! Come and say hello to us at Krakow if you happen to be there. We're the ones with long hair and ponchos. =)

Finally, here's an earworm for your labor day lunch. Nicole Willis and the Soul Investigators. Dig it!

Sami

Hastur

a-rolling

Hello again. The past few weeks have been a blur for us. We got in touch with Business Oulu and have been working on our marketing plans and investor decks etcetera. Lots of coffee consumed, paperwork and phonecalls and things. Da business side of the Hoodownr enterprise.

We attended the Oulu Game Spring event last week and met some really nice people with great ideas and advice about where to go with the game. Hell, we even managed to (somewhat?) impress the Paradox ceo, Fred Wester, with our concept. Please find an obligatory hanging out with rockstars-proof picture further down this post.

Mr Janne the beard also moved to Oulu last week and we're having more Hastur people living here in Oulu now. Me and Janne have been frequenting Kulttuuribingo (local, camp hastur style creative hangout/live venue/artspace). My perspective after attending gamespring and various other gaming events is that there's not enough focus on creativity and too much focus on funding.

So our mission now is to produce an event here in Oulu, mixing the game dev/business style people with the creative folks. A melting pot of sorts, all in the best possible taste. Looking at the end part of may, the event will provide an alternative angle on how to think about games, creativity and the joy of discovery. The preparations are moving well along, more data here as the thing solidifies.

On the software front, we've got a fresh new build of Hoodownr with improved graphics and most of the advanced new stuff we've been working on for a while now. Can't wait to field test with a group. Maybe at the event?

Coming to Oulu has meant focusing more and more on the various gameplay and longevity related ideas. And filling forms and talking to more and more people. Busy beez..

Today consists of more work towards the Event and finally upgrading this mac's hard drive. So much fun reinstalling all of the software and migrating things, can't wait!

Short note this time around, stay tuned!

Sami
hastur

when mr Z met with Fred

mr Petri Loukusa came in to camp over for the weekend to produce gfx

few lovely gals at Kulttuuribingo yesterday

oulu street art jam - street heats, bongo beats

Hello again and sorry for the long delay again. We moved to Oulu a few weeks back and we've been busy getting organized here. So many people to meet and things to do..

From the point of view of a indie game dev from Lappland, Oulu is the only possible move if you don't want to end up in Helsinki. The topic of heading here came about when we did the polar bear pitching thing and were offered this nice apartment to use for development and relaxation.

In a few weeks time we've got more things going businesswise than in the past few months in Tornio. It's so easy to go to a meeting when you don't have to drive 130 kilometers thru the wind and snow, in the dark. In Oulu, a bicycle trip is all we need. Great!

As we've got many friends who are based in Oulu, we have also had the opportunity to talk about the project to a few professionals who work on marketing and graphic design (the areas we need help with because it's more fun to code than do spreadsheets=). There's interesting stuff on the boil as always with a few additions to the hoodownr team in the near future.

As osuuskunta hastur, we felt like we need to make an entry to the Oulu scene and wondered what way should we go. A few weeks ago our graffiti artist Stig (of the hoodownr logo fame) got in touch and told he and his girlfriend Sofia Waara and another Swedish street-art dude Ruskig are coming over to Oulu to paint a bit and he asked me If we could accommodate them and find a wall and a bunch of paints. I said of course and set out to find a way for the street art jam to happen.

After contacting this local culture person/personality, Paavo Heinonen, I was informed that there actually is a street art project in Oulu, they've been negotiating with the city for a few years to get permissions to use public walls for street art. Things had moved on a snails pace tho. Mr Petteri Parhi from the street art group figured that the time to get this thing really flying is now and so we flew!

Petteri cleared permits for the walls and I called a few sponsors (RealDeal & Geezers.fi) that kindly helped us with cans and cans of paint. By thursday everything was ready and it started to snow really heavily after few weeks of no snow. How's this going to work out now?

Luckily, the snowfall stopped by saturday morning and the guys rolled their sleeves up and powered by veggie pizzas, did the basecoat and got sketching. Ubercoolness and underground manouvers were performed and we took turns babysitting the artist's kids. Despite popular belief, street art is fun for the whole family!

