news from another star

Hello again and welcome to the latest installment of Hoodownr development blog. A lot of things have happened after the previous post.

Firstly, we did a manic push to get Hoodownr on the Google App Store. This included a lot of coding and tearing hair out and learning about google's family friendly rules. Did you know that If you don't moderate ALL chats on your game, you're really not suitable for children?

We also had a local release party on 4.9.2015 in co-operation with Tornio and Haparanda youth councils. The new graffiti wall at Putaan Koulu was unveiled and our graffiti guy Writingmotor attacked the wall with about 100 kids. 100 cans of spray got burned quite quickly by the eager little graffiti artists.

We had a promotional tent with coffee and of course there was a DJ with a nice sound system. Everybody got well excited about the painting thing and we managed to hand out a few copies of Hoodownr early access.

For our own fun after 2 years with Hoodownr, we managed to throw a party at Tornio water tower. A very neat location on the top of the city, breaking our backs carrying tons and tons of lighting and sound equipment. Merja and Anna set up a great light show for the evening and people drank, danced and there was a really bad jam session as well. Anyway we felt lucky to get the venue and people told us later that they thought they had seen an UFO with the lights shining all the way to a harbor 15 km away.

Getting the app out there on google play has been really good. We've managed to have some visibility for our game on the local media and on Facebook as well. Two weeks ago we started getting more and more playtesters all over Finland to test the game and report bugs and feature requests. This has been a very good thing and many a bug and glitch was caught, debugged and fixed.

The early access version is still missing clan chat, achievements and some other stuff but is in a fully playable shape. All the rest will happen in the weeks to come. The app is available in Finland only until we are happy with the build and have all the key features in. We might do a release in Australia soon but we'd rather wait until we can move with a modestly complete build of Hoodownr.

So the days are more about responding to feedback and coding than writing blog posts. Currently our Facebook page tells us that we are very responsive to answer people's questions and that's the way we like it.

So the freely testable build of Hoodownr is behind this link and after downloading you can test it. If you're not in Finland, google will complain about your device not being compatible but that is not the case.

So please give Hoodownr a whirl, get a few friends to walk and explore with you. Give us feedback! Get an early access account and support development, you know it makes sense!

Best,

Sami
Hoodownr

early access time!

Hello and welcome to the obviously bi-annual blog post from the world of Hoodownr!

The good news is that we finally have an early access program to test the game on Android devices. And the program is live and you can get your early access account by paying a few euros here.

In case this is the first time you heard about Hoodownr, here's a brief recap:

Hoodownr is a very simple game to get you out of the door, alone or with friends. After installing the app (google play store link here 4.9.2015) you log in with your early access account, see a screen with map of the locality and press the play button. After that you walk somewhere, taking your time, chilling out, and then head back where you started using a different route.

The area you walked around becomes your hood in the game. You need to walk over one kilometer, thats the minimum size of the hood. This will take about 10 minutes if you walk non stop.
Upon returning to start, a magical window with a claim button appears. Tapping this button will send your run to the server. Walking alone results in a run that has the takeover power of 1. Walking with friends will result in stronger takeover power. This means that to take over a piece of land that belongs to another clan and that has been taken over by 3 people would take you three runs so ask a friend or two to join.

Hoodownr players always belong to a clan. When you get your first run, you are shown a list of clans available on the area. Join one. You can join another clan later on by making a run together with a member of that clan. On the final version of the game you can create your own clan and invite people into it.

There are all kinds of statistics on the user profile screen, kilometres walked, your adventurer status and so on. By going to places you haven't been to before, you have more fun and a better adventurer status.

That is the basic gameplay of Hoodownr. We've been working on the game for quite a long time now and have plenty of ideas of things to do in the world of Hoodownr. As an early access adopter you will be able to see new stuff coming in gradually and can take part in testing various ideas and giving feedback. We really like to play our game and we'd love to make Hoodownr into something you would enjoy.

Hoodownr does not need mobile data while you are on your run. We advise turning your phone to airplane mode while playing. We had a serious bug a while back that forced us to do just that on our test runs and it was very revealing to see various levels of panic when we had to be completely unaware about what Jeff Minter had tweeted about his sheep or some other crucial information people feed to twitter all the time. The message is to tune out at least for a while and lose your stress by doing so.

