Life-note

And if you actually got that, we should totally meet. I have no idea what the Tank or Healer is, but I am probably both those guys?
In addition to my intended post this week, I wanted to throw in an important note. I will be going to San Fransisco (which, as a note, is literally half a world away) to talk about, show and play Cloudbuilt. So, let’s babble a bit to justify this as a “Life Note”. It’s the first time to the Americas, I’ve been looking forward to going to GDC for years now and… yeah. It’ll be great. But I don’t run a blog to talk about my life (I’ll save that for my retirement, if the world cares… hah, who am I kidding, this is the Internet!), and I don’t post this just to express happiness. I want to reach out for finding meetings. I would love chatting with press, of course: Being a small indie studio, making news is our best option. We make news only by having a cool game. And do we have a cool game! Which of course is super-subjective, and I of anybody have some kind of self-interest to claim so; but, honestly, having played the game for months I still find it fun to try new challenges and revised levels. But, hey, don’t take my word for it […]

Life-note: Going to GDC, looking for meetings

 in Business / Life-note / Note  tagged Cloudbuilt / game play / gaming / GDC13 / san fransisco by
I just got back from a hectic, crazy fun and invaluably… valuable week in Cologne. I could do a long write-up about this with impressions, and I will later, but for now I’m happy to just break my own silence to say that’s what’s been up. A collegue reminded me after my last post that what I type here could colour the perception of Coilworks. So I really should stress that what I type here is my own opinions and thoughts.

Back from GDCE/gamescom 2012

 in Life-note / On Things in Games by
Wow, what a week! Last weekend, we at Coilworks uploaded an announcement trailer for our game Cloudbuilt. A colleague expressed an expectaton of at least 500 views, which I found optimistic. We had worked hard on the promotion for Ovelia: The Wake, reaching just a few hundred, so how would we reach that when most videos on youtube reach next to no-one? Oh, how wrong we turned out to be.

Finally, Breakthrough

 in Business / Life-note / On Things in Games by
Last year, I volunteered at “Game Developer Conference – Europe” in Cologne, and I’m happy to say I’ll get back this year! Last year’s visit was really great. A lot of new people to meet and greet, loads of valuable presentations and my first impression of an international games fair. It was probably the latter that left the strongest lasting impression. I had checked the prices before-hand, in an attempt to get my head around the cost-structure of marketing, and I noticed it was *expensive*. Like, a thousand dollars per square meter expensive. Just for the floor space. So when I entered the halls and saw giant monters with loads of empty space in them, I was baffled – how these guys could complain about risk and profits and spend this kind of money on empty space was beyond me (it later turned out those plazas was intended to hold a crowd, so it wasn’t so wasteful after all). And on top of that, it was 5-10 meter high structures, massive screens and speakers for trailers and of course dozens of computers for the games, gladly with multiple screens so the line outside the booth could watch. Add to that, […]

Pre-travel GDC-Europe/gamescom -12

 in Life-note / On Things in Games  tagged gamescom by
While I studied, I believed starting your own would be some kind of short-cut to having a job. After all, all you have to do is start it and no-one can filter you out!  I sure missed an important aspect of it – you want to be paid to really call it a “job”. And getting there takes a lot of time and a lot of work. Thankfully, we’re fortunate enough in Sweden to have government-funded university education for up to six years of studies. Which means, you can start that company and study to get the money you need. Drawback, of course, being you have to spend time studying. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Here in Skövde, we’ve also been fortunate enough to have an “entrepreneurship education”, a one-year program teaching very basic economics, marketing and project leading, all while writing a business plan. And the best part have been that it basically leaves you loads of time for that company you’re working on! But, as I mentioned, that means you sooner or later will need to put time aside to study. Like a weekend. Like right now. And, as with all students who have to study something difficult to […]

