“Party of None” released

Posted on June 4, 2011 by Mikael Vesavuori

Civil Protection Unit’s 6-track, instrumental sampler “Party of None” has just been released! This has been the reason why I have waited to roll out games, by the way. More to come when internet connection is more stable. Enjoy the music!

Party of None cover art, small

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One week until Relocation; News in General

Posted on May 24, 2011 by Mikael Vesavuori

Next week marks the move to Gothenburg, which means that I will do less work than usual for a period in early June.

BUT

As contract work is now pretty much done, I took up NonViolence and Wrong which I was saying would be out “soon” a few posts back, and make no mistake – they will be out very soon. NV is out for some final testing and tweaking and Wrong has been getting much more polish and some of that good old reductionist treatment. It’s now simpler, better explained, more coherent and also packs audio that I think suits it quite well as compared to the blips and blips from earlier. In short, new games roll out next week before the move. The iPad versions will not be out until then though, because of the submission process that takes some time.

If you’ve missed it, I also posted a short paper on a concept model for physical gaming that focuses on drama and uses tangible interfaces for interaction. It was done in the line of duty (school course) but involves a fair bit of the early thinking I’ve had in mind for my Valand project. Read it if it sounds interesting – I think it is.

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Progress For The Comrades, Relocation and Graduate School, Dance Idiot Dance

Posted on May 9, 2011 by Mikael Vesavuori

First – the WordPress design may be a bit funky because of an upgrade but I’ll get to that later this week.

Comrades, you must not despair. After viral assassination attempts great effort has been spent doing contractual work. We like money, but not capital – therefore we labor! So – that piece of outsourced migraine is soon done. It is in fact pretty decent, but still, we may soon move on toward diverging goals.

As for this month’s combined family/personal/PB news, the relocation to Gothenburg, Sweden has gone through pretty much all of the critical milestones. Lodging for the tired backs of laborers (me and my wife) has been acquired, reconnaissance has been conducted fully across the landmasses and most importantly – I have been accepted into my graduate program at Valand School of Fine Arts where I will work towards my master’s degree (in Fine Arts – only thing missing is the wine, now!). Gothenburg will thus be my place of residence starting June 1st.

The ever-upcoming Civil Protection Unit album Dance, Idiot, Dance is growing and taking shape all the time. Since the fall it has mostly been in a phase of stage 2 polish, as most of the music as such has already been done almost a year back. I hope readers will understand that a bunch of other work has been taking the time from CPU during the last year. I am nevertheless very excited to hear the album in increasing complexity as the months go by, now clocking in at around 46 minutes for 15 tracks. This will be very good, and as reported, more dance oriented than Tagged, Bagged and Gagged’s industrial sound. Tunes range from old rock-styled midtempo straight-hitters to epic synth chant-a-longs. Personally I’m psyched for one of the late-comers to the album, a track tentatively called “Attention (Quota Warfare)”, which reminds at least me slightly of TWA by Front Line Assembly. Nice stuff.

Updates will start becoming more frequent from now on as well. All is well now.

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Stockholm, Sickness and recovery, Bizarre problems

Posted on April 13, 2011 by Mikael Vesavuori

This blog post has been delayed due to illness, anti-party activities and foreign agents (bad imported television, that is). OK, let’s summarize.

—

The Stockholm trip at the beginning of the month went very well and I had a great chat with my contact there. If all goes well we may hit it someday and do some work together. Cheers for the future! *kanpai*

This is where my illness comes in: Just after the trip I managed to get very sick. As I was recovering my motivation was seriously frayed. I think I am getting back out of it though and have managed to start getting things done, once again. Since I’m not really ill very often, this was about due time in all honesty. I deserved being sick, is another way of putting it.

One of the other reasons last week was utter rubbish might have been that a few of the pieces I’ve been trying to update (Welcome Home for iPad, iSinner, Equalizer 1.1) all have late-coming, extremely bizarre problems. Their nature is of the kind that wants me to finally admit them as “done” so I can quit hustling with these old things anymore. Let’s see if that ever happens. I believe this on-going work with projects makes sense since most updates are iterative and small. Perhaps the ones gaining most from these releases are not 1.0 people, but the ones catching up a bit later, like 1.1 or 1.2.

If all goes well I may start releasing the webplayer versions of Wrong and NonViolence very soon. Status of Wrong is that it works as expected but I may reiterate some of the finer design choices. Perhaps I shouldn’t. It was never meant to be very complex. NV works better than ever but still has the annoying bugs with paths that seem to have broken. I will need to reimplement the entire subsystem if I am ever to release the game. Back on schedule, blogging about whatever is on my mind, next Monday.

