The people who makes up the community is to a large extent what Power Soccer is about. I’m the Community-guy so I have to say that, but that doesn’t make it less true. Victories taste so much sweeter if you know a little something about your opponent and if you have the means and the right to gloat… The community provides all that and a lot more.

A mini-introduction of me. My name is Powdersnow. The simple answer to the question “What do you do?” would be: a little bit of everything that has any relation with the Community. I read up on forum posts and mails, talk to people, organise, re-organise, keep in touch with the game admins, try to digest ideas flying from the community and from the far corners of my own mind, answer mails from customers (some angry, some positive and some… let’s be honest, complete nonsense) and a lot more. I am proud to say I’m completely hooked on our own product, I’m known as “that 99-guy” among jealous crew people, because I played through the entire game and came out alive on the other side. I was even ranked number 1 in the world for a while. Oh and did I mention I’m level 99? Anyway, you’ll be hearing lots more from me if you check in here now and then.

There is lots going on in the development of the community right now. User created news coming up, leagues with message boards, our new community page and of course this amazing dev-blog that will allow you to get inside the skins and minds of the members of crew who dare to use it… (Please be nice guys, these people are used to the gentle glow of the computer screen, not the blinding limelight).

We have a big (BIG!) Soccer update landing March 12. Biggest one yet! Stay tuned for a detailed description of what it will contain.

Just added support for gamepads, steering wheels and pedals. It really lifts it all to a new level! Got some more tweaking to do though, but it already shows a lot of potential.

That might sound a bit dramatic, but I’m simply referring to the last day of the conference. It’s Friday afternoon on this side of the globe and everything is slowing down here at GDC. Simply not as many people running around crowding up the place. Of course there’s still that constant noice in the background of a couple of thousand people talking at the same time, in different languages barely disguised in English.

I didn’t write anything about what I did yesterday. Bad me (still blaming the jet lag). Among other things I invited Fabian (a new friend of ours here at GDC who’s representing Pole Position Production, our gifted sound providers) to come along and attend a roundtable session called “Hentai, Hardcore and Hotties: Sex in games”. As a “gender aware” human being I felt it to be my duty trying to spread the knowledge on these matters. However it didn’t quite live up to my expectations as the discussion turned out to focus more on branding issues (what will happen to my company - image wise - if we provide the technical solutions for a strip poker online game?) and other stuf in that area. Brenda Brathwaite, the speaker/moderator, is a veteran within the gaming industry and is no doubt an extremely well spoken and interesting person. And of course, in just one hour of discussion, there’s gotta be a lot of topics you DON’T have time to attend to.

Besides that I attended Laura Fryers lecture “Production Basics and Beyond”. Laura is also a veteran, now working as an executive producer at Microsoft. She came across as a naturally gifted speaker, her presentation was really funny yet serious at the same time. Of course, for me, it was very interesting listening to her as she’s a woman (yes it makes a slight difference as there are so few and it calms me down when they’re successful) working/struggling/coping with the same issues as I am - how to get that game out on time, at the right quality level, while keeping the team happy. Interesting was to hear how she, although concerned with how the team is doing, not at all seemed to consider game development being possible without the crunch process - unlike several other speakers on these subjects.

So that was great. And prior to this I had listened to another great lecture, held by Petter Sydow from Massive Entertainment. The topic was how to make a 90 + game (World In Conflict) while breaking all the rules. Besides being a catchy title for a lecture it referred to the change of project methodology that took place after several months of production. From handling things the old fashioned waterfall way the teams went agile, influenced bý scrum (which for you who don’t already know is one of several agile project management methods). And although the agile way is becoming more and more acknowledged and widespread through the game industry many people are still sceptical considering it to be a vague and uncertain way of production. However - Petter gave a presentation with examples tightly connected to the production process and the every day situations that occured during the development of World In Conflict. I’m extremely impressed they pulled this off, not only handling the transition to an agile working method mid way through the project - but also without any crunch… Go Petter and the teams!

Seriously, it’s truly inspiring and I only hope I can be just as wise and clever and super-talented in my role as a producer for my team.