The weekend was really great, hard work but so much fun hanging out with our friends, painting and non-painting. There's still over a few hours of footage to edit to get a video out but I'm hoping to finish the jam vid by the weekend. Anywayz, million thanks to Realdeal + Geezers, check their stuff out on the web and buy some shit, you know you need it! =)

Next weekend is a different kind of jam with Pete and Photoshop/Illustrator and digital media that will hopefully grace your screens any day real soon now(tm).

keep reaching up,
Sami
Hastur

pram-a-lot! used for transporting toddlers not paints!

us geezers got the real deal! Paints galore!

work in progress shot. Stig and Sofia in action!

the logo!

tales from a hole in the ice

Past few weeks flew by in a flash, sorry about no bloggy stuff for awhile.

Few weeks ago we took part in Polar Bear pitching event, the idea was of getting nipple-deep into a hole in the ice and pitching your project as long as you could in the freezing water.

We saw the polar bear pitching event pitcher guy (appropriately dressed as a polar bear) at Slush last year and thought that it's the worst idea ever. Who wants to get in the icy water, no way!

In true Osuuskunta Hastur style, we are very nimble to change our opinions about things and decided to give the ice hole a go. Even though I'm Finnish, I had never tried ice hole swimming however healthy it's supposed to be. So It was a first to me and Mr Z (poland) as well.

As we arrived to the event site and got registered, the ladies asked us will you guys be pitching from the ice hole. Mr Z's face froze suddenly (he had tried to escape from a moving vehicle just 10 minutes earlier to avoid going into the water). After about one second of hesitation, I said yes, we're going into the hole. Yeah baby!

We walked to the pitching site and watched the first batch of pitches and despite wearing full winter clothing, man it was cold out there. Looking at the people going into the hole physically hurt. It was hard to believe we would be going in there soon. Obviously if our mission is to produce a game of discovery, we absolutely must go out of our own comfort zones as well so : man's gotta do what man's gotta do!

We moved to Jääli swimming pool to get our bathrobes, slippers and things and went to the changing room. People who'd already pitched came in one by one and told us that it was not so bad. Just build your core temperature before going in, do push-ups and the sort and you'll be fine. I did my tai-ji routine for 20 minutes to warm up while Z had a few beers to build courage. With me waving my hands about the changing room space must have looked a lot crazier than the beer consumption..

Our turn came and we were picked up by a car in front of the swimming pool. To my surprise, the air that felt very chilling an hour ago with a thick snowboarding jacket on, didn't feel that bad after the warm-up with just swimming trunks and a bathrobe on. The car took us to the site and since we were first of the batch, we were quickly directed to the stage.

Mr Z thought we would go to a sauna before the ice hole (would be a standard practice here in Finland) but oh no, we went in directly. It was freezing but not so bad. Only thing I remember is that I nearly fell off the little platform that was built inside the hole (scary). After getting up from the cold water, we were interviewed by the bear who was amused by Mr Z's outfit (Suomi t-shirt, Aloha shorts and slippers, like he was going to the beach). Then it was time to head to the mobile sauna to warm up and then head to the transportation.

All in all we had a really memorable experience with the ice-hole pitching. There was food and beer at the afterparty, believe me that you get really sleepy after ice swimming, sauna and a meal. The beers after that will render anybody quite brain dead, honest =)

Good people were met and fun was had. We had a chance to check out camp hastur mk3, this apartment in Oulu we'll be using in the next few months to finish Hoodownr. So besides coding and things there's also the moving thing to do and the moving day is this coming friday. Besides the computers and things we won't be taking much stuff along, just the shisha, our trusty record player and a bunch of vinyls for some serious after-coding relaxation sessions.

So the majority of team Hoodownr is heading to Oulu now. If you happen to be around, pop by for a cup of coffee or meet us at Kulttuuribingo sometime!

Hope to meet you all in Oulu!

Sami
Hastur

the london perambulator

Sometimes along the way, a person needs to stop and ask himself: What is thy quest? Hmm!

Last summer we defined our quest to be the quest of helping discovery. Meaningless ad blurb in less than 64 characters found at our website: 'We bring discovery into your lives'. What kind of discovery is there to be done walking there on the streets with a mobile phone in your pocket?

Some people do it even without a phone. I was well inspired this little documentary about the London Perambulator, Mr Nick Papadimitriou. Essentially he's this bloke who walks around and turns everyday things into a sort of poetry. If you haven't watched the clip before, do yourself a favor and watch it.

So Mr Nick is described to be 'a mystic who hoovers out magic out of stone and brick'. Another fitting quote: 'He is an eccentric, there's no doubt about it'.

