…the office and it’s production is shutting down for the day. For the rest of the afternoon, evening and night as well. It’s time for the annual Christmas party with a mighty kick-start somewhere around 3 o clock. Let’s bring out the Hof people!

Per S - as sharply dressed as ever. Tomas U and Erik W with their brand spanking new/old second hand bargains from today’s shopping experience. Tomas A with his pointy shoes and high hair. And the rest of us just trying to keep up! My guess is I shouldn’t be taking any photos tonight… or should I?

/ L

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

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

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