Hastubuzz - the buzzword!

Things have been really Hectic at camp Hastur. We've been setting up our dev environment with web dude Zergius Zirkus, cursing at erica getting massive timeouts from Iriscouch, got familiar with the blissful thing couchbase and getting deeper into geospatial JSON in an attempt to build a primeval back-end to hoodo. And moving the lawn of course.

I personally found that the more I'm getting involved with this project, the less time I actually have to code which is a bit of a bummer. I've been running around talking about the project and securing some cash flow to keep us freewheelers on daily potatoes, internet and refreshments. Importantsy stuff.

A few interesting people came over to Camp Hastur last week, on thursday we had Elina Stoor from Innorooms, we had a long meeting (lots of coffee out of a pot - oldskool Finnish stuff, no crappy machine coffee served here ever!) and discussed Elina's game, our business model and a bigger cultural project here in Tornio that's going to change things in a big way. Reclaim the streets!

Elina from Innorooms. Promised to bring sweetbread for the next meeting =)

Elina left and it was time to head for the mall to buy some plan B materials (Sergiusz erlang installation was borked and he couldn't push his couchApp, time for a plan B) and we bumped into a guy on a Jinbei, a japanese summer costume. This guy and his students were working on a sand sculpture, long story short, he came to visit us the next day.

As did another friend from the theater world. Turned out that the jinbei man, Janne, was a set designer and the theater friend needed to commission somebody to build a set for a small play. Winning synergy happened. Janne also told he's an avid LARP person (live action roleplaying) and we had the most interesting talk about the larp-elements of hood-o. So it's like the dude's rug, it ties the room together.

Sculptor Janne Aldberg!

A proper meal! Probably the first time somebody ever cooked anything that didn't say Saarioinen in it at camp Hastur. It was awesome!

Both Elina and Janne absolutely loved our space at the camp. I absolutely loved the flow of energy of these people brought in. We've been getting stuff done on many levels and keeping the doors open, it's been great!

This week is going to be busy with lots of admin stuff for me and more geocouch study for Zergius, there's a new build of hoodo to test courtesy of Lukasz and heaps of ideas to process and people to meet. Plus we're getting a few guests on Camp Hastur, it's going to be one whirlwind of a summer =)

If you happen to be around Tornio, contact us thru our Facebook Page and inform when you might be coming over. Join the creative buzz people. There's a ton of things to do together, a ton of things to get inspired at Camp Hastur!

That's it for now =)
Sami
Hastur

First week at Camp Hastur!

Some light entertainment here. It's been a week since I flew back to Finland and set up camp Hastur for everybody to get together to code, bounce off ideas or just relax in the evening.
Here's a few pictures from our camp with people who came in during the first week (there was more but I've yet to get everybody's permission =)

The cool camp Hastur 2013 signboard

Zergius the web dude with the Moomin coffee mug!

Guest from Japan, RF engineer extraordinaire, Mr Daido. Yes, there is a sauna at the house and we're using it!

The external screen experiment. Why this lady is holding her tummy is anybody's guess

Therapeutic after-work art session. It's not a cake, it's a beacon

And many more to follow. We're getting a slew of international professionals to visit our camp this summer, lot's of fun. Want to pop by? Page us on Our Facebook Page and like us too!
Back to geoCouch now. =)

Cheers,
Sami
Hastur

Expedition mode

Really busy week behind. Wrapped up stuff for hood-o, arranged a live event at Kobe Shonen and after a few sayonara parties, it was time to head back to Finland.

A really interesting thing happened last week, I got out to climb a nearby mountain to test hood-o. As usual, GPS signal didn't work out on the samsung (the device has no cell network so I'm relying entirely on the built in GPS, great for worst case scenario testing). I left the house, GPS icon blinking on and on and on.

Getting closer to the mountain, the icon still blinks and my voyage had no starting point. It's hot, i'm getting sweaty and climbing the steep hills, all the way to the top. There's a small temple up there with a magnificient view over Kobe, the sun and the sea. Took out the device and yes, it had found GPS and we were in business.

I wondered around the mountain on my hood-o mission and sat down below the plum trees, the noise from the city was really quiet and the scent of the forest simply breathtaking. Heading down the hill I stumbled down the narrow rocky paths and made it back down. Venturing on, I headed towards the place I started (I remembered they had a vending machine over there), climb climb climb.

There was no vending machine. I sat down exhausted. Another gaijin walks down the hill. In Japan we rarely talk to the other gaijins who threaten our gaijin uniqueness in the country. But this time around I said hello, the gaijin said hello and we had a nice chat and headed down the hill. I told I'm testing a new game that's about experiencing things, he told me he's an experimental musician from Scotland.

Moving on, the scotsman got intrigued about the game and asked me If I have heard of Psychogeography and I had to admit I hadn't. Sounded very intriguing. We parted ways, I went home and read the wikipedia article. Bam. This is exactly the thing. So bizarre that on the only day I actually could be bothered to climb the local mountain despite exhaustion and hangover, I met this dude who knows about this thing that's exactly what I'm trying to do.

