the A-camp

It's the last week of august, the leaves are turning yellow and autumn will kick in in a day or two. The house we enjoyed during the summer is being sold this coming friday and Camp Hastur is going down as a nice memory of summer 2013.

There's still a few weeks to go at the camp but I'd like to look back a little bit for what was achieved. We got quite hot-headed about bringing Tornio it's cultural powerhouse, a space for artists and musicians. A lot of ideas and information were shared at our voimala-meetings and elsewhere, a lot of information was passed during sauna-sessions with people in the know and so on. The future of the space is still unclear as the owners of the building are in a bit of a situation with it. It's too valuable historically to tear down and at the same time they want to sell it for an unreasonable price to the city they fucked over a few years back when they moved the production of the Lappland beer over to southern finland. Many lost their jobs. Many of our friends lost their jobs. Bad blood. The negotiations haven't been good at all, there's a lot of work to be done until that space will open it's doors for creative people.

But the culture house project certainly did bring people together. Us, Innorooms and Merja Ruth all mixed and mingled quite a lot. Elina's business training game project moved on, we tested it and pitched ideas and got very valuable training on how to define our mission and market and our legend of sorts. Elina is moving on with her training game and the first public session of it is next month in Ireland. Not bad at all.

Yesterday we went to listen to Merja's presentation about ADHD, the bad bits and the good bits. It was most interesting, Merja had done a great job and come up with a very clear package that she will take on the road soon. Johanna got into Z-vector and is exploring it's possibilities, lot's of waving of arms in front of a kinect going on. Her first Z-vector gig is this coming weekend at our Hasturock-rock festivus. Really exciting stuff!

We of course have worked on the game and setting up investor meetings and the like. The feedback from the people we've met so far has been totally awesome. We Have Struck Oil - kind of awesome. There will be some news from that department soon =)

There will be a bigger Hoodo playtest coming next week once we get Hasturock out of the way. This time around we're having the usual slew of bands, sound installation, short movies, wicked visuals, dj boombasto, poetry reading.. it's going to be the biggest yet! Hey it's our second bigger event and it's already all over the place, watch out for next summer! =)

One more fun detail here: we've (re)discovered backgammon! 9 years ago I found this Finnish backgammon strategy guide at an old books store in Helsinki. Officially endorsed by Spede Pasanen himself, bought it immediately for seven euros. Then one day in july we went to the recycle shop with Z to hunt for some cheap vinyls to play at the camp and discovered a curious looking suitcase that just said 'SPEL' on it. Spel means a 'game' in Swedish. 7 Euros for a spel. Deal!

And sure enough it was backgammon and the guide fit inside the case perfectly. Immediate scratchy Vivaldi fueled backgammon revival begun. Surprisingly many of our friends were fond of the game and we've been playing quite a lot. Even last night when I scored my first gammon win against Merja. Not only backgammon is retro classy, it fits perfectly to the mood of Camp Hastur, meaning it doesn't need a charger and you can play it even when you are drunk. =)

Before we get kicked out of the orange house we're definitely having a backgammon tournament at camp hastur. Very jet-set, by invitation only darlings.

So the rest of the week is building the event and a bit of coding here and there, hoodoing of course and then the saturday shall happen. If you happen to be around, join the fun, Osuuskunta Hastur style!

Sami
Hastur

Spede was Da Man!

perfect backgammon music

Backgammon frenzy spreads!

Merja's lecture at Innorooms

GPS related stuff

Really interesting article about GPS and us. Take a look!

Ted talk about GPS spoofing

artist spotlight - Robert Taira Wilson

A bit of entertainment here. Take a look at Robert Taira Wilson's video, great stuff. Rob's an international man of mystery currently based in Osaka, Japan. He played a blazing gig at our Nightspot event at Kobe shonen on may.

A bit of rock and roll is good for a change, besides working on the game, we're doing our annual band event, Hasturock, at the end of the month with a sizzling line-up. If you happen to live around Tornio, 31.8 is the date to party!

Without further ado, Robert 'Tiara' Wilson:

the bling

This week has been a week of graphics stuff for me. Messing around with a new website layout and things, screening images proposed for our promo vid and the like. Making things look prettier and more current, woo hoo.

Z has been hacking away on node.js building a nice bot skeleton for our army of bots who deal with the players conquests and make scientific gps-error filtering calculations. Starting for 0 node.js experience he's grasping the ins and outs of xmpp and doing all that on node. Looks good.

As always, we've been testing a lot. We opened a tumbler account where we post snapshots from our hoodo runs, you can find it here. Not much narrative there yet but you can get a glimpse of what we have seen on our little trips.

