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!