Distractions

 in Life-note / Prototype  tagged diabetic aid / entrepreneurship / studies / video games by
As promised before, here’s the first by-weekly blog post about running a start-up dev studio. During these weeks, I’ve been booking meetings for Nordic Game Conference, prepared a company pitch for Connect (a company serving as a meeting place between entrepreneurs and venture capitalists), visited the Start-Up Day 2012 in Stockholm and made a major change of course on our first project. Trouble is, I can’t go into the details. Not because it’s boring to read (I’ll make it fun to read!), but also because I perhaps should guard the details for now. Which is a shame. Running a new business requires lots of time (and I’m far from the one spending most hours at work), yet there’s not much to talk about regarding it. Very much because of this, “a secretive life” has become a recurring phrase in my mind the two last weeks, knowing I had to write something here. I’d have liked bringing pictures, too, but I sadly didn’t. Maybe next event… Well, that’s for the day-to-day work (I’m at a computer, like so many other people). I could write about the start-up day for a bit, though, because that was a fun event. Very much because […]

A secretive life

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This is kind of embarrassing. I started this blog back in… 2007, I think, in an attempt to post once every week and show the world how much I knew in time to have been running for a bit when I would need to find a job. It didn’t really turn out that way. The last post is from early 2011 – in other words, I haven’t written anything for a whole year! So I’m not even near one post per week. However, I have no wish to try – I’ve been doing a lot of useful things since then. I made myself a job, as CEO (and producer and designer) at the start-up Coilworks. For a 2011 summary, you could just as well read the Coilworks 2011 retrospective. There are some episodes I’m not adding there, which I may or may not wish to write about in the future. However, leaving this blog behind wouldn’t be that smart of me. Now I’ve got several brands to build (my own, my company’s and the company’s game’s), so that mean I should use this more rather than less. It also mean I should have what I use cause some effect. For […]

Revision to the blog

 in Blog-note / Life-note  tagged blogging / gaming / producer designer / social-media by
Here we have a good example of why you should think a few more times than one when starting a series of posts. In this case, I found out many of these points were half-finished, although they could be considered “finished” if you tweaked the goal a bit. So instead of writing one post for each, I’ll write this one post, and then be able to go on with other ideas. The “Learn UDK or Unity” point was pretty much fulfilled. I did learn the UDK level editor with their BSPs (geometric shapes) and Terrain tool, Kismet (a “visual scripting language” i.e drag and connect boxes of conditions/actions and logic) and, towards the fall and winter, made a half-working HUD, menusystem in Scaleform and applying it to UDK, as well as a loading screen and splash screen. The “Learn Photoshop” point was pretty much fulfilled. Although what I initially implied was “learn to draw”, what I did learn was how to use photoshop is used with pretty bad drawing skills to create something nice anyway. Sure, the menus and interface may not look amazingly super-good, but they do look quite alright. I suspect I should put a screenshot up to […]

Goals of 2010: Part 2 – rounding up (already)

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Some may wish to say this story is way beyond the scope of what its story matter should entitle. I say this story is the end-point of a development where I get to speak about it, its intentions and results. It’s about a business card, but it’s just as much about design and development (note that there’s no “game” in those two words). The problem I wanted to solve was this: Game Expo “GameX” was approaching, as well as the industry summit Nordic Game Stockholm Summit, and I wanted to gain new contacts and make an impression. I wanted the impression to be remembered and show that I was a clever designer. I also wanted it to have a professional quality.

The development of a business card

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Some people make promises for the new year, such as “I will start training” or “I will heat healthier”. Fun thing is they never seem to hold, and I’ve only taken one once (I was around 11 and decided to not use any bad language – it held until February when I thought a class-made had flushed my glove). I think it’s pretty silly, but after I decided to not continue with the Student Union-activity in December last year, I set up eight goals which I wished to fulfil with this new-found spare time to direct my efforts. Funnily, life sort of made me fulfil seven of those eight goals in perhaps not the way I intended, but still with acceptable interpretation. I intend to list those ten goals and how life fulfilled them for me. It’s game related, but primarily it’s because there’s a few fun stories in there and it allows me to show off some actual work. However, listing the thinking behind each of these points would take an insane amount of text to deal with, and no-one would really bother reading it all. So I intend to split it into several parts. Here’s the goals: 1. […]