Ok - now I still haven’t told you about todays lectures and no you’re not gonna hear about it either. Not now. I’ll be going in a minute so I’ll leave the Friday lecture excitement for a later post. I must keep myself busy at night aswell, leaving something to do later on. A hotel room doesn’t leave you with many choices really - the computer is your best bet.

Picked up a few dvd’s today on certain areas of game development. And I placed an order for the lecture dvd/audio recordings! All of them. So soon we can arrange miniature lectures for the entire teams at home, in the conference room! How about that folks?

And you poor guys at home having trouble with the coffee machine - you just wait, I’ll be back soon and of course I’ll sort all that out. Hang in there!

// Linda

Our coffee machine has been acting up lately. However will we survive? How?!

So, now my first day at the conference has come to an end. All the events (lectures, expo-booths, roundtables etc) are gathered in the Moscone centre in central San Francisco in two different buildings across the street from one another. Just imagine the constant flood of game nerds walking back and forth, blocking the streets, completely taking over that perticular part of the city It’s brilliant.

I went to three lectures today. The one which had the largest impact on me was on the concept of Crunch (”Your shameful secret addiction to Crunch”) by David Amor, Creative Director at Relentless Software. It was absolutely brilliant -full of insight and humour on the difficult matter of productivity vs. overtime. Very inspiring. I also took part in a roundtable session called “Play for free! Pay for Items!” which was very interesting. It was a valuable experience participating in an open and honest discussion about the pitfalls, possibilities and issues other developers are facing on the matter of item based sales in online games.

All lectures and sessions are recorded and tomorrow I’ll have to check out how much they are to buy. I want to be able to share some of this stuff with the rest of the team(s).

Tomorrow is a busy day, lectures from 9 to 5. And some Starbuck’s coffee in between…

Until further notice.

// Linda

Hey

This is Anders writing, and I’m team leader and programmer on the team making this game. I just thought I’d give you a little heads-up on what we’re currently doing here on the actual game, and present the team. It might get a bit technical, but I’ll try to stay out of the geeky details!

Björn, Tomas A and Linda have already presented themselves here, so I’ll skip past them and go straight to the developers…

First of all we’ve got Erik, who’s working on getting the network up and running smoothly. As you all know, problems with lag and network stability can make any online game really horrible to play, and we don’t want that. Making it work well is a really complex problem, but with Erik on the mission it’ll turn out fine.

Then we’ve got Peter, who is a total car physics freak; in the good way! He makes sure the game simulation gets really realistic, and is currently tweaking details about how a car works that any sane person didn’t know existed. “Oh, so this is gonna be a really hard simulation style game” I hear you say. Nah, he also knows how get the car to behave sweet for all you full throttle arcade burners as well. It’s just good to have a rigid physics base to build from.

Mikko, our track artist, has started the hard work of texturing one of the tracks he’s working on. It’s a tedious work, but Mikko is working relentlessly on it and as always I bet it’s going to be great.

Jukka, the car modelling expert of the team, is cleaning up some odds and ends on the first batch of cars. I think the finished ones are looking great, so it’s going to be great to see the new cars he’ll start on eventually.

On the web side, there’s first Tomas U, who is working on our garage. It’s the place where you’ll be spending time customizing your car, both out of a visual and performance perspective. He’s got a lot of cool things going on there, and I hope we’ll be able to give some sneak peaks out of that sometime in the future.

Then there’s Per, and he is right now working on backend servers that are the big glue between the web and the races. It’s a big scary job, but he’s handling it all fine. He’s actually looking quite happy while doing it, and that’s an effort.

Marcus, the General Guru of All Things Web and Databaseish[TM], dwells in the depths of the main web framework, keeping it nice and cuddly so it stays a pleasant thing to work with. Just like with everything else, a robust base is really important to get other things done quickly without having to cut corners.

Finally, we’ve got Simon, the newest addition to the team. He’s gotten up to speed quickly, and is right now working out quirks regarding browser compatibility. Why can’t standards just get along? Oh well, good thing we’ve got a great guy to sort it out!