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Blekinge Domination Tour

Posted on March 29, 2011 by Mikael Vesavuori

Back from six days in Blekinge, or more specifically, Karlskrona. I can now check off all but one activity from my todo list. Of course this now means that I need to work hard to get more important things to do, say and talk about. Let’s do a quick assessment of what the Bureau got out of this.

Lecture – The Boring Game
I delivered my introductory talk about critical games on Wednesday evening at the Karlskrona city library. After some initial technical problems (always the thing that happens at these things) the talk was done pretty much on the clock which really never happens – win.
For future iterations, some content will be pushed slightly and it’s going to get even more focused. One of the listeners also thought that it may be suitable to talk even more about my own games and how they apply to the ideas I present. I guess I was a bit too modest to make more comments about them, but they were there. In all, I am very satisfied. Since the talk was livestreamed on Bambuser, I chose to archive the video so you can watch it on the Intertubes as well.

UPP2011
As stated in earlier posts, the touchscreen provider did not attend for our cross-promotional booth, meaning the entire PB presence got more than slightly set off-course. Quite some material was created for even the most miniscule details, and the two hard months since I could focus more on this date and place more specifically I feel have been not so much a waste as they have been, on Saturday, extremely anti-climactic.
The good part is that I got valuable feedback from some of the people that attended UPP plus some input from a young gamer who had some ideas about NonViolence. Then the best part is that I now know that this is not the setting for Propaganda Bureau even if the setting, place, time and context were spot-on on paper. PB can now move towards those places that matter for the business and audience more. Doing project-wise presentations may also yield better results than showing a large array of materials straight away.

This week and beyond
The primary goal for April is to finalize projects for iPad/iPhone and do a slight update to Equalizer. These are already well underway, so no worries there. There is also contract work to do, a meeting to attend on Friday and an idea of porting Welcome Home to iPad. Anyway, finalizing is the main thing now so I can move on to other work.

Thank the Party for UPP being over. Back to work, comrades!

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One week until UPP2011, Last minute changes, General updates

Posted on March 22, 2011 by Mikael Vesavuori

A few days ago I was informed that Netsmart, the company responsible for the numerous multitouch screens I was supposed to use/borrow/promote/whatever would not be able to show up at UPP, meaning I have in the best of cases one screen to use on Saturday. While this has the positive effect of meaning I need less works to show there (meaning less work until then), this obviously also implies a slightly less extravagant presence. I am truly sorry for that turn of events. Their will be lies, slander and games anyway.

Stress has been very much in the air for the last month, as you may understand from the recent posts, but I can happily inform you that very important family matters are finally getting better so I can continue putting time, energy and love in Propaganda Bureau without feeling the least bit ashamed. Hopefully all works out well. The release schedule for April is coming along very nicely and I sincerely hope that all goes well with the first Apple submissions, so I can get the proper versions of iSinner (formerly know as iRepent, iPhone) and NonViolence (iPad) out. Writing about submissions, Copenhagen Game Collective has called for submissions to Nordic Indie Game Night, for which I sent Don’t Get Raped. Let’s see if it gets in – if it does, it means I’m going to the event in May. Niceness. Let’s hope.

I’ve also implemented Flattr properly, still trying to finalize account verification with PayPal, got truckloads of work done and brought in custom error pages for PB in case you ever get lost or something strange happens. It is good to have virtual land.

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Two weeks until UPP2011, Preparations, Prototyping

Posted on March 14, 2011 by Mikael Vesavuori

So it’s less than two weeks until UPP2011, the interactive expo in Karlskrona hosted by Blekinge Upp and others. The final line-up has been decided – my new project Wrong, The Waiting Game, NonViolence (HD! or something along those lines) and a prototype for Life Story. There will also be live testing of iSinner (which was formerly iRepent until some bastard nicked the name) for iPhone.

This entire last week consisted of getting old work done, massively overworking, prototyping (read below), improving the UPP line-up games and in a fit of database-enduced rage, misclicking and removing my working copy of the PB web site. Quite a few hours of polish was instantly removed when updating my local server. After some investigating it seems most of my important polish work remained intact since it has been uploaded already. Good. Wouldn’t want a database tsunami right now. I’ve already got stress tics in my eye lids.

So, prototyping. I’ve had a few more small art games popping up, grabbing my attention. One of these was Wrong, which is now going to be shown and playable at UPP2011. Wrong (a game about making things right) is a Pong clone where there is an AI player that does not want to play. The metaphor is about the willingness to listen, help and get involved with the lives of others, particularly loved ones but getting denied the chance to be there for them.
Many of the other game ideas are also reworkings of classic games, like The Hating Game – a “neo-Nazis meet cultural critique” version of Streets of Rage or Whining and Dining, about the sometimes mysterious process of choosing the right wine for ones food to avoid looking like a barbarian with no taste.

