Category Archives: Personal Life

Brb & Awesome Day

I’m away to Poland for a week, just so everyone knows.
So I won’t be working on anything, but I’ll probably still have internet access.

Anyway, I finally got my driving license! Hurray!
I made quite a lot of mistakes on the test, but nothing serious enough to fail apparently.
It’s a bit late, but I live in a big city, so driving isn’t always the best way to get around. Hopefully now I’ll be able to do a bit of exploring in the countryside.
(I’d also like to point out to the Americans that our driving test is a lot harder than yours, and we don’t drive automatic cars either. :P)

I had a Minecraft party to celebrate afterwards.
We explored King’s Landing and Winterfell, played some minigames, and teamed up for the Hunger Games. Great times were had.

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We got pretty good at the Hunger Games by the end of our 11-hour Minecraft session. Managed to win two matches!

 

Checklists and Trello

Checklists are the most important organizational tool ever.
If you don’t use checklists, you’re not organized, and you should feel bad.

Wikipedia puts it quite well: “A checklist is a type of informational job aid used to reduce failure by compensating for potential limits of human memory and attention. It helps to ensure consistency and completeness in carrying out a task.”

Basically: “Your memory sucks. So make checklists so you can never forget anything.”

Whenever I work on a game, I make lists of features to add, bugs to fix, stats to set, and other things to do. I then work through these, and cross them off when they’re done. I’ve got checklists for items, foes, maps, stats, skills, treasure chests, menus, mechanics, ad locations, bugs, tweaks, user complaints, users to credit, and everything else. I have a look at each item in the list, and either address it, or decide that it’s no longer relevant and get rid of it. Once the list is empty, I move onto the next one. I even sometimes go further and add stuff like the current progress on each task, its priority, or how much time that task is expected to take.

This all makes it very easy to remember what I have to do, and to keep track of how much progress I’ve made. It keeps me focused and motivated.

At first I did this mostly on paper. I literally have piles of notebooks full of just notes and checklists.
I moved on to using notepad and other plain text editors, once paper started going out of fashion for me.

I’m currently using a webapp called Trello for my checklists. It does the job very well, using a sticky-note style interface. You’ve got different “boards” where you attach your lists, which look a lot like sticky notes. You can also include images, links, dates, colors, or whatever else you need.

There’s some pretty cool advantages of using Trello over traditional paper notes:

  • I’ve got the Trello app on my phone as well as on my desktop PC, so I can update my lists from anywhere.
  • Trello archives all of your activity, so you can always go back and find out exactly when you did what.
  • Trello can be used for collaborating! You can share your lists with others for managing projects, and assign different people to tasks.

Here’s what some of my lists currently look like:

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As you can see there, checklists aren’t only useful for work! You can put fun things on them too! My favorite use is making a list of in-real-life achievements to work towards. If people can do pointless and repetitive tasks to earn achievements in videogames, why can’t they do the same in real life, where the achievements actually matter?

If you wake up every morning and open up Trello, you’ll quickly remember what work you’re supposed to do today, what activities you’ve got lined up for your free time, and what your long-term goals are.

So yeah, I just wanted to get that out there. Occasionally I get questions like “How do you stay motivated to finish your games?”, and stuff like that. Well, checklists are a big part of the answer.

Back from Sweden

Hey guys, I just got back from an 11 day trip to Sweden.
It wasn’t a particularly interesting trip; I didn’t do much sightseeing or anything fancy. Just chilling out with student type people and experiencing some very different living conditions.

My brother’s been studying in Luleå for the past year, and he’ll be going home soon, so this was my last chance to visit. Most of the students were gone by the time I got there, but there was still a bunch of awesome people left. My brother’s got a flat all to himself now, and lots of leftover gear (bikes, food etc) from the other students.

I already visited in January, so the journey there was pretty routine; Ryanair to Stockholm, and then got a sleeper train to Luleå. Went with a slightly more expensive cabin this time, and although it was a bit more comfortable, I still couldn’t sleep much. Long train journeys aren’t for me. The whole journey took 22 hours, 13 being on the train. My new phone kept me entertained though (more on that in my next post).

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The most Swedish thing there is: Benches for one person.

I’ve heard that Swedish people avoid confrontations whenever possible, and I saw this demonstrated on the train. I was sharing a cabin with two other guys, and it seemed that the staff had forgot to unlock it for us when we boarded. So we stood there awkwardly waiting for someone to come along and unlock our cabin. After 20 minutes of waiting I was like “Shouldn’t we find someone to complain to?!”, and they were like “Nahhhhh, the ticket guy will come round eventually.” This attitude did not please me.

When I arrived in Luleå, the first thing that struck me was the constant daylight. It never got dark enough to turn on street lights. This was super ultra awesome. Darkness is depressing.

My brother quickly introduced me to dumpster diving, which we later indulged in almost every night. Seems it’s a really popular activity for students there, and most of the ones I met did it. They’ve even got their own Facebook page for posting any treasure they find. I guess this explains how my brother was surviving without spending any money.

Most of the food that gets thrown out is still perfectly good, even if it’s expired, but a lot of it isn’t even. For example, if one egg in a set breaks, they throw out a whole box of good eggs! Our best find was 7kg of expensive salmon, worth almost $300. Luleå’s a great city for dumpster diving. It’s light all night, there’s no police, and Swedes won’t confront you about it.

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Midnight in Luleå

Anyway, enough about that. Our only method of transport around the city was by bicycle. My brother has collected a lot of bikes that have been abandoned by other students. It was interesting trying to pick which one looked the least crap. Cycling’s pretty awesome when there’s not a lot of road traffic around, and when your bike’s not gonna be stolen instantly if you leave it the city center (Luleå’s only 50k people).