As for myself, I’m right now focused on pulling the game down in size. Here at Power Challenge we like things small, at least when it comes to download sizes. Therefore we take every measure we can to bring things down in size, so you guys can get up and running quickly! Fortunately, we’re not fond of cutting down quality, which leaves us with a tricky combination of requirements. But hey, the good news is that it’s up to us to solve the problems, and you guys get to reap the benefits. Could it get any better?

Phew! That got longer than expected, but it’s all for me now folks. Going back to the code mine…
//Anders

Hi people. Now we’re finally here. Over there. The conference starts tomorrow morning (which should be about about 18.00 or something Swedish time). Jet lag is a bummer but I’m trying to cope with some help from Starbucks vanilla latte…

The whole business/mingeling apparatus starts tonight with some kind of get-together arranged by The Swedish Trade Council. Most of the Swedish game developers attending GDC will probably be there so I’m very much looking forward to it, hoping to speak to some of our interesting competitors, calmly bragging about Power Racing. In a very subtle manner of course.

Tomas Ahlström is - informally - the social and schedule manager of our little group, being in total control of all our appointments and meetings. It seems like it’s gonna be a busy week… We already have quite a few meetings with the press scheduled, and we’re counting on a lot of visitors to the Nordic booth at the Expo area where we’ll be hanging out most of the time. Or at least Tomas & Tomas will, I’m gonna be spending a lot of time at the actual conference listening to some incredibly clever and interesting people giving lectures on agile projects and production do’s and don’t’s among other things.

The website is up, alive and kicking! Make sure to check it out (www.powerchallenge.com/racing). I’m thrilled with the work so far and it’s just gonna get better. My guys on the team are simply the best. Just imagine, in a few months from now we can all enjoy the hottest online racing game ever. And even if our summer release is “only” a first version, barely a Beta release, I’m sure it’s gonna be a great gaming experience for us all.

Ok, time to find out what this city is all about. And yes I’m bringing the camera just in case something unbelievable shows up.

// Linda, with a fanatic attention to bringing some adrenaline to your browser

Hi everyone.
My name is Björn Lundgren and I am the Lead Game Designer on Power Racing.

Just wanted to publish the team’s incredibly nice concept and beauty shots of the game. You can find these in higher resolution in the press kit on the Pre-launch site as well.

The Cars represents the 3 different regions you can start a career within.
1) American muscle - Pic 1
2) Asian Street - Pic 2
3) European Style - Pic 3

More cars will come within these 3 regions later on. We plan to have 6 cars total in the release, 2 in each region. Each car will have changeable fronts, rears, hoods and wings for you to be able to create your own unique look.

Please come back to this blog later on, and I promise to publish the next car as fast as we have it ready. =)

Best Regards
/Björn -Lead Game Designer

Oh yeah, forgot to mention the tiny little detail about us going to GDC… The mighty Game Developers Conference, this year taking place in San Fancisco. We leave from Linköping on Monday morning and arrive in San Francisco…some thousand hours later. Today I’m off work early to:

1) buy camera for snapshot and blog purposes

2) getting things organized in general (like find passport and tickets, hug the kids etc)

But no worries, the blogging will continue through our journey to the west. We have lots of meetings planned, important and interesting people to meet and tons of valueable information to take in. I’m attending as many lectures as possible, most of them on production but hopefully also some on game design and business & management.

Our pre launch site will be up and running on Tuesday - very exciting! The guys on the team have done such a great job with all the material for it and it will ROCK! There’s a great game coming your way folks…

Anyhow, time to roll out of here. I’ll be back with some travel updates after the weekend.

/ Linda

Ok, so you have heard that we develop a racing game. And you think “why?” - there are already 100.000 racing games and they all look the same. BORING…

Well, let me put it like this; we don’t really do like everyone else - we have our own twist, and you will like it.

Power Racing will feature advanced 3D graphics that set a new standard in web-based gaming, extensive personalization and a community to support the millions of sports enthusiasts that are crazy for their sport.
Unlike most multiplayer action games available today, Power Challenge titles are played right in your web browser – eliminating the need for time-consuming downloads, a state-of-the-art console and expensive gaming gear. Best of all, they’re free! And yes - you can connect your old USB steering wheel too.

How about that for a starter?

Have a look at the pic below and don’t forget - this is a web game. Pretty cool huh…     =)

Click thumb to expand!