Anyway, I realise we have to work on ours. Some of the comments made here sort of put Power Racing next to Bigfoot, Shangri-La, El Dorado, Nessie and other believe-it-when-I-see-it objects of our imagination of belief.

However, Power Racing is very much less mythological. I’d say it’s about one hundred percent real.

The reason you haven’t heard from me (or anyone else on the team) in ages is this: we’re constantly working on building the game. And I mean CONSTANTLY, all day, every day, all the time. Believe me, the game is there and it will be released. At this stage there’s a huge amount of time spent on meetings, planning, estimation, retrospections and what have you. I know the guys on the team much rather just get to work, get the code written, the problems solved, the details nailed… bascially do their job. Still they need to put quite a lot of effort into the plan-and-design-process, to come up with some preliminary scope and dates. And if I wasn’t there myself I would never believe how difficult it is and how long it takes.

There are several reasons we haven’t been communicating more regarding release dates, development status etc.

One is uncertainty. We can’t be sure exactly what to release on a certain date. Either the scope or the date has to be flexible. We can’t make any promises, we can just provide estimates based on reality so far.

Another is politics, or marketing strategies. When would be the best time to release this game? Why? How? Business, pure and simple, which is not my cup of tea and someone else’s decision to make.

As this game, product, is being built from scratch we face problems that we don’t have to deal with in Power Soccer. The children’s diseases that only strikes while you’re young. Growing pains, if you’d like. Power Racing doesn’t exist as a product yet, but the game itself does. The people working on it are extremely dedicated and passionate about this becoming the best online racing game ever. This means having opinions on design, how features should be implemented, what solutions would be the best… Discussions and decisions. An entire game has to be thought through, nothing left out. The product managers have to tell us enough but not too much.

Information is a tricky thing. If you have too much it limits you and restrain the creative process. If you don’t have enough you can’t really move forward either.

So, in trying to get the right game out in as short amount of time as possible, we’re walking a thin line that takes us from our product manager’s vision, the producer’s interpretation of it and the developer’s final creation.

And as always I ended up lightyears from the initial subject: is Power Racing just a PR stunt? No people, it’s very much real, happening and coming your way.

It would be nice to show you some new screenshots or an in-game video or something soon. And I know the team would really like to show you our work in progress as well. It’s just a matter of time. So, let’s see shall we, if I can get one of the guys to put together some PR pics or videos soon. But - no promises, just my most sincere intentions.

Do what George Michael would have done, have some faith…

Sincerely yours

/ Linda

We have meetings. We plan. We discuss. We talk. We consider. We reconsider. We design. We draw. We write. We agree. We disgree. We stand up daily. We retrospect.

We’re finally getting close to having all the bits and pieces we need to get the work done and the game out. Not saying it’s gonna be easy or be done in the flashes of flashes, but we have a Plan and a Product Manager. And extremely talented developers, just waiting to get the green light on Power Racing.

So. We’re one week from Christmas holiday and the focus factor is sort of aiming for zero. Well, that actually depends on how you look at it. We’re all 100 % occupied with thinking/talking/dreaming of racing, it’s just not that easy to focus on the tasks magnetically taped to the whiteboard. We couldn’t be more eager to get going than a whippet on a race track.

We won’t have any spectacular news before Christmas, but trust me, tons of work is being done even as we speak and come January I’ll definetely be able to tell you more on the details of the development.

So - keep your fingers crossed and be nice and Santa just might bring you some excellent presents this year.

When you look out through my window, by my desk, this is what you see

(no photoshopping done here, I swear, this is as damp grey dystopian sad it really looks!)

What can I say? Look up “dull” in the dictionary and there you have it! The back of our office building in early December.

But inside the office things are really cooking. Oh yeah. Per is being his usual creative self and suddenly I’m not the only one doing manual work, using scissors and scotch tape! Excellent! But what is he doing?

Any takers? Oh come on, just one guess? No? He’s rearranging the backlog of course! Like hello!? Just gotta love that out-of-the-computer-thinking. Why keep it in Excel if it doesn’t feel right for you? Free your backlog! Let’s do it old school.

And on my way back from the kitchen (with like the 8th cup of tea today, spiked with honey) I found Pow who’s wearing green today! That just had to be documented. Green is such a perky color.

And to the left of Pow, there are some clever people trying to get some work done (he just bugs them):

Stroll on, move on, keep going. Behind that 90’s shade of blue wall you find Per, now busy with more manual work. Very refreshing! But there’s a terrible story behind this picture. You wanna hear it? Well, Tomas U, the man ripping out the sensitive parts of Per’s computer, is up to his neck in some Very Important Stuff, like making inspirational material for Power Racing. The problem is, he needed more memory. Well, not him, his computer. So he simply hijacked Per’s. “The RAM or your Jolt” he said. Of course Per let him take the memory.

So there you have it, even the nice ones go a bit crazy when the computer runs slow.

