Coding Hello!

The past two weeks have gone by in a flash of coding. That's what game programmers do I guess. Code.

We set to build a playable build of Hoodo after Slush. People we met there were only interested to see the finished game and player feedback and stuff before they would discuss any funding. Now That is really helpful. Rule number one, please have a hit game that is making lotsa greenback, then you'll get funded. Right on!

We've had a few alphas for testers this year but the complaint has been the same, unless you actually get to play the game, it's hard to understand what it's all about. Mission: complete the game!

Under the hood, Hoodownr poses a few technically difficult problems. Unlike a mmorpg where you shard and instance groups of players, we don't shard and most certainly don't instance. Everybody who plays the game plays on the same global map. All 10 million of them. Or more. This is where things get a bit tricky.

I've been hacking away on the server side to make the magic happen. The existing code had to be completely rewritten and tested for all kinds of deadly situations that might arise. And on a game like ours, lot's of stuff will arise.

After a few weeks of hard work, everything looks pretty much the same as it did 2 months ago. Well there's the new player status and achievement screens but beside that, things look very alpha. Most discouraging but adding eye candy is the easiest thing.

There's a few bits and pieces still missing but it's close to playable now. We plan to have a few group tests with our friends who are getting new handsets for christmas and see how they feel about the Hoodownr experience.

Still an insane amount of stuff on the bucket list but things do get done one by one. Bugs fixed, issues resolved. Things are moving along.

Looks like the blog entry turned into a progress review and nothing interesting. Hmm. Maybe because it's about the work that goes into a game. Can get very tedious at times but that's how she goes.

One fun thing to write is: Parallella is almost ready. Take a look. They will be shipping boards in the next few days, can't wait to get mine!

Your boringly and uninspiringly and workingly

Sami
Hastur

exploring cityscape

Let's kick off with a quote from a Rush song called 'the Analog Kid':

'You move me, you move me
with your buildings and your eyes
Autumn woods and winter skies
You move me, you move me
Open sea and city lights
Busy streets and dizzy heights
You call me, you call me'

So what I want to talk right now is how we experience the city. I would think most of us are or have lived or travelled in a City. New York, Paris, Los Angeles, London, La Paz,Osaka.. all these vibrant and exciting places where it's all happening.

Or is it? One can have a very boring old time even in the coolest place of the world. When you live and work in a metropolis, the places you go to work and play easily become a repetition. One acknowledges the possibilities of a metropolis, all it's venues, hiking trails and millions of people but still feels stuck.

When traveling to a city, you might be stuck with a tourist group or if going solo, going from one attraction to another can become very daunting.

I think the problem lies in the way we look at the city. We sort of know what it is. Like a big machine made of sewage drains and bus routes, all those people spinning there trying to run the economics and chase their dreams. Everything in the city is built around and by the people and their dreams. And as people and their dreams are individual, so are the cities and the suburbs and train yards and everything in them.

I've been living in a few cities in Japan and Korea, visited a few in Europe and the states too. I had the luxury of time to stay for a few months at a time, sometimes years, and try and experience the place that I was in.

After spending a while in a place, you've found a few people you meet occasionally or frequently and a few places you hang out occasionally or frequently. Doing what you did when you arrived, that is, exploring new venues and things, sort of fizzles out. Going to new places becomes harder and more bothersome. You land at the spot where you are aware of the possibilities but still sort of stuck. Congratulations, you have landed at your comfort zone. Are we really comfortable now?

Breaking this mold you cast for yourself is one of our key motivations with Hoodownr. We need incentives to go out of our comfort zones and we need to be awarded for doing that. Everybody wants to see more and feel more. I don't think I'm wrong if I say that people, you, me, the man next door, are just waiting for the right cue.

Also we easily become stuck in our social circles. Cues do come from our own circle of friends in the form of trips to the countryside or to an art show but those cues might not come as frequently as we would like them. Hanging out with exactly the same crowd becomes daunting after a while, same faces, same conversations, similar things. Oh if only there was an external wake up and and adventure to boot.

