Well, it was less than 15 minutes since I talked to Loreley, the one who interviewed me over the phone. It turned out well. They want to meet with me already now on thursday (one week from now).
So I guess I'm going to Gibraltar!
PokerStrategy.com, prepare to meet my FACE! =)
Okay, by request by one of our fans, I will now write a blog post about the development of the Neverwinter Nights 2 module: Fools War. I will state our problems, our production stages and how the future looks for the module. Oh, I'll give you some screenshots on updated areas as well.
In the beginning, the project at the university
Proccess:
We began our project in the late of august 2008, at the University of Skövde, Sweden. Our team consisted of 4 designers and 2 graphical artists. We had the following roles: Dialogue and Story writers, Level designers, Quality Assurance, Balance, Scripters and Promotion artists. I worked a little bit with everything, but my focus was QA, Dialogue and later on Level Design.
In the first phase, we created mockups for everything: Dialogues, Leveldesign, Promotional Art and Story. The mockups gave us a better picture on how the Module should be. In the second phase, we started producing real content, much of what excists today. In the last phase we focused on bugs, balance and art direction.
The result of the 5 moths of work was okay, but not great. I will go more into detail about this in the problems-section.
Problems:
What we did, we did with VERY limited resources and some unmotivated team members. The University was to supply us with game licenses, so that we could work with the toolset at the school, rather than at home. We think it's important that everyone works at the same place, and not split up.
Although these licenses didn't show up for the first half of the project (2-3 months), so we had to split the team up, because we didn't have enough laptops to support everyone. Keep in mind that these laptops was our own and not in a very good state for doing graphical tasks.
We had a couple (2-3) team members that did not give it all for the project. This resulted in huge miscalculations of hours available and a lot of content that we had to trash. I'm sorry guys but this is the truth and you will have to live with it.
Another big problem was the Neverwinter Nights 2 toolset. It was very complex and a bit buggy. A lot of the times, our save files where corrupt and hours of work where lost. If you happen to work with this toolset, SAVE OFTEN and in NEW FILES! As you know, this is very frustrating and affects the morale alot.
Working at home, not really an option. A lot of time where spent on problems that other team members could fix in a blink of an eye, and much content was created that was not in line with the rest of the content. This resulted in many hours being lost and a morale being sunk to the bottom.
The summer process, the current situation
Proccess:
The focus is bug-fixing and a graphical unity between the leveldesigns. We are now 4-5 team members that work with fixing critical bugs, strange dialogues and leveldesign that is not quite as good as we want it, artisticly AND gameplay-wise. We work at different locations on different hours, with a weekly meeting every sunday evening.
Problems:
Once again, we work at different locations and the down sides of that is listed in the previous problems section. We also have a problem with morale, and that is directly connected to working at different locations and all the bugs that keep showing up.
New game patch = tons of new bugs for us modders. Whenever Obsidian Entertainment release a patch for the game Neverwinter Nights 2, a lot of things stop working in our mods. It's most frustrating when they release another expansionpack. Then, nothing works anymore. We feel that even if we get the module ready, patches and expansions will keep messing it up and we will never be "done".
The future! When will the module be released?
We don't know when we can release the module, but our aim is to be done before new years eve so that we can compete in the Mod of The Year competition at IGN.com.
We will continue to hunt bugs, fix leveldesign and game balance, but later on we also want to add some sidequests and expand the hours of play. We got the main foundation ready, now we just have to make it "fun" and figure out how we can stop the new bugs from showing up every time they patch the game.
I hope that this is what you guys wanted to hear =) If you have any questions either mail me directly or write a comment to this blog post.
Okay, I admit it. I'm beginning to get nervous. It is less then a week 'til my interview with PokerStrategy.com. and already the nervosity is sneaking up my butt.
I will try to follow my own and my friends tips::
Ah, by the way. The positions I'm being interviewed for is Team Leader Community Manager and Swedish/English Community Manager. The job is in Gibraltar, south of Spain, which is governed by Great Britain.
So, guys and girls. Can you keep your fingers crossed for me? =)
I made a frightening discovery when I surfed DN.se. Apparently, anyone can now "make" DNA-proof to place at crimescenes.
I wonder what happens in the future if we don't do as the government wants us to do. Will we be convicted for some mysterious "crimes" where they have found our DNA?
Well, lets hope it never gets that far, but in some countries these kinds of stuff actually happen. And those countries has advanced surveillance against its citizens. Think about that for a moment.
Here's a link to the article (warning: Swedish)
Okay, I have done a lot of blog posts about getting a job, but I haven't really gone through the marketing part of the process.
I will in this post talk about how to market yourself in different way. Why should they choose you among all the other applicants?
The Websites
I suggest you sit down and take a minute to think about what you can tell people about yourself. Filter out the best parts and put them into three/two websites:
If you want to you can use one site for all of these, or any other combination, but the important thing is that you try to cover all the subjects.
