Visitor in Visby

Still sitting at home, I’ve now managed to procure an audience with the corona care center. They are pretty lax compared to Holland: after the test they told me 48 hours until someone calls me with the results. They don’t call sooner if you are positive, unlike in the Netherlands, and 48 hours is a huge step down from the 20 minutes I’m used to. Plus, it’s done via automatic email, which is much more reliable than a worn-down health service worker that does 30 such calls per hour. At least I get to spent my time doing everyone’s favorite activity: writing reports. As much as I like being in school and not having to worry about money or the job market, writing reports at the end of a semester is BOOOOOORIIIIIIING!!!!! I guess in a way these blogs are also reports, but these are funner because I get to do them in story form and because I get to share them with my folks at home. For the most part though, going over my experiences and reflecting on them is not nearly as fun as just diving ...

It’s become hard to work on Break It. And it’s a shame: I really went for that project. But after a falling out with a team member, and another one being generally curt to me, my excitement for it has waned significantly. I haven’t been updating the community, I mostly work on other stuff during my Break It hours: it’s not something I’m proud of. But at the very least, I sent Hakan, our project leader, a mail asking if we can have a chat with the whole team. If not now, then perhaps after the assessment, because I’ll be damned if I’m not getting a lesson out of this. As a solace to this hardship though, I’ve agreed with the team to work on my parts individually, with them giving me the required workload. I wasn’t feeling welcome in meetings anyway, so it works out. This has helped me a bit, since it’s now just about tasks I need to tick of and I can skip the feeling-unwelcome parts. It doesn’t even feel like it is so much about what has happened between us, more that it has gone unreso...

As my exchange is coming to an end, I gotta start planning for the future. What kind of car should I buy? How many kids do I want? Are 7 cats laying on top of me enough to keep me warm during winter or should I get another 3? And, of course: what will I do for my graduation project during the next 5 months? This blog will answer one of those questions. 3 weeks ago I mentioned that Julius and I, together with 2 artists Vlada and Timon, created a snowboat game for the 48hr chill jam. You can play it on here: https://casey-hofland.itch.io/the-legend-of-the-new-years-wish . The game jam was a huge success… but afterwards, when all was said and done… I wanted more! Blizzard sailing is cool! Exploring the landscape is fun! I want to give people more of it! So… I started digging. This is the story of how project Snowflake came to be. What bothered me most about the game jam was the fact that snow tracks looked awful. They kept flickering and didn’t work at all. And it was… kinda sad, beca...

The winters on Gotland here are beautiful. Lots of snow, everyone is hanging lights in their windows to make the town shine, people come together for comfort and drinks… but even Smirnoff can’t safe you when winter depression hits. 12 bottles of Vodka does nothing against the cold energy-draining darkness that, sooner or later, swallows us all. …by which I mean winter depression, not age. Mixing winter depression with corona measures goes together like Vodka and milk. Even though it’s not that bad here in Gotland, our C++ teacher still needs to remain home since he caught a cold, and the team doesn’t feel the need to meet up this week. Structure is what I could use to get out of this hole. Instead you are left to wallow in your hollow. The words “school” and “social” share 66% of their letters for crying out loud! Ugh, I’m just mad because it annoys me. The whole week I felt bad and kept underperforming. I don’t wanna be underperforming! I wanna be the Michelangelo of programming, writ...

This blog is 2 weeks late. It’s funny… last blog I was talking about how I had it all together… and then 1 day later, on Monday, something tipped me over the edge. Let’s talk about it. P.S. if you’re not here for the sap then skip the entirety of the next part, the ending is much more fun! There were a couple of difficulties plaguing the writing of this post. First of all… up until now I couldn’t see it without making it personal. Second was that the conflict kindof drained my energy. And third is an overabundance of stress. My shoulders felt heavy every time I thought about person… let’s call them Star to make things easier… and on top of that Holland is getting affected by corona more and more. Sad, especially because it seems impossible for me to continue my studies here in Sweden… meaning I would have to go back. The idea alone of going back to anything that feels like quarantine, well let’s just say I did NOT expect it to hit me as hard as it did. Anyway: Monday. The story actual...