Hoodownr strives to offer an external and casual cue. For yourself and for other people who are playing the game. Adventure can be a tap away after starting the app. Starting off solo and having other people on board while you're exploring happens. When you feel you are in a rut: start hoodownr, just hit play, take a bottle of water with you and head out the door. Take a camera with you. It's all out there for you. Discovery now!

'the focus is sharp in the city'.

Sami
Hastur

Don't throw stuff over the railing, it's not polite

Stig Bombing

More strange news from the convoluted world of Osuuskunta Hastur.

A few weeks back, we took part in arranging the unveiling of 'the Broken Lantern', a 8 meter tall stainless steel sculpture in the heart of Tornio city. The artists, Teija and Pekka Isorättyä have been hanging around at the camp every now and then and great times were had (evidence further down on older blog entries).

The town of Tornio paid for the costs of the sculpture that celebrates the towns village idiots and HC punk scene. For some reason or other, the town was not interested in creating any kind of unveiling event or artist reception so all us bright minds at Camp Hastur got together and planned and executed an opening ceremony and the reception.

Pia and Merja created the concept that included an opera singer, fire art, lights and performance activity. Teija and Pekka asked one of our friends, Miku (of the assembly 2013 rainbow rug booth hangout support fame) to have the opening speech. Usually someone from the town council has a very boring speech in such occasions but this time around is was our friend who got a bit of limelight. We'll he's in the town council too so it was all legit. =)

As we came back after slush, I got the news that the reception budget had been axed in the council. WTF! If a pro cross-country skier of equal magnitude made his return to the old home town, they'd probably send a limo and have a big party. But for artists, no matter how famous, the town didn'd want to spend a penny. Classic. We felt that this was quite outrageous and decided to arrange the reception ourselves. After all, the statue is about independent culture. I had 2 days to arrange the reception without any money, lights, PA..

With a little help from a friend here and there, we got the keys to and old bank building very near the statue, Miku arranged us a projector and a small PA set and Pia bought heaps of bubbly out of her own pocket. Arranging a party for 50-100 people in two day's notice is not easy I tell you. Especially if you want to throw a classy party. But we pulled it off, miraculously.

The opening went well, the party was groovy and the afterparty even groovier maybe =)

Next day me and Janne crawled to the art museum bazaar to meet up with artists who might have interest in doing an art show at camp Hastur. We met a few people and then there was this Mr. Stig who had some really cool graffiti style paintings. He told us we was not interested at all to come to this god-forsaken town but some of his friends basically forced him to pack his paintings and drive to Tornio.

Long story short, we are planning an art show with Stig PLUS he's doing some kick-o-ass-o graphics for Hoodownr! I'm posting a few samples of his stuff here, take a look. If you need a airplane hangar painted in vivid colors or something like that, contact stig, he's da man for da job!

This week it's still grinding away with hoodo pre beta. So much to do. More blogging later.

Ah btw we got the hoodownr specific website up at hoodownr.com , take a look!


Appreciate your local artist people!

Sami
Hastur

gaming or gaming?

Here's an interesting tidbit I read a few days ago. I'm quoting the text in full from Notzed's blog here:

Is it gaming or gaming?

The other big thing to come to light is the attempt to push the revenue model up significantly higher than the selling-disks model will ever be able to provide.

Here in Australia 'gaming' generally refers not to computer games, but to the computerised gambling industry. An awful lot about the intended revenue models (and mobile/tablet 'free to play games' in general) share a lot with this despicable industry which prays on people psychologically to fleece them of their cash. Even the words being thrown around like 'whales' come from directly that industry.

And gaming is big money compared to the computer game industry.

Unfortunately it seems 'computer games' are going to be headed at least in some part toward this gambling revenue model; anywhere there is this much money to be had it will be sought out actively. Companies that don't embrace it will be fighting for the scraps but hopefully they'll be able to survive and hopefully this is just a passing fad (or gets regulated out of the market).