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+5 int, +40% mp recovery

Me and my bro cycled to some nearby farm town. Dunno what it was called, but they had cows and pigs and herbs and farmy things. It was really touristy, with lots of souvenir shops showing off animal chunks and artwork by the Sami people. Everything was mighty expensive though, and I’m not sure if the airport would even let you through with most of it. There were knives made of antlers, wolf pelts, bear gloves, drinking horns, weird sculptures, and stuff like that. Most of it looked awesome in context, but would be totally out of place anywhere else.

That was the only touristy place I visited. Most of my days afterwards were spent hanging out with my brother’s buddies.

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How popular is this game?!

 

There was a festival going on in town for a few days. They had theme park rides and music and boats and that sort of stuff. One of our Swedish friends got back from some sort of boat trip, and we got to hang out on his boat for a while. It was quite a large sail boat which could support 9 people.

Hung out with a group of stoners one day. They had some unusual hobbies; carving knives, shooting stuff with air rifles from their balcony, and most recently slacklining. We joined in on the slacklining, but didn’t get very far. It’s really hard to even stand on the thing, let alone walk along it. Apparently they had been practicing for 3 days straight because they didn’t have anything better to do. They left on a long hiking trip the next day and I didn’t see them again.

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Dunno who these guys were, but they were pretty awesome.

The next time we visited the festival there was a heavy metal band playing! Previously they only had pop bands for 5 year old girls, so this was a nice surprise. The crowd wasn’t too enthusiastic though.

Errr, that’s about everything worth noting I think. The rest of the trip is Facebook material; a birthday party, a barbecue, and stuff like that.

Oh, and I tried eating horse and reindeer sandwiches, just because. They were delish.

My journey home was also quite uneventful, except this time I took a flight down to Stockholm instead of the train. It was totally worth it, and it’s not even more expensive if you book early enough. Flew with Scandinavian Airlines that time, which was amazing compared to Ryanair. I almost forgot that flying can actually be somewhat comfortable. What’s that? I don’t actually have to print off my boarding pass for no reason? I can just keep a copy on my phone? You’re even giving me free coffee? Woah!

You suck, Ryanair.

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On a motherfucking boat with a super awesome Swedish girl.

Off to Sweden

Tomorrow morning I’m off to Sweden for 10 days.
Last time I went in the middle of winter, so it’ll be quite different now.
I’ll be doing a lot of hiking and cycling. Got a short trip to Norway planned too.

Most of the students will have gone home by now, but hopefully some of my Swedish buddies in Luleå will still be around.

I’ll have internet access, but not enough hardware to work on anything interesting.
I’ll be on trains a lot, so I’ll try to play through a lot of mobile games while I’m away, and get some ideas from that.

Anyway, see ya.
I’ll be back on the 17th.

What I’ve been up to

Hmmm, so after that huge blog about EBF4, I labelled myself unemployed and didn’t think about work at all for a month or so. Here’s what I’ve been doing.

• Got a new bike and started doing a decent amount of cycling. The weather’s been really nice, but it’s getting worse now, so I haven’t been in a while. I almost got knocked down by a car once. Good thing I learned not to cycle through a busy roundabout without actually being killed.

• Managed to run 5km. Didn’t even seem like a big deal once I actually did it. Maybe I should go for 10km after all. Also dug a bathtub-sized hole in the garden in one session. Felt pretty manly after that. I guess I’m reasonably fit now.

• Been doing a lot of driving lessons. Like 4 per week. Failed my theory test by one mark. Sat it again as soon as possible and almost got full marks. A lot of it is down to luck with the questions, which is horribly unfair and stupid. Booked my practical test. I didn’t realize the waiting period would be so long. I should have booked it much earlier, because now I’ll be waiting for months, and I’m almost ready already.

• Started volunteering at a charity shop, in an attempt to make some friends and maybe get some sort of work experience. There seemed to be a lot of cool younger people there at first, but now it’s mostly just old people and guys doing community service for drinking too much. I was also hoping to get first dibs on cool items, but it turns out you can’t do that. So I’m not really getting a lot out of it. I think I’ll stop working there and just stalk that one girl I like as a customer.

• Got talked into volunteering at a community center and teaching IT to newbies. Just starting with this. It could be interesting. It seems I’m more qualified than the guys that were originally supposed to take the course, and I’ve kinda taken over things. I plan to teach HTML and Javascript, cause those are kinda fun and not too hard. Plus, it’s an excuse for me to actually do some HTML again.

• Been wasting too much time on Minecraft again. I tried to beat survival mode without cheating for the first time. I fell into the void 3 seconds after entering The End, and lost all my best stuff. Fuck that game.

• Finally played VVVVVV. It’s a great game, but it does just feel like a Flash game. Also played Evoland. It was fun at first, but became pretty mediocre once the gimmick got boring. There’s a bunch of other indie games on Greenlight that I’m looking forward too (Shovel Knight, Secrets of Grindea etc). If you guys know any fun retro/indie games on steam, let me know. Preferably platformers, or action-adventure games.

• Got a new phone (Samsung Galaxy Note 2)! It’s awwwwesome. It’s the biggest phone there is. It’s great for movies, photos and games, but slightly awkward to use for simple stuff like checking the time or actually phoning people. I’m doing a lot of “research” in mobile games, since I’ll have to start developing those eventually. Cut the Rope is amazing. Labyrinth 2 is also great fun. World of Goo works really well on touchscreens. It’s interesting to see what sort of game mechanics are possible with very simple touch or motion controls. If you guys know any fun games or apps I should check out, let me know.

• Going to Sweden for 10 days in one week! It’ll be quite different in the summer. Sadly most of the students I got to know last time are gone.