The game was designed to be unobtrusive, un-compulsive and free of spammy ads and malware. Protecting our players privacy is very important to us as we're dealing with your location data. If you so wish, you are completely anonymous to the other players around the area and your location won't be revealed to anybody unless you explicitly want that to happen. There is no opt-out scammy intelligence stuff built in the game and your personal data wont be sold to anybody ever.

The easiest gig to make Hoodownr viable and getting some kind of funding is to do exactly the opposite. We still feel very strongly about your privacy and want to see how the early access program works. We honestly appreciate you pitching in a few euros to play the game.

The state of our early access version is pretty good with basic gameplay. There will be bugs and unexpected things so as for every early access game, please understand that we are still working on this thing to ensure the best possible experience for everyone. With your early access code you will get access to the support forum to tell if you encountered a bug or have a feature request.

We're still in the process of thinking what features will be on the full version of Hoodownr when that happens. The project will evolve and we will discuss about it more frequently as there will be people actually playing and testing the game. We promise to look after you early access people even after the release.

The early access for single player is 12e, a six player combo pack to buy for you and your friends is 45e. The proceedings of the sales will go towards server bills, cat food and developing the best adventure game we can.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

Yours,
Sami
Hoodownr

back on black!

Wow, it's really tricky to write something on the blog after what apparently was a four months break. Better late than never I guess. I wrote a 'the year that was'-text on the new years but decided not to publish it because of way too much vitriolic words in it. ahem.

Basically last year was pretty much wasted on learning the ins and outs of game business and funding, the Finnish side of the story. We got accepted into a government program that prepares small businesses for funding, attended a bunch of pitching events and spent countless of hours preparing the pitches, writing applications and other kinds of things. It was very educational for sure, but didn't bring the game any closer to you, dear reader. Towards the end of the year I felt really burned out with the biz side of things and took december off from the project to reflect and re-evaluate. That was a good decision, being focused on only one thing for too long results in anxiety and Sauron appearing in your dreams. Taking breaks is good for you.

Fundingwise we did do well but didn't get funded. Out of 15 teams that were in the program, our coach told we were in the 5 that had potential to reach our goal. Got quite close a few times but things fell flat despite investors agreeing upon our numbers and things. Only one company out of those 15 got a few K euros in the end, a piss poor show in my opinion. Non-Finnish investors, come to Finland to get a deal, nobody's getting any love from the Finnish side of the investment industry, people crying over a few K, ho hum.

After the break we decided to not to waste time on funding talks and stuff like that but focus into actually making the game any which way. Progress has been slow with our main coder having a day job and life and babies happening. I've been tinkering with the server side of things and made progress towards the playable beta. Also we've got a new guy Tom on board, we met at Oulu Game Jam and he wanted to join the project and mess around with the android codebase. After a bit of thought the answer was Yes! So there's a chance of some client updates soon, fixes to all those nasty, nasty bugs that have been delaying the playable beta for too long now.

It's funny how a project can really really get to you. I watched some Butch Vig interview where he told about the time he and Billy Corgan became complete studio rats and locked themselves into a basement for the best part of the year, endlessly tweaking and overdubbing, working on something that eventually became the Siamese Dream. I could smell the panic and terror. I saw myself in the interview and it was scary.

It's good to step out for a bit I tell you. They say the world won't wait but it will. Another mantra that keeps me going is the one Jeff Minter said when he was still going for broke and doing iOS apps :'you are making a game because you believe there's a reason for it to exist'. Even after all this time with Hoodownr, I believe there's a reason for it to happen.

This last weekend we did a couple of test sessions, uncovering new bugs and adding up to the endless pool of crash logs. In two days we walked 10km in total, spilled our guts out about this and that irritating thing in life and took a good nap after the walks. I'm quite happy to see my user screen mileage go up steadily. It's just a number but still there's something gratifying to see a testimony of your time away from the computer, your time with your friends, real life =)

Siamese dream took it's time to reach completion and it became to be one of the best rock albums ever made. Hoodownr has taken a long time and we hope to bring it to you guys during this spring. Again there are a few things on the boil and now I've got my blogging motivation back (sort of), there'll be something more to see in the very near future, promise. Meanwhile you might want to check out the Amazing's new album here. Or listen to some Chassol, he's brilliant times three.


Keep on walking!
Sami / Hoodownr