Nice amount of playtester data was accumulated over the week. Because of this and that, we had to shuffle a few things around on the server so your runs wont be registered in real time but don't worry, once the client side gets an update, all your trips will be transported. Please keep an eye on our facebook page for client update news.

The coming week there's still more paperwork and things, same old story, manage a project and you won't get much chance to code. That's the way she rolls I guess. A few more weeks until we get our promo video, I'll post it here as soon as it's ready.

Nothing too casual for this time around, back to the cycle of coffee, coding and cigarettes.

Sami
Hastur

The Assembly that was

So two weeks ago Assembly organizing invited us to summer assembly 2013 to promote our game in Helsinki. The week had been really busy with us getting the alpha playtestable, then having a 10 people playtest and 2 day shooting of the promotion video. We got the news on friday and set off coding more stuff for the assembly edition. The invitation came on the last minute and we had to decide whether to focus on our booth or the game. We decided to keep coding to get a nice playable Assembly alpha and posted help requests on facebook if people could help out with 'decorating' our booth.

The beginning of the week was really hectic with testing and bughunting. On wednesday we packed our boots and skis and headed to Helsinki by car. I took my Haiku laptop with me to use with the monitor (and to show off haiku a bit =). Janne contacted us that he has got a nice thick rug and a few baggy chairs for us to use. We drove to Vihti to pick up the items and met Janne's friend, mr Manninen who is this cool roleplaying dude, discussed about our game with him and headed to Hartwall Areena to set up the booth.

The areena was buzzing already. The staff were busy building the stage and various big things, we were totally knackered so we just threw our stuff at our spot next to the Skrolli magazine and went to our accommodation. There was definite excitement in the air!

Thursday came and me and Zerkus headed to the areena with our computers and things. Getting to the venue was interesting, there was a huge queue of people with their computers and monitors waiting to get in. We got past the queues with our sponsor status, rock star status didn't hurt at all =)

Setting up the booth, we pulled the rug, the bean bag chairs and things. As there was no time, I hand painted a few signs and things that we taped on the monitor and the tables. The tables were really ghetto so we covered them with maps of Tornio, a fun little detail nobody took any notice of. I found this sparkling hippie scarf at the accommodation and we used it as a tablecloth. The Osuuskunta Hastur booth looked like a piece of Camp Hastur (some people commented like that after seeing it) and we sat down to promote and demo the game.

It was a lot of hassle trying to pass the build on with bluetooth. We had to opt to sending the build as email which also was a hassle. Distributing unsigned alpha builds takes a bit of time. However we had a nice stream of people all the way to come and talk to us and download the Assembly edition.

Towards the evening Mr Miku came to hang out with us. Miku the youth councellor dude was attending a gaming seminar in Helsinki and assembly was a part of that experience. On the bag chair he sat and we pushed along. It felt really nice to have somebody of our friends to come over. We did a 13 hour day and headed to the airport to pick up Basim who'd flown in from England.

Everything was really smooth, Bazzer brought us a huge bottle of Jägermeister to celebrate his first ever trip to Finland. Miku had bought two sacks of meatballs and into the oven they went. Reggae was played and the meatballs and fries and especially the Jägermeister disappeared quickly. I noticed the nights down south are way darker than in Tornio as we were chatting away on the balcony. A total conking out happened.

Friday came and went. Basim was really impressed about the event, 4000+ people gaming, coding and doing seminars and things. We timed our shifts at the booth so everybody could go to see a compo or a seminar. Me and Baz went to see this presentation called 'Want to start a game studio? Prepare to be f'd!'. Could't agree more with that one, there were two different studios and I could totally relate to their experiences. rust0 had made this little game called Beaver Karts that we immediately liked =)

We experienced the tron dimension of the world with z-vector and oculus rift, really trippy. Made me feel that oculus rift is going to change the game, amazing stuff I tell you. There were a lot of demos and intros and it was a lot of fun to observe the swarm of thousands of screens yelling and bellowing when the 'kill all lights' video was shown on the big screen. Really cool to see the demos on the huge screen with kick ass sound, well worth experiencing.

Of course we made a few new friends, the Polish team behind Createrria were super nice hippies and me and Baz ended up going to the shadow event Boozembly with those dudes. There is a small forest nearby with kids swimming pools full of beer, sound system and all manner of lights and things. And of course people selling all kind of refreshments. We staggered back to the accommodation at 3am, it was really cool to take a long walk in Helsinki, the night was warm and we had a very nice conversation with Basim about where to head next. I realized I have to get to England pretty soon and spend some time there presenting and planning.

three winged hussars!

Zergius' custom made space invader party socks

Osuuskunta Hastur hardcore

blessed trippyness with Z-vector! Amazing!