Hood-o in action ladies and gentlemen. I'm not going to say too much but.. we're working hard here setting up Camp Hastur in Finland to build this thing for you. So you can also experience the wonder. Wait.

Here's some music from the man on the mountain at the right time. Me name dropping? Never. =)

The pitch

So the past month we're been busy at work with our super secret project, codenamed hood-o. As things moved on, we've build the handset proto to test the game and our ideas in the real world and so far it looks very nice indeed! 

So what is hood-o all about? Here we go.

Hood-o is an unique game of exploring one’s surroundings in a meaningful way. People in general are stuck with a very small range of movement and experience boredom seeing the same things every day. Hood-o challenges people go out of their way to experience and engage in different things within their environment. Instead of being just another augmented reality gimmick, Hood-o is engaging and keeps people finding new context with their environment and the people around them. Hood-o has the makings of not just a game but a social movement that changes people’s perception about the world around them.

What I think is wrong with the gaming culture these days is that the virtual friendships and connections hardly lead to any real-life activities. Maybe it's just because I hang out with geeks. The sports/outdoorsy people tend to have a stronger real-life connections than gamers thru sports clubs and sporting events and they gain social value from it. I think the problem of computer games is that no real incentives to form real-life connections outside the gaming forums or chat rooms are presented. 

The games companies want their people to form communities because Communities Are Gold, they bind people with the game and create a sense of commitment to the product. And that is all fine and well. What we're trying to do is to have the real-word interaction built into the game and produce all these little opportunities for even the geeky or shy people really to meet each other and Do Stuff. 

Hood-o is designed in a way that it's perfectly enjoyable when played alone but to get further in the game, actual interaction with real people is imperative. We've designed a number of little play-related tasks that vary from simply saying hello to running events with thousands of people in the game.

So the focus of the hood-o is in bringing people together. It's about gamifying a very ordinary activity, making it an extraordinary one. There are no space wizards from Uranus, all that stuff that appeals only to nerds is done away with so even people with no interest in computer gaming can pick it up and play.

Without saying too much, hood-o is for the body and soul. Our game will get the masses moving. I'm sure we've discovered a very interesting concept here and we're pushing hard to finish the proto and do a few VC rounds this summer along other things.

Todays build of hood-o looks very good. Dr Lukasz has really been rocking it on android studio this week, now it's our (the designers) turn to get of our butts and playtest.

Finishing the blog and heading out for my pre-alpha hood-o kicks now, catch you soon!

Updates for the sake of future customer security

It's the most beautiful day in Kobe, very warm and pleasant and I'm indoors writing this blog. There must be something wrong with the world.

Today there was an update on the Parallella Blog. They've managed to run Ubuntu on the test-run version of the board. Mr Olofsson tells us to keep checking the site in the next week or two because there will be SIGNIFICANT updates. Excited!

I've been checking on their site for like six months now. And the forum. Especially the forum. Today's interesting bit was about wiring the HDMI transceiver to the Xilinx chip. Some of the readers pointed out a possible problem with the current wiring and Mr Olofsson himself reacted and the problem was explained to him in detail. This little interaction could make parallella even better and more efficient. Oh the miracles of open source. Why did it take so long for us to get here?

I don't follow too many blogs (the designers do) but I do check whats going on with Haiku-OS, parallella and the couchDB world a lot. It's quite interesting how much anticipation builds when you follow somebody doing something interesting, you feel like a little boy again, bicycling thru the frozen wastes of northern Finland only to check if R-kioski has the latest issue of Your Sinclair. Except you sort of don't have to do that anymore and everybody's getting fat. But that's a side point really. Plus we're making a game that helps you to not get fat. ahem.

So here are some updates from this week at Camp Hastur. Dr Lukasz indeed whipped up a nice pre-pre-alpha of our super secret project (handset edition). I walked around a lot, playtesting. Immediate health effects right from the start, I got a flu and was down for three days. Don't let this happen to you kids. But that too is a side point.

So we tested and debugged, version after another and now things are pretty good even with a shaky & wobbly Samsung Galaxy mark 1 with no network. This week the pre-pre-alpha will be more or less finished for our purposes and the work shifts to bombing geoCouch with interesting queries and conjuring up sexy views to lure in investment. Interesting stuff, well worth keeping us bookmarked ladies and gentlemen.

There's nothing yet I can say is SIGNIFICANT (at least any of the stuff I can reveal here, it is a super secret project after all) but it's not that insignificant either. All these little jittery movements inside the mass of Osuuskunta Hastur contribute to the thing SIGNIFICANT later on.

So basically you can all go home now and ignore us for a few weeks at least. Or read the Parallella Blog. Or check out what LLamasoft is up to. There's a whole wide world outside Hastur I tell you.

Darn. Gotta take another look at the parallella forums. Can't wait. =)

Back in Black!