What impressed me personally was Mr Nick's way of immersing himself into the surroundings on his walks. Maybe experiencing things was like that when one is a child. Magical and mystical. Makes me think that as adults, our minds become very fixed and analytic to our own detriment. The magic is almost lost and it only remains in our dreams. Mr Nick seems to be in an altered state of consciousness on his little walks, hence he is an eccentric?

I believe that we all experience altered states of consciousness just like Mr Nick. Reading a book or playing a game transcends our everyday thoughts to somewhere magical. We're entertained and exhilarated. Why not try and find an altered state of mind on your walking trips?

I think our fixed attitudes about life and things, being adults and everything being such serious business, stifle us from seeing the magic that still exist there if we took the time to see it. There's a ton of sports tracking apps for mobile devices with various calorie counters and things that measure our performance. Our society has become obsessed with performance and I don't believe I'm wrong if I say that we have bought the idea of judging all our actions by performance. Even casual exercise needs to be justified and measured. Why?

For Hoodownr I wanted a diametrically opposite approach to all that performance measuring. Sure, the game mechanism monitors your steps and shows your progress and there are leaderboards to climb if you want to. But I sincerely hope that people would find the magic and wonder of their surroundings and the people there thru our game. This I feel is our biggest challenge with Hoodownr, to fuse a easy entry concept (taking over hoods) and a more deeper concept of psychogeography or deep topography or whatever you wish to call it.

After a lot of playtesting I believe we've got the right formula for just that. Still a lot of things to do and think about tho. It's very hard to explain the game experience to people that have never played it before. It's like explaining role-playing: you have to do it yourself to understand the fun.

In the next few weeks we'll be able to do a bit of testing again with the new build. I'm very keen to hear what our test subjects have to say. =)

More stuff happening soon, great things to look forward to so please keep on following the blog, I promise you won't turn into complete nut job perambulating aimlessly somewhere (fingers crossed).

Sami
Hastur

The new gospel

Hello all and here's a small project update: coding, coding, coding..

Didn't quite reach our goal for a playable beta for the new years but we're almost there. And there's a bit of news too, we're moving our operation to Oulu at the end of the month to continue working on Hoodownr. After 6 months in Tornio, we fully discovered the boredomness of having to drive 130km to a meeting every time and decided that Moses has to move towards the mountain when the opposite is not happening.

Speaking of religious terminology here's one thing I spotted on play Finland the other day. Apparently Unity is touring Finland trying to lure more people in to use their platform. I talked to a few Unity people a few months ago, the guys are really great and have a great product of course and I cannot really think of any reason to not to go Unity if you're publishing for multiple platforms.

The choice of words on the Unity tour promotion bothered me a bit tho. It looks like us lucky lucky Finns are in for a big experience as the 'guru Andy Touch, EMEA Product Evangelist at Unity Technologies' is flying all the way from X to preach the gospel of easy multi-platform game publishing. He's going to tell us all about the mindblowing, even Revolutionary new ways to change our lives as game developers. Bliss!

I really don't know why they would use religious terminology to assess the expertise of this mister Touch. If you really think about it, it's not that far from the business card of Mr Guangbiao Chen who basically states that he is the god-king of the universe. Take a look at the article for kicks. I actually love his approach with blatant self promotion, at least he's being honest about how he feels about himself.

Us westerners of course are much more civilized (read: sneaky) and do the same thing in a much more roundabout way. But why borrow American TV-evangelist jargon to make the same point? Maybe it's just me but the connotation feels very awkward: 'DIAL 777-GOD now to make a contribution'. Who buys that shit? Sofware engineers? Maybe there is a little buddha inside all of us!

So we're expecting a guru AND an evangelist all rolled into one coming over. I see an image of a mysterious man from faraway lands who comes (possibly riding a camel?) with his begging bowl and helps his converts to make their own begging bowls. 'Why give a man a fish when you could sell him some shit to help him to sell some shit' is the new gospel for the modern age. And happy we are of all the modern things.

I myself would better enjoy Mr Chen's gospel. At least he starts his press conferences with a song and I believe there's something honest about a man singing.

If you're reading this Mr Chen, please come over, let's get blind drunk in Oulu and while we're at it, try and communicate our great achievements to the public. Hell, I'll even set you up with a proper gig somewhere (please google 'Ykän Pub', a very promising and accepting venue), let's blow some wannabe guru evangelists out of the water. 

End of terminology rant. Enjoy 2014, boys and girls!

Sami

Hastur