This suddenly made a lot of sense to me. This past autumn I have followed the game industry events in europe, especially the UK. The trend seems to be that the gambling industry is developing ties with computer game companies. I wondered why those loathsome fuckers are accepted in the gaming events at all but now it's pretty obvious really. The mechanisms of gambling seem to be infiltrating the proper games industry as well.

Cannot say i'm really looking forward to a more complete amalgamation of gambling and gaming. I think that conditioning people to be more accepting towards an industry who's line of business is of basically ripping people off and creating an impression of 'It could be you!'. And the house always wins. What's next, gambling Mario now with crackwhores for kids?

The pay-to-win models work tho. And as a game producer I could reason that we're only supplying a demand. Just like your local meth dealer does. Supply and demand, It's business baby!

I wonder how much the expectation of multi-billion exits affects us startups. If you don't proclaim intentions of making a huge amount of revenue, you are not going to get funded. I think Notzed's observation about companies who are not comfortable with heroin-dealer tactics of ripping people off are accurate. You are left to fight for the scraps.

Our vision is not of pay-to-win or endless IAP's to keep up. The point of Hoodownr is to bring people together. Once purchased, it's yours to enjoy forever. There will be no ads for the most lucrative fields of ad revenue, gambling and pornography. In fact, there will be no ads at all. We feel people get bombed with enough advertisement propaganda already.

In the current state of affairs, I think this is the only sensible way for us and our players. If you're a die hard F2P proponent, think again. Think of all the ad crap that you've been force fed and the gambling-derived business models behind the attractive package. Time to uninstall some software guys.

Sami
Hastur

we got slushed!

A few notes about our Slush experience here.. totally tired after the three day trial..

So as usual, when there's an tradeshow or something happening, we hit the high gear with development. This time our goal was to get a gameplay demo of hoodo with most of the key features in. The features we had shown on the video but that we're not ready yet. And what a big piece of the cake it was. Totally burned out with all the development hell and testing, we were really burning the midnight oil for the current build.

Slush organization was really good, they provided a steady stream of emails with hints about how to connect with investors and the like. Studying investor profiles and learning about the investors hobbies and stuff was encouraged. Big plus for all that info so everybody could find the maximum benefit.

We are a small team so instead of studying loads of profiles and things we just skimmed thru the material and looked up people who were doing or funding interesting things. And worked on the build of course. At the venue, Z went to talk to the accelerators and small investor players. We registered late so there was no opportunity to pitch in front of an audience so I just did a lot of cold pitching to interesting people I met wherever. That approach worked out fine and I had a few very nice conversations with people high up the ladder.

Another thing that we noticed once again was the 'show me the playable demo'-thing. Startups and other future game devs, nobody is going to care about your video, be prepared to show your progress thru the demo. We had the party build ready online and prepared to give the link via qr-code and an nfc tag. Tap your phone to the tag, get the build, wham bang thank you mam. I saw nobody else having anything like that. NFC rocks!

All in all the venue was really chaotic and I found it hard to concentrate on the presentations. So many projects and companies all pitching on stage. I felt our direct approach was really good for us for making contacts.

So now there's a lot of following up to be done. We went thru all the business cards and things and made a plan of what to do next. The push for slush was a big step for the game, we've pretty much got all the basic elements of Hoodownr in place for further playetesting. It was really hard work but very encouraging to see how far we got in a very limited amount of time. Still a few bugs and additional features to throw in, I can see the rest of the year flying by really fast.

Well, it's time to get back to the old grindstone. Thanks all who we met and helped along the way - stäy tuned!


Sami
Hastur

Under the hood

Busy busy bees here hacking away with Hoodownr codebase. We're preparing a build for next weeks Slush 2013, tech company and investor meetup.

The slush build will have most of those fun things our playtesters during assembly2013 and wärkfest asked to have to grok what the game is about. We've also improved the build deployment process so installing it is easier than ever. This time around things should be really straightforward for testers.