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Material Properties/Öppna Sinnet 2011 | Blog Post @ BleUppInd | Upcoming lecture

Posted on March 9, 2011 by Mikael Vesavuori

Receivers of this year’s Öppna Sinnet, the art grant in Karlskrona, were just announced. I was unfortunately not one of them this time around. Looking at this year’s receivers, all of them deal in fairly ordinary cultural practices, chosen by the jury seemingly for the sake of public amusement than in actually making something radical and new. Material Properties was certainly not “easy” and thus far harder to pitch and manage to get through the tiny loopholes of the grant jury. I will have to look into that specific project when I have the time, since the funding would have been a very good incentive to really push it through in the coming months. Now it will have to wait until summer at least.

In better news, I was invited as a guest blogger at Blekinge Upplevelseindustri, so that post got live on Saturday. It’s in Swedish and a bit more poetic than most of their usual Saturday blogger’s texts. You may find it slightly controversial, or maybe not.

Also, my upcoming lecture/talk at Karlskrona Stadsbibliotek is in the monthly cultural guide booklet which can be found at several places in Karlskrona. Being modern and such, a Facebook event will be started for it. Be sure to click “will attend” if you are planning to come. Note that the lecture will be in Swedish.

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Tidying up, looking ahead, interview

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Mikael Vesavuori

As promised, this week dealt a fair deal with older things I’ve not yet finished. Some of these have cooled down a bit, meaning the only reasonable and good way to handle them is to simply postpone them for a while. This goes for RaceWar! (needs some more thinking) and Modern Welfare (hit a rock wall with NPCs). The Waiting Game is likely going to change quite a bit, for the better naturally, moving towards an installation object instead and is therefore in need of some additional reconceptualization. While this may sound a tad lame, it is not, dear friends. They are merely going to incubate for some more time and will end up better for it.

More urgent work is underway with the UPP2011 expo works, anyway. The last couple of days I’ve programmed the core of Life Story as well as done initial prototyping for Backpatter and coming up with an actual concept for Put [It] In. Looking at the state of those games as opposed to what I had last Monday really feels good, not that they are in any way complete, but just knowing that they -are- something now. They will be very interesting to see in action with real players at UPP2011. Looking at my extremely busy schedule, I am planning Put [It] In and Life Story for public release somewhere between April and June. Otherwise I’m just going to fry myself trying.

In the general workload the weekend has been dedicated to some more web polish (markup is never semantic enough). I’m testing a different project view as well, thinking that the black-framed monstrosity of today might be a bit too blocky. Also, I’m trying to figure out Joomla for a client’s project. While initially pretty strange, I now have something decent going, and it’s all really not that unfamiliar from my own web dev practices, except the fact that Joomla is -slightly- heavier and actually uses more involved PHP. As for other new skills, I’m trying to make something out of my Objective C reading, and can’t help but wish that Xcode 4 was here in a final version already. Interface Builder being separate from Xcode feels pretty unintuitive for a n00b like me. Even my 30″ monitor can’t save me from the hellish armada of windows occupying all the screen real estate.

Last week I was a guest at the Spelfokus podcast where I talked about Don’t Get Raped and the other mischief I’ve been doing since October. You may also be interested in the blog post I’m doing for Blekinge Upplevelseindustri that’s going to be posted on Saturday. It is part of their communicative role to let media creators do weekly blog posts like that – now it’s my turn. Link will come your way when it’s up!

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NonViolence release, Back from business “trip”, To-do

Posted on February 21, 2011 by Mikael Vesavuori

NonViolence has been released today after a long history including events such as company reorganization, platform switching, corrupt project files and so on. Exciting, but infuriating at the same time. Well, the game is released and should be treated as the thing it is: a full conceptual prototype, or a protogame of the sort PB has been doing since Don’t Get Raped. You cannot win the game, but simply fend of the pesky demonstrators until they finally win. The game has also gone through development in an age of regimes crumbling under the pressure of liberty-seeking peoples, such as those from Iran, Tunisia, Egypt and most recently, Libya. My hope is that NV will put some focus on the farcical martyrdom involved in creating sensationalized revolutions such as those we are witnessing today. The Bureau salutes you in the Middle East and Northern Africa.

Note that the camera movement button is RMB (right mouse button) and not MMB (middle mouse button). This will be fixed in a 1.01 version in the not-so-very-extremely-distant future.

Also, I returned back from my many various commitments last week. While I like to take the occasional outside perspective on my own work, I like actually working (to have something to look at from the outside) more. Things done last week involved some updating with business development contacts, meeting clients and new folks + shaking hands on a new contract, working on a yet-undisclosed project with Thom and also finalizing a plan of attack for the UPP2011 expo and getting it “approved” and OKed.

The coming week will probably move back to the more formal idiot savant state where the immediate goal is to finalize projects that have been laying around. If all goes well most of that will be done and over with after Saturday or so. Looking forward to it!

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