I bought a hat! I am a hat-guy now! Many of my friends have been telling me they enjoy my blog, but grow to wonder about how I’m actually doing. So this one’s for them: I’m doing great! Have you seen my hat?! Nah but seriously, I’m doing okay. Life has admittedly been busier than I would like right now… but ey that’s just how life is sometimes ya know? Amongst my responsibilities like the game, the community and my class, there’s lots of other stuff I wanna do like this blog, cooking… and SINTERKLAAAAAAAAS!!!!!!! Yeah baby, for all of you who don’t know what Sinterklaas is, it’s basically Dutch Santa, and we celebrate it on the 5 th of December instead of the 25 th ! Amongst the pictures I send to my team explaining Sinterklaas was this one: Moments later: And, even though they don’t have the good stuff… I found these! Only Dutch will understand. The truth is I’m very occupied right now… but it’s for the reason that I’m keeping up with work as well as my social life! Not all duty is w...

My new course, API Design & Best Practices, is SICK! And I don’t mean sick like an urban slur, I mean our teacher is actually laying sick in bed unable to teach. And it sucks, because the new course is SICK (now it’s an urban slur). Like I said last week, it’s about making your code airtight, as opposed to making your code solid as air. Let’s hope Ulf (the teacher) gets well soon. Touching on last week, we made the posting process an internal discussion. But now we actually have a method in place, instead of hastily winging it. Thursday is now posting day, and Monday is polling day: every Monday I’ll offer the team some suggestions, then they can react which one they like best (or veto ones that are too revealing). Of course, I can’t tell you which ones we polled, but the winners I’ll repeat in the blog here. And this week’s winner was… (drum roll), MY FLICKER EFFECT! Simple yet elegant. Nice little things like this add some atmosphere to the scene. What do you think? Let me know. ...

API Design and Best Practices is the programming course I’ve always wanted and every darn programming course should be exactly like it from now on oh my god! Studying to be a game developer, most of your classes will be focused on “make the thing work”. And don’t get me wrong, ‘making the thing work’ is a great paradigm if your game consists of 5 scripts written for a 2-week project. API Design is the first programming course that asks me to “make the thing airtight and self-reliant” and I love everything about it. In the past, I’ve fallen victim to the pitfall of writing unnecessary tools. My general rule of thumb nowadays is that they should only be created if they save time. After all, saving time is a tools primary purpose. Luckily, the Celestial Clock Tool has already paid back its time loss tenfold! Quick recap from last week: the tool lets me change the time of day inside the scene view. With this, I can quickly iterator over our day-night cycles. Making sure that golden hour lo...

As a community manager, I believe my biggest asset is realizing I’m still failing. Start this week our community was 6 large. Now, you have to understand I hold no animosity towards the number 6; in fact, for a couple of nobodies that have posted some random art in a couple of servers that didn’t ask for it, we’re doing pretty good! No, the real problem I have with the number 6 is that I have no idea how to increase it. Though my knowledge on the subject is lacking, thankfully the internet has plenty of tips, tricks, guides, tutorials and courses on how YOU can UNLOCK YOUR AWARENESS or some hogwash. This not being my first rodeo, I know to take any sales pitches and unrealistically positive advice with a grain of salt. That being said, taking out some company-time to fill up on fan-attraction knowledge was I believe the best thing I could’ve did! Brought to you by the same guy that made “1000 Fans in 90 Days”. I’m not kidding, that’s literally one of his other videos. Some of the infor...

After 5 days we’ve got 6 people who joined the discord. That aren’t talking to each other. Or interacting in any way whatsoever. The takeaway: we’re right on track for the 30-users mark! But boy there’s a real art to this community-stuff. I’m constantly questioning what I can and can’t write about the project, if I’m promoting the game to the right people (or am even allowed to), and if anyone even cares! Luckily I met some indie-fella last week whom I asked for guidance. He explained to me that, yes: you should post everything, and you should save everything you post so you can make callbacks to it later. They also told me to plaster my discord invites on any wall in every place, so that’s what I’m doin’. Last week I complained about lights for half of the post. This week is a lot more relaxed. I went through the rest of the course and finished it splendidly. There’s 3 main steps to lighting optimizing, which can be completed in any order (though they really should have started with t...