Are you Chilling?

There's that extremely helpful guy who overheard someone talking in his phone: "Where are you chilling? You don't know the place? Ok, I'll try to find you!", and so he felt the urge to help and started to ask people around "Are you Chilling? No? Excuse me, are you Chilling? Hello, are you Chilling?"
A couple of hours later he found himself being on the beach. "Hi, are you Chilling?" he asked somebody sunbathing, who grinned back and answered "yepp!!". The exhausted man gave him a slap and yelled "Then what are you doing here?! People are looking for you!"


The first (and only) time I heard this joke was in high school, but somehow I remembered it while thinking about myself right now. I'm the producer of our team and have to plan a lot of things, I have important stuff to program, I have the GUI design and implementation to do, the dissertation to work on and the individual projekt to atleast START with. And what am I doing? Chilling!

Things are looking better, I have to admit that. Our level designer seems to be hyped by the fact that he gets to do the tutorial levels too and plan everything - good for him, really. But not all the team members are as optimistic as him and I really can feel the team power meter getting lower and lower. Have to do something!! My fellow programmer have worked her hands off and the designer seems to have given up on this project being fun to play. Our artist feels like hell's upon him and the third programmer in the team... well he disappeared again! He's been doing that all the time, but I thought I had him this time. Even the hands off-programmer tends to hide nowadays. Things that were supposed to be designed this week seems to be unfinished, but according to our plans, this sprint (which lasts until Sunday) is the last production-sprint and there will be no more drastic changes and new inputs. Next Monday it's feature stop!

Yet I'm still chilling. Is that ok? Am I still sane? I hope my optimism is not due to me loosing all my adrenaline. Maybe, my brain is being I Don't Care-ish, but my conscious doesn't get it.
Either way I think our game will be fun to play. I've seen the level design, it's not finished yet but our level designer seems to have some talent hidden under the hoods. At least enough for this project. I like the way he thinks and solve stuff, so I'm leaving that up to him. I myself am trying to get the GUI system up and running, but GUI design is harder than I thought. I'm not aiming at a complex system with lots of stuff to see and chose, but the look and feel of everything is so hard to determine! Why is it so hard to determine where to put a simple little button? Or how it should look. Does it even matter that much? I'll only push it to play the actual game for God's sake!! Am I missing something here? I definitely do, with my over-optimistic attitude and everything...


Let's take a look at another side of my life: my post apocalyptus, aka. after graduation. I have no clue what will happen, and since I'm such a planning freak, it freaks me out even more!!
Thing is, mom can't stand it anymore, she wants to live in our home country, so everyone is working to fulfill that wish. My poor parents have gotten through and sacrificed a lot of things for the sake of protecting us - now is our turn to return the favor! What that has to do with my post apocalyptus? Well, the initial idea was to study here in Sweden, but then mom persuaded me to rest for one year before continuing with the Master's degree. Then my brother persuaded me to go to London and do my Master there (he's living there now). But then mom got very ill and she went to Kuwait and now she refuses to continue living in Sweden. Understandible, I must say. But, now my brother is doing his best to get into business in Kuwait so that he gets a residence permit and buy an appartment or house where he and my parents can live. Eventually they will get an rp too. And now they try to persuade me to study in Kuwait. I can't find any Masters on computer games programming in Kuwait!! What I think that I've decided is to take distance classes while tagging along the family to Kuwait. But now I have to check for which requirements there are on courses to be counted as advanced enough for the Master's degree. With that approach I can manage to put up my own Master! Handy eh? And exhausting... But honestly, regaining harmony into the family spirit is priority #1 right now, so I can end up being anywhere on this lovely planet with neither a school nor a job to go to.

Jee, I'm really talented at WHINING! Gosh, I'll stop. You know what? let's turn this plate over to a better side:
I want to go indie! I think that suits me very well. Flexible, minding my own business, working at my own pace... I can have another job on the side, as long as I get to make my own games. I think it goes great with the post apocalyptus planless days - if there is no work to do, I'll make up work to do!

There are a few persons I already know I'd like to work with. Maybe I'm being naïve now, but I really look forward to work with people overseas, people from other countries, to get a mix of ways of thinking and percepting things. Also, there is atleast one competition I plan to participate in and I hope to find out more. I also plan to do some experiments in my games, I want to compare different styles of programming, different styles of games and even different graphics to see what it provides for the gameplay. I'm sure the answers are obvious but in this way I feel like making the game developing process only more interesting. Come summer and sweep me away!