Our very great executive producer and Scrum Officer, Richard, is holding 3 times 2 hour scrum sessions with everyone. Very good initiative! We all need to be on the same level with things, especially something as fundamental as our production/development method. Thank you Richard! (and look, aren’t the racing team just the cutest?)

// office blogger No 1

No no no - I’m not gonna announce the release date. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. No. You have to wait a while longer.

But I have fantastic news. We have a new Product Manager! A very talented and dedicated person who’s gonna be in charge of setting, and maintaining, the vision of the game. Scoping, prioritizing, high level design… Basically being Power Racing’s dad. From a Product Managers perspective he’ll point out the direction and I’ll try to keep the team moving that way, avoiding the every day obsticles of game development.

And who is he, you ask? Well, let me introduce… (drum roll) Tomas Dunard! 

Isn’t there a certain…je ne sais quoi, just oozing around him? A certain air of divinity, one could say.

Tomas has been in the company for some time but has very recently (like…yesterday) taken over the PM role for Power Racing. I’m very glad to have him on board and I think Tomas is going to do a great job with Power Racing.

Welcome to the family!

There was a post from Jake the other day. He had a great idea: if I’m all out of great ideas and don’t know what the next post should be about, maybe the readers themselves can come up with some suggestions? And he started it all of with asking about new features, how do we come up with what new stuff to put in the game, and how is it done, from a practical technical perspective?

Good topic!

When it comes to new ideas for functionality and features in the game: where do they come from? How do we decide what to put in, what to take out, how to improve what’s already there?

I thought a lot about this yesterday, after I read Jakes post. This is a subject and an inssue that I feel rather strongly about - we all do, and sometimes it’s frustrating when you can’t do as much as you’d like.

Like right now. I’m busy doing twenty odd things I have to finish before finishing this post properly. There’s a lot of stuff going on in the soccer teams/development and right now, instead of talking to you guys about all of it, I have to go and actually DO it. But I promise to try to find the time later today. Ok?

Talk to you soon!

/ Linda

Sometimes you wonder what you do all day. You didn’t have any coffee breaks. You didn’t google away any time at all. There weren’t any scheduled meetings. But still, after nine hours there’s not much to show for your efforts. It’s frustrating and it can make you have serious doubts regarding your own abilitites. This is something that, in a good scenario, pushes you a little bit harder and keeps you on edge. Trying harder, focusing even more. In the worst case scenario it gives you a stomach ulcer and sends you home, promising yourself to look for another job. Any job.

Then you write about it, talk about it, think about it and the pressure wears off and you forget what those negative doubtful thoughts really were about, anyway? You remember why you wanted to do this and you know you’re really going to enjoy going to work on Monday.

I’ve come to understand that this is part of the project management issues that you simply have to learn to live with - and might even come to enjoy. This is where communication might prove to be the best medicin - talk to your team and learn what is actually going on. Talking to people is somewhat underestimated as an antidote of last minute pre-launch panic attacks. Problems exist, stuff happen and deadlines break. That’s not gonna change. But if you keep talking to people you’re gonna know about it in time to reduce the damage.

Even though the development sometimes go into that invisible mode, where noone outside the team can actually see something is happening, things ARE as a matter of fact evolving. Constantly. It’s part of the dilemma of game development that from time to time, when the board and other people who are interested in seeing some progress, they just have to take your word for it. “Yes, it’s going well. We’re working as hard as we can. But no, there’s no actual visible difference…yet”. Some developers solve this by always having a playable demo for the publishers and others to see or play. Others make sure that everybody who’s working on the game commit their work before they go home and the latest version of the game is always working. Always. Some even have an alarm going off (Yes, really. On evereones desk!) when something that’s not working is being comitted.

I’m lucky enough to have a team with really brilliant people. They’re smart and nice and funny and thanks to them my job feels great most of the time. And when it doesn’t - they’re never to blame. Basically, I trust them. They’re gonna come in to the office with some new clever solutions and cool ideas and build incredible stuff. I don’t take them for granted although it’s their job to do all this - how could I? Without them there are no games.

And talking about building cool stuff - on Friday Per E and Erik made the pool server work! Go Thunderbirds! It’s one of those breakthroughs that really deserves an evening of celebreation. That pool server is kind of the foundation of our future official multiplayer game modes. This major success gave them each a green marzipan frog and of course the satisfaction of knowing that we, thanks to that, kept our informal internal not much spoken of deadline.

And that pretty much sums it up. They do their magic and I try to provide them with what they need to do so, looking down on it all from some macro bird view perspective where, on a good day, it’s all very clear and you can see for miles. At other times the details are hunting you and the slices and sprints and planning poker complexity points makes you wanna run and hide.

Today I’m gonna have lunch with Michael (my fellow producer here at PC) to discuss “What is fun, really?” (in games, ours and others). Interesting, necessary - and fun!

// back to the coal mine drinking tea from my bright red “Seriously” Grey’s Anatomy-cup.