The Assembly was really great for us. We got to talk to so many people, I raved on about Parallella and Haiku-OS to a number of geeks and hackers and they were well excited. People tested our game and we got great feedback and ideas. Our team felt a big surge of energy, friendship and motivation to steer the game towards the launch date. I'd definitely recommend attending Assembly whether you're a gamer or a game developer. Good stuff!

We came back home last night, it was really nice and serene at Camp Hastur. I put some candles on and played the Amazing's first album (the one with the white cover, it's amazing) and just chilled out after all the hustle and bustle. Z fell asleep immediately. It was good to be home. We've got some nice stuff coming out soon so please keep an eye on Osuuskunta Hastur!

Sami
Hastur

Group Test Party!

Last week was total insanity at Camp Hastur. A week before, mr Makkonen of Jo-Jo the dog suddenly crashed our party and told grim tidings about close deadlines looming, the shooting dates for our promo movie had been set and that meant we had to get the client and serverside ready for a playtest session with our friends. Makkonen left, party went on, I have a vague memory of Burt Bacharach compilation album coming out at some point followed by folk music from Toohoku prefecture.

On friday, we got our chainsaws out to kill our darlings to get a semi-alpha-proto-playtest build ready for wednesday, the day before the shooting activity. I called up everybody to join the playtest and we got a really excited response, one of the participants cancelled her luxury yacht trip to attend the playtest. The weather was crap but we pushed on. I remember almost freezing to death riding the hasturped on saturday night. brr!

The beginning of the week we were testing and bugreporting like crazy. Lukasz did a great job providing constant updates to the android client, I got a Nokia Lumia to explore the win phone platform and we walked, ran, rode all manners of vehicles and tested hoodo. Tuesday night Mr. Olli came over from oulu with his synthesizers to join the test. Whisky happened. Anyway, on wednesday we got a great group of people at camp Hastur, eager to do some psychogeography slash urban drifting without really knowing what they were up against. At 5pm we set off drifting.

boys and girls on a mission

now where do we go now from here. major confusion!

part of hoodoing is discovering cool joints like this

bright heads together now. it's a window to another dimension!

The field test went well, a number of bugs were discovered, all in all most people grokked hoodo and we got comments about how easy this game is to play. This time around we had the DB in place so people's runs were recorded for future fun and gps error trapping purposes. Many things we hadn't thought of turned up and there was a lot of writing of notes for future reference. The ultimate thing was Lukasz's autoupdater that took away a lot of pain installing new builds, thanks you very much for that!

I'm going to write another post about the video shoot which was fun (and HOT!) but right now I have to continue coding because: We got selected to present Hoodo at Assembly 2013 in Helsinki this week!

We're producing a special assembly build of Hoodo client and a fun mission to all of the assemblites who want to give hoodo a go. We'll be having the Osuuskunta Hastur Booth at the lounge (Baby, where else?) and you can meet us there from thursday to sunday, ask for the build and go test the game.
Still a lot of preparing to do but today's fresh build looks good and we will be ready to rock!

Catch you all at assembly 2013!

Sami
Hastur

Moving on

And getting closer. The last weeks have been hard coding and designing like always. We came up with a snazzy mission tray for hoodo that allows you to save your progress and pick up where you left off earlier. Our point is still to make our game as transparent as possible with the least amount of UI interaction during gameplay and that goal is getting closer.

The last weeks we've had a bunch of people visiting Camp Hastur and I've explained about Hoodo and even let a few people to playtest our current build. The idea about forgetting about your handset while playing seems to provoke quite interesting reactions from the playtesters. Like 'All i have to do is to hit start and put the phone in my pocket? Really?'. Except that later down the line you don't even need to hit start =)

We had Radio Perämeri visiting, they did a nice interview about Camp Hastur and what we're up to. There's a summary in Finnish here. Take a look at the strange lingo. =)

Our current pre-alpha build (.19) went thru some heavy shuffling about on code side, this weekend is for some field testing and bug hunting. Hopefully .20 is the one we can use for the first bigger test run with 10+ players on the field, a lot of coding but should manage. I'm hoping to have a team test run before the promotion video shoot thats later next week so the actors would actually be clued in what's happening on Hoodo. No sleep till the playtest!

One more item of interest: Bazzer suggested we'd allow people to work on the hoodo code and spin and mangle the game the way they want. We decided to build and publish a little modding API that allows people to make their own missions and things easily with HTML5+JS. This desicion worked quite well even before we can offer modder access. The mod view solved a few problems of testing and development on our side even now. We get to mod our own game now, how cool is that ;P

Anyway it will be quite exciting to see what people come up with. Beautiful things, spooky things. Again there's some modding news to tell later on.

This entry became quite short and dull but that means the game is moving on quickly. We'll post a few pictures of the team run test thingy + video shoot next week, keep them peepers peeled!

Catch you all soon
Sami
Hastur