Last week, its time to get ready

Our t-shirts are now ready and I will go out to Skarphäll tomorrow to get them for the team. It feels good to know that we have all the properties that we need. It will feel double as good when our game feels more ready than now. I am still stressed about our game, but that must be a natural thing for a producer, to be stressed at times like this.

I am doing a schedule for all the members in Slingshot to follow at GGC. It’s a bit hard to include all the breaks and have everyone doing the same amount of work every day. There are some interesting lectures and all the team members in Abstract Reality should go to at least one of them. It will be a bit different working hours for some of us because of that. I for instance will be there most of the time, from 7am to 6pm. But the schedule is not ready yet so things can still change.  

You will find us at the entrance on the congress hall with this kind of t-shirts on us.  

only a week left

It is only a week left before our game will be placed and played on Gotland Game Conference. The pressure on the team is high, but everyone (almost) is working great.

I had to do a difficult but necessary task today. I degraded one of the lead's. The reason behind this was that he was overstressed and did not do the job that was needed to be done. One of the team members who has been a stand-in for him before was promoted to the lead role. Everyone in the team accepted the decision.

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So much to do, so little time

My work as a producer is reaching a stress level i never thought I would feel.

I am worried about not having a multiplayer game to GGC. I have changed the work hours and had a serious talk with all the team members about the seriousness state we are in. We had a great discussion about everything and tried to reason about a good solution to everything. It went well - thank god!

After my epic quest to look at different candy companies in Sweden, and talked with a lot of them about the price, I realized that our best solution would be to find a wholesale company here in Visby. I found (with quite a lot of research) a wholesaler company that started selling candy about 7 days ago here in Visby, and they were really friendly and helped us with everything.

Our t-shirt company also asked me to visit them and take a look at our t-shirts and the colors. I took two graphic people from our group (Malin and Jimmy) to join me in my candy and t-shirt adventure.

We were pleased with the t-shirts (I let them decide which color to use) and we also agreed with the same kind of candy. We brought a lot of candy (about 9 kilogram) that we will treat to our visitors at the gotland game conference.
So come and eat some candy and play our game while doing so ;)

No more badges

And so, after all my working hours and stress about finding badges and companies that would be willing to give us some discount and help us with the badges, my team decided that they no longer would like to pay for the badges... Or at least half of the group felt that way, even if they wanted it from the beginning. So after some discussion we decided that candy would be a good thing to have instead (the way to a man´s heart goes through his stomach) so I am now searching for candy. About 10 kilogram candy will be stored at our booth on GGC.

I am now working with our t-shirts and getting our game out on GGC:s homepage.

Here is how our badges woud have looked like:

Brotherhoods badge. Art made by Jerker Gullbrand.

Freedoms badge. Art by Jerker Gullbrand.

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A producer with a touch of programmer heart

I have finally got three or more companies who are willing to give us some discount on the badges. Finally!

Something struck me today. As I talked to one of the graphic people about the art to our t-shirts i realized that we had a very different view about colors. This is how our arrgument went:

Me: I need text and color to the print on our t-shirts. The text can only be in one color. Can you fix it today?
He: Of course, which colors?
Me: same as on the banner/banderoles we have, yellow for brotherhood and white for freedom
He: What kind of yellow?
Me: ....what do you mean? yellow as in yellow, the same yellow as in the banderole text?
He: I need a color scheme from the company. Can I take a look at their website?
Me: sure, but they don’t have it. *sending the website*
He: ... Okey, they don’t have a color scheme. So what do we do?
Me: just do the text with color and I will talk with the company about it afterward, they told me that they could make it similar as long as they had the text and color.
He: okey. what color?
me: Yeeellooow! and white.
He: but i don’t know which yellow?
Me: As I said, the same as in the banderoles.
He: what if they don’t have that kind of yellow?
Me: Well, in that case.. let me handle it .
He: okey

A programmer and an artist talk about color.
I realize that my sentence above should have been different, with "color tone/shade" and stuff in it.. Not a color that is carved in stone.

To be continued

Reaching forward

I tried to find properties/props for our booth and for all the team members in Abstract Reality.

It has been both easy and difficult. The real challenge was to find good items which are cheap and not to schlock.

I got a deal with a badge company and hopefully also an money deal. The school could not provide us with money for the badges and no company could afford to sponsor us, so the best deal that I could get for the team was from a company who promised to lower the price for a decent cost. My contact person at that company should send a report on the price real soon.

We in Abstract Reality want to have our own t-shirts and I found a good deal from one company. But I can´t order any right now because we need to wait for the school to give us the "game" sign that we need to have printed on our t-shirts.

Hats. We all want hats. Cool hats, awesome hats, Russian hats, American hats....hats hats hats.

I don’t know how many days gone by to just trying to find a decent price for good and awesome Russian and American hats that is not to expensive for a student wallet. We want a special kind of hats so that makes my quest for hats more complicated and more challenging.

The best price for Russian hats that I could find was between 250-400 Swedish crowns. American hats could be a little cheaper mostly because we couldn´t find one of the hat types that we wanted, so the next best thing is cowboy hats ;) But if the Swedish Armed Forces could provide us with one of their air force hats then our problem could be solved. Hopefully. You can never be sure.

Anyway. Me and Jerker works hard on getting an awsome booth for our team. The last artifacts and orders are ready.

Week 15, Tuesday

Alright, there have been some changes since last week.

But let us take it step by step.

Yesterday (Monday) was an interesting day. I searched for different sponsors who could give us free badges to our game. It was a bit of a challenge. Plenty of companies told me that they got these requests everyday and that they nowadays have policies which says that they won’t give away any badges anymore. But I got a fair deal from one of the companies and I hope that the school can provide us with some money for it.

My next mission will be to promote our idea about the badges to our teachers and school and hopefully get some financial support.

We had a meeting with all the leads today (Tuesday) and it went.... well, what can I say? There were some discussions and arguments, but I believe that everyone will feel alright in the end. 

Let’s make a long story short. We have had two people being responsible for the role as the producer. One focused on the programmers, and the other one focused on the graphics/artists. I have been one of the co-producers and shared that responsibility with another person. So the main topics on today’s meeting involved discussions about the booth, and about letting me be the only producer and let the other person continuously focus on his main responsibility as a great lead artist.

...and by making a long story short, I am now the producer instead of co-producer.

I feel the need to attach a picture from the internet to explain about how plenty of people probably see each other in the/a work pyramid.
Note: this does not reflect on my opinion. I just thought that the picture was funny.

That is all for now. Thanks for reading my blog.