In these sites you have the chance of telling your future employer who you are, what you can do and what your ambitions are - Three very important parts for self-marketing.
The CV & Cover letter
In your CV you should focus on facts and not on your personality. The only way to market yourself in a CV is to make the CV easy to read and having the right content for the right job. See my detailed post on CV's here.
In the cover letter, try to sell yourself as much as you can, in a reasonable degree though. If you included a picture in your CV, you don't have to include one in the cover letter.
Try to convince your employer why you are better than the other applicants. Explain what you can bring to the company and write something to back these facts up (I backed mine up with writing about previous experiences in the area of work I was applying to)
Another great tips is to be very confident in your covering letter, but not too much. Make your employer feel that there is none or a very small risk factor when hiring you. If an employer has doubt about one person and not about the other, you can easily figure out which one will get the job.
They refuse to review or investigate their surveillance at FRA. My conclusion is that the Swedish Government, lead by Fredrik Reinfeldt, want's to keep us in the dark.
"Why not investigate FRA?", we ask them.
"It's impossible to do!", they answer.
If USA can do it, why can't we?
It's obvious that the Swedish Government has been puppets of USA for some time now, but apparently cant everything that is done in USA, be done in Sweden. USA have reviewed and investigated their own surveillance network.
So, why doesn't the government want us to know how FRA works? Are they using the facility to do something they aren't suppose to?
Well, they have done it before (without being brought to court for that matter).
I recommend checking out Klambergs blog for more on this, or his own FRA-wiki database giving you some deeper insight on FRA and it's database. (warning: swedish)
Well, this wasn't any suprise really. The newsportals are screaming "the impossible have happened", "This shouldn't be possible, the cheif of police said". Well get a grip, anything can and will leak out if there's any value in it.
This brings me to FRA, IPRED and all the other laws that concerns surveillance of private citizens. If the polices' "Secret Documents" can leak out to criminal organizations, can't the information gathered by FRA leak out as well?
Well, I don't think I have to say more, you got the picture.
Hi, I realised I haven't talked very much about what I do in the Game Industry, or what I do on my free time. I figured it's about time I told you about what's cooking in my kitchen so to speak.
I'm first going to tell you what I do now, but also go into what I might be doing in the near future. But first, I will tell you what I won't do in the future.
I recently turned down a job as the Marketing & Community Manager for the newly started HR-comapny Resource Unlimited. I was talking a lot with a Robert E. Taylor about this job, but in the end, I realised that the job might not be the one I'm looking for and it involved too much risk taking from my part. I'm too young and inexperienced in the stocks-business, so buying a part of the company to work for it wasn't something I would want to do right now.
Fools War and Dreamlords: The Reawakening
This is what I do on my free time. I'm (still) the community manager for the MMO-RTS game Dreamlords: The Reawakening, even though I don't get paid - I do this for the players. Right now I'm holding an event in the game, and hopefully it will work out fine even though we are very limited to what we can do for the players right now (explanation: Lockpick Entertainment have gone bankrupt and is no more).
Other than that, I'm developing the Neverwinter Nights 2 module: Fools War. I'm doing leveldesign, bug hunting and some dialogue writing right now. Earlier in production I worked with QA, Dialogues, Leveldesign, Game Balance and Storywriting. We expect the module to be ready sometime this fall.
Oh, I almost forgot. I write news articles for the local newspaper as well. If you can read swedish, you can read them at www.joakimbergman.com.
I'm going to spain? or Great Britain?
Well, it depends how you see Gibraltar. It's in the far south of Spain, but is officially governed by Great Britain. The job involves Community Management at a large and successful poker community called PokerStrategy.com. My interview is later this month, so if everything goes well, I'm on the next flight to Gibraltar. Keep your fingers crossed for me, will you? :)
If I have the time, I will try to keep up with my work on Fools War and Dreamlords: The Reawakening, but I will have to prioritise the job that my economy is depending on.
Maybe not in Sweden yet, but now England has taken the big step to set up camera surveillance in 2000 families homes, and the plan is to extend it to 20 000 homes.
To intercept and correct anti-social behaviour they say
They wan't to turn us into robots. This reminds me of the movie: Equilibrium
This is what happens when you "don't care"
Stupid people, and I really mean STUPID! Not only are the ones responsible for this really stupid. Many of you don't lift a finger to fight against this, and that's even worse. The worst part is that this WILL happen to Sweden and many other europeian countries as well, if people don't start acting NOW!
The Treaty of Lissabon is the first step to this, and you don't even know it. Counties in the EU super state will stop having the right to stand against new laws, made by the parlament, which will force more countries to loose their freedom and their Right to Privacy.
The time to fight against this is now! Not later. So get your lazy asses up and do something already. I don't want to find you whining then it's to late if you haven't lift a finger to fight against this.
Thanks, Henrik Alexandersson for this information.