Goals of 2010: Part 1 – introduction

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Initially just a “I’m still alive”-post, I got a bit mad and wanted to do a short re-cap of my 2009. The blog hasn’t been active, and as such can’t really reflect what I’ve done this year (the fact that I want it detached from my life just strengthens it), but some – if not most – of it is related to games, game design and “hey, employers, look at this blog – ain’t I awesome?”. The year of 2009 began with January, snow and a dawning game developing project. My first with a team, actually, and a first where a complete team intending to finishing a game within a time-limit. Only been doing stuff like writing down ideas, try to build maps (only to give up half-way through because there was neither plan nor vision behind it) and throwing together some not-so-good WoW GUI:s, it was an exciting period – at times. Obviously, game development is not all fun and games all the time. It can actually be rather dull, tiresome and draining at times. Such as when you enter the “office” in time and, when your meeting time passes by, needs to call everyone who’s late, only to […]

Looking back at 2009

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This Saturday, I and a handful of my teammates on Alcheringa was on the Swedish Game Awards (SGA) final at Försvarshögskolan i Stockholm. I know I took some pictures of it there, but as I burrowed my father’s camera I haven’t got them available at this time. Maybe that’s for another time. The Final was quite a long day. To get the components needed to set up the computer for the game, we were supposed to be at the site by 09:00, which meant waking up at 07:00 to get ready and drive there. At 11:00, the exhibition began and lasted until 15:00. Four hours where we tried to make as many people as possible stop their walk around to perhaps chat a bit and play our game. Seeing the other games there, we got more and more humble, as we hadn’t seen our game as any good before, but seeing that someone thought our games as good as the others, it couldn’t be that bad. During these hours, we got the honor of being interviewed by Orvar Säfström (most likely for SGA’s own site) and Sam Sundberg (gaming journalist for Svenska Dagbladet – most likely for print on the […]

Swedish Game Awards-day 09

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Alcheringa, my project during the university course Game Project 1, has been nominated for Swedish Game Award’s “Best Innovation”-prize! This is something I’m very excited and proud about, and is an obvious thing to post about. A “games” page for the blog is coming up, but visit www.gameawards.se for the time being to learn more about the game.

Good news!

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After my last post, any possible reader probably expected a lot of updates, and feel a bit disappointed there haven’t been any. And I agree, although I have had more pressing things as of late. This last month, I have had my feet, or rather – heels – broken, and been put to hospital to fix it, and sent to horizontal mode to make any swollenness disappear – in the latter, I have been able to write here, but it’s been impractical and I haven’t had the mood for writing (pain killers make you quite tired). I do have a few things to write, though, so I hope I’ll get writing here more often in the coming weeks.

Life-note: Why there haven’t been any updates this month

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Time flies! When all tests stop coming in, when you think you can get time to write here, you get a job you educate to and suddently that time went away. And then the high-school/university assignments open up, which takes the remaining evenings. And then you have to write an application for your first pick, taking even more time. But now I might get some time to post! Huzzah! Question is, about what? I thought I could write about menues earlier this week, when I saw how Buitiful Katamari had done it, which felt really cool. But I don’t really have that much more to add to that, very few games do menus that’s not just text on buttons on a row. I’ve been thinking of doing a review on World in Conflict, which I bought a month or so ago, but I dunno – there’s not that much to say. The teamwork-stuff depends on knowing people playing, which I don’t, so I can’t really do fair criticism about it. I could write about Warhammer Online or Starcraft 2, but I don’t want to turn my blog into a Hype-machine, so let’s not. Well, at least I can wish you […]

Blog/Life note: Void

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Or whatever the word would be in English. It’s a week off next week, anyway, so I might be able to not focus as much on the studies as I have these weeks. Which might mean I can get stuff to write on this blog. I sure hope so, I haven’t found anything to write about since last post, really, even though I’ve bought World in Conflict and installed a demo of a really cool politician-game called “democracy”. Perhaps I can “review” one of those soon. And perhaps I should allow myself to “review” other stuff then full, retail, games. They’re quite expensive, after all, and I it won’t hold to only focus on those in the long run. Some flash-games, cell-games, advertgames, demos, persuasive games and indie-games could be useful to write about, too. The world of games is so much more then AAA-titles and your favorite review-site.

Life Note: Sports-holidays!

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