First blog entry in like two months, woo-hoo! A brief report of things that are going on with Osuuskunta Hastur and The dead of the dead follows..

Two months ago I packed my bags to spend a few months in Japan, meeting friends and working on DeDD. Getting organized took a lot of time, dusting off the part of my brain that can handle all those Japanese situations took even longer. It was fun to come back tho, seeing all my friends and going to hundred different live shows. DeDD documentation and players guides were crafted along other things. But as there was nothing really to show, I just postponed writing the blog. Sorry About That!

We got into talks with my programmer friend, Dr Lukasz, about another project that would be more lightweight than DeDD, one that we could whip up and test in a few days. Dream on, that little project got our designer and myself really excited and we were banging away on the design docs and related things. Nothing is as simple as it looks.

But now the preliminary design of the Super Secret Sideproject is wrapped up and Dr Lukasz is blasting away on the compiler, we will have a pre-pre-alpha testing version for this coming saturday. Using a hacky command line dark side manouver, the binary will be planted on our android handsets and we can go out and test the thing. Next week will be used for fixing bugs and finalizing stuff that's going to be needed to make a bit of a video demonstration of the game.

I'm almost tempted to post our elevator pitch (yeah, we still believe in elevator pitches and we wear bell bottomed trousers as well) but because of this and that, that's going to have to wait.

It had been a year since I met Dr Lukasz and he told me he's been involved in gps/geospatial data application development. Well that's a curious coincidence I thought, we've had an idea for a game in the geospatial world for a quite a long time but for some reason (DeDD?) had done nothing with the idea. I talked to Lukasz about the idea, he was excited and wanted to jump in and code some. Whoosh!

I'm spending the rest of the month here in Kobe as there is a lot of stuff to do and people to meet. When I leave, there'll be a nice thing to show back home, i'm sure we'll get an excited response with the Super Secret Game demo. =)

So time passed, we're not dead and the Dead of the Dead is not dead. More stuff here soon, keep your peepers peeled!

Oh. Call for arms! Please like our page on facebook by clicking this link! Every like encourages us, please show your support and tell your friends too.

Greetings from the land of the rising sun, strangers!
Sami

The vidiot game

Rant alert, standards have fallen in adult entertainment as Jackie Treehorn would say.

I've spent the past couple of weeks talking with our designers about Dead and trying to find some cohesive angles to the game development and design and where we should go next. So it's not that we're dead in the water with no postings, we've just been busy.

It's my impression that finding proper investment for a game requires the designers to make a list of items that describe in which ways the game will be Exactly The Same as the handful of successfull CCG's around. Read again, it has to be Exactly the Same. Every developer seems to complain about the same thing. The budget for producing Dead is no small amount of money so anything we present to potential investors has to be tight. Exactly the Same - business models are viewed as 'tight' if i'm not badly mistaken.

We took a close look into a CCG that one of our designers plays almost every day. That game is available on Kongregate, written in flash, has severe crashing bugs and looks like the graphics were drawn by a retarded child on Corel Draw 1.0. It certainly looks and behaves like a complete piece of turd, if you'd compare it with say the Vidiot Game, vidiot game would come on top for innovation and staggering graphics.

I've been watching Kongregate over the past four years as a platform to host my games. Sure enough the platform has lots of users and a few popular games. Is it just me that thinks most if all of the stuff on Kongregate is of very low production value. And people seem to be ok with that. Why?

Thinking of something I produced sitting on a page that's full of these ugly widgets with 256 different font types and sizes makes me shudder. It looks so bad but still people are ok with that. Why?

Maybe it's the band analogy thats gnawing away inside me. If my band had the best shit but no recognition, would I do a tour with two other bands who have recognition but that are rubbish? The answer is always no. Why would I like my band to be associated with rubbish? No effing way.

We went thru a lot of monetization models and things in our research and the staggering fact is that you have to do all those dirty powercreep-inducing manouvers to keep people playing and buying. Never lose sight of your begging bowl seems to be the rule. It can look like crap but still you can beg. And the most astonishing fact is that people actually spend money on a game item that basically is a piece of steaming dog's excrement done in corel draw 1.0 and that gives you +3 mana for the next 3 minutes for your pay-to-win kicks. What absolute rubbish. Am I the only one who's pissed off about this kind of tactic?

As our mission is to give good production quality and good value, we've decided to produce a physical version of Dead. Yup, real cards. Maybe you remember those, things that look cool on the store shelf, you pay for them, take home and open the packaging, feel the new card smell, shuffle your cards in awe and focus on the instructions on How to play. Call up a couple of mates, grab a few beers and have fun. Magic moments. And that's what we want to give to you guys, magic moments with your friends, memories for life.

The 'real' version of Dead doesn't mean there won't be any online fun ever, oh no. The online development is alive and well and we'll keep on building. But it's completion is still ways ahead so we're doing the paper version first. No powercreep, no begging bowls. Just buy the deck and the game will be as much fun as day one even 20 years after you bought it.

That's what i call value. Exciting things ahead, we'll keep you posted!