On the backend side, we've been botbuilding and discovering all kinds of neat things we can do with the game. Neat things like making it easier and more intuitive. People who have seen the game already were surprised how easy it is to play. Newsflash: It just got even easier.

The backend work also contributes to a good few gameplay elements we're going to incorporate in Hoodownr. It's fun to see the project evolve.

Last night's build didn't work on Froyo anymore due to google policy. What followed was a mad rush to a local theatre production company unofficial headquarters to get the DOCOMO galaxy mk1 (a.k.a the shitphone) properly cracked and reflashed. Where else would you have your phone hacked?

After a few hours of Z and Jonttu trying to break the devices Japanese carrier-locked backbone and me and Merja talking about the situation with play rehearsal spaces here in Tornio, the phone finally yielded and runs Gingerbread now. And the latest build of Hoodownr.

Jonttu was wondering why we would support an old piece of crap like Gingerbread. The answer is obvious of course but it made me remember our four letter words project a few years ago on IOS. The game has a heavy self-organizing cell algo and we decided it should run on iPod mark 1. The algo was heavy even on a current iPod at the time but Dr Lukasz's madskills came into rescue and sure enough, the release is perfectly playable even on that iPod that looks like an early proto of a touch-screen device. If that's not a win I don't know what is.

Professionalism is the thing that is not immediately apparent goes the old Finnish saying. We want to show you more.

A beautiful snowy day in Northern Finland. After a cup of coffee, I'm going out to do a run with the latest build. Forgetting about testing while you're testing means you're doing something right.And that's the plan!

See you at Slush
Sami

Camper trailer

Just like Clark Kent works at day and flies at night, things move with Osuuskunta Hastur. Last friday we had an exhibition opening for Jouko Alapartanen, theme being 'art is here'. Jouko popped by a few weeks ago during a portrait painting gig in Ylitornio and mentioned he had a bunch of heavy old paintings stashed away somewhere that could be used for an art show. Things set in motion!

Jouko's paintings are really big and heavy and it was no easy feat to arrange the exhibition. Visiting sculptors Pekka and Teija Isorättyä  had a van but no winter tires and that problem had to be solved before any of the art could make it's way to camp hastur. When the paintings came in, we realized just how heavy they were and got into scratching our heads on how to display them without crashing the ceiling down. Welding wire to the rescue.

Again, unexpected things happened. Certain Mr Matti drops in out of the blue and turns out he's a pro building exhibitions and me, Florentino and Mr Matti start shuffling the pieces about. Inspirational 70's disco was played and plenty of bassist jokes were told. Didn't quite break our backs with the stuff but it took three grown men to set things up.

The opening was on friday and Jouko took a coach from Rovaniemi to join us. Well stocked with crisps and bubbly, we sat down to wait the guests to arrive. And arrive they did.

Instead of the usual flowers, the artist received a bottle of swedish blended cognag (such a thing exists in Finland too, a remnant of the wartime when cognag was mixed with vodka, google Jaloviina for more details). Jouko was well happy with the present =)

After all the hard work building the exhibition, the party turned into a total chaos at Isorättyä's workspace where we eventually ended up. Trombones and organ were played amongs the dementic robot sculptures. We made a hell of a racket for at least an hour, got too tired and then it was time to start pretending we're 9 years old and at school, Pekka was the headmaster. Local disco-taxi took us to the next afterparty in sweden (yep we switch countries fluently here). After the disco-taxi things got a bit fuzzy. ahem.

But we had a great time. Probably the craziest party in years. People of software engineering: Hang out with artists every one in a while, it'll do you good!

This week is preparing for slush 2013 amongs other, coding and promotion related things. Hope to see you at Helsinki next week everybody!

school organ licks!

shamanic drumming by Jyrki

Merja doing the Lappland witch singing

Blow blow Pekka!

auxiliary percussionist Pia passing

Pekka and Teija and a dementic robot