Hi, I’m Tim and I am a coder. Hmm, that makes it sound like some sort of addiction, but actually that’s a pretty good analogy. Especially now that I’ve graduated from programming socially (in an office) to solitary (working from home).
Yep, after spending the last 12 years surrounded by the cacophony of open plan studios in the UK games industry, I’ve switched to working remotely for Vostopia. The sudden change has come as a bit of a culture shock. On the plus side, it is quieter, there are far fewer interruptions and it is much, much easier to focus, get into flow and crank out the code. On the downside it is possible to go a bit stir crazy not seeing anyone during the day except for our two pet rats (who sleep all day anyway). I need to pop out for lunch with my wife Elizabeth some days to remind myself that I am not a digital Robinson Crusoe.
Actually I make it sound worse than it really is. Creating games is an inherently collaborative process and there is a constant flutter of emails, instant messages and skype conversations. And for the initial design meetings where face to face communication (along with the ability to write on white boards, and gesticulate wildly) is essential, I can always pop across to Norway. Which is exactly what I did last week for the initial brainstorming sessions on Survivors – discussion of which will have to be saved for a future blog post, I’ve got to go write some code, that addiction won’t satiate itself…
It’s been a bit quiet on here, so let’s see if I can redress this somewhat!
First of all, we are now five! Five people that is. Tim has boldly leapt aboard and joined us here at vostopia. I’ll leave it up to Tim to introduce himself on here and for now just say welcome to the team! It’s awesome to have Tim with us working on a new game, speaking of which…
Exciting times! We’re getting going with our new game and it’ll be somewhat more ambitious than our previous projects… It’s called “Survivors“…
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We noticed that the wingsuit challenge scores had reached epic heights over the last couple of weeks. After looking at the replays, we realised people were somehow able to fly straight out to the boat without using the secret route, which should not be possible. It turned out that a combination of a blond coding moment, combined with a very enthusiastic designer had led us to create and release some pretty uber wingsuits.
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So we spent a great deal of time coming up with and refining our avatar system, it’s pretty flexible and allows quite a bit of mixing and matching of items while keeping the authoring requirements manageable and reasonably straightforward to understand for designers and artists…
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This week has been hectic but fun! We had a cunning plan to launch the alpha version of our site on Monday, but narrowly missed it. We managed to launch it on Tuesday evening, and it has been working like a charm since then. Here’s a pic from the launch preparations (in the old office) on Monday.
Old, tiny, airless office with team in alpha prep
Read on to find out more about our alpha launch and to see our new office…
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…if it’s delayed, blame Dropquest 
ps. We love Dropbox really
Bjarne’s off to Germany this weekend to present at a conference, so to help spice up the demo a bit, we’ve avatarised him! Behold, the Bjarnatar! =)
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Posted in Art
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Tagged Art, Avatar, Bjarnatar
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While surfing reddit a few days ago, I stumbled over a blogpost by Joakim Hårsman describing a technique for rendering bitmaps containing contours (like fonts/logos etc). Rembembering the pain we had with fonts in Wingsuit Challenge, I decided to code up a Unity-example to test it out.
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After an exciting (and exhausting) week in Montreal we all made it back to Norway in one piece.
Tore, Mike and I headed over on the Sunday ahead of Bjarne and we got set up in a fantastic apartment in the heart of Old Montreal. We spent the first few days prepping for the conference and in our spare time exploring what the city had to offer. Actually Mike spent most of his spare time on a futile hunt for the Rockband 3 keyboard controller – it seems that it is as difficult to get your hands on one in Canada as it is in Norway.
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While the rest of the team got on the plane to Montréal, I headed to Copenhagen to attend the Nordic Venture Forum. On Sunday, I attended the Venture Academy – an event designed to prepare those of us with companies in the early stages for what was to come, and on Monday I presented at the main conference.
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