ImpactO – World Championships

ImpactO World Championships 2014 is now over and we are glad to present the new unbeatable masters, Gustav and Adam from Kiruna. This year, the championships brought more enthusiasm and joy than ever; with a total of 20 teams participating(!) the excitement was stunning. As for us developers, it is awesome to notice the increase of popularity and the enjoyment that our game brings you and we hope that you will continue to give us useful feedback.

We are also proud to present a special surprise to you, namely the ImpactO Nordsken movie directed by Eric Öhman (big thanks to you for your kick-ass work!). This movie takes you back to the best parts of the finals. So, take your seats and enjoy the show.

Huge congratulations to both of you.

Vaction!

Vacation are in full swing and the sun is shining like never before here in Sweden. I’ve left the keyboard and productivity behind me for a few weeks and instead focused on living life (something that is easy to forget when the creative juices flowing as best).

Visual Studio 2013 – Productivity Tips Part 1

As some of you already know my daily work is mostly done in the studio. Moving from 2008 (which was our main version at school) to 2013 was not a big leap at all and it was a swift process to learn the new way of working. The core is the same, although Microsoft has seasoned the latest release of Visual Studio with some very interesting parts. I will introduce a series where I go through some of my greatest tips and tricks that might increase your productivity significantly.

1. Utilize Bookmarks. Assigning different parts of code in different files with a bookmark will let you jump to these locations instantly. In the beginning you might forget to use bookmarks, but trust me, when you get a hang of it you will start to use it all the time 
2. Investigate and start to use ReSharper. I have started to wonder how I could develop without this tool in the past. It offers a great amount of useful features that you will use daily. Some of these are:

• Code-Quality analysis – this helps us, A LOT
• Traversing files – jump to a specific file and browse related files in a blink of an eye
• Code geration – write properties and templates faster than ever.

    In the upcoming posts I will review the details behind ReSharper more in-depth.

3. Pin often used files. Pinning important files that you are currently most focused on will remove the frustration that these files closes or drowns in other tabs while opening a lot of files.
4. Code snippets. Use already defined or create own snippets. I usually use them when working with XAML and want to do experiments in order to speed up the development. For more information.
5. Fix syntax errors inline by either using Visual Studios own tool or ReSharper. Place your marker above the error and press Alt+Enter to bring up a list with possible fixes.

So, E3 2014 is now over and I hope that you were as excited as I was while watching the new releases.

In General: a lot of potential and no doubt a good looking 2014 and 2015 for the gaming idustry.

So, what was the most spectacular game? A very hard question indeed and I must admit that choosing one single game to be the winner is not a walk in the park. If we think of the work “gameplay value” I must say that either Assassins Creed Unity or Farcry 4 will give me the most out of it. However, if we think of the words “excitement”, “potential” and “hope” I will give it to Star Wars Battlefront, which was actually one of the first games presented in the series. What will this game bring us Star Wars-fans and what addictive features will it include? Well, I hope that you are as eager as I am to find out.

In case you missed the e3 announcement of Battlefront (which you of course didn’t ;))

NDC Oslo

Yesterday I read on our Intra Blog that some of our colleagues spent the large part of last week at NDC Oslo with many great speakers. They have released videos of most of the talks on Vimeo. 

Of course, I recommend you to check these out. For sure you will find some useful information inside.

 

 

 

Though day at work. A lot of problems and a lot of unsolved problems as well (that is your lifestyle when working within the IT-sector, right?). Went out to celebrate my GF’s 23th birthday instead 🙂

 

 

 

 

Top-of-the-line joke

The programmer’s wife tells him: “Run to the store and pick up a loaf of bread. If they have eggs, get a dozen.”

The programmer comes home with 12 loaves of bread.

^.^

C# Good Practices

At our last Google time I found a really great article about good and bad practices regarding C#, something which fits me as a .Net developer like a golve. You should really read the things mentioned about the foreach loop and how properties actually should be used.

Here is the Article

written by Kunal Chowdhury

Communities – the key to achievements?

Now and then I think about the biggest differences when moving from the school-world to the “real” world. Of course, the number of differences are countless and there are pros and cons with everything. However, the most drastic change is no doubt the size. And when I mention “size”, I mean the size of almost everything; the projects are bigger, the lifecycle of products longer and of course the number of developers within the same project is huge compared to school related projects.

At this point, when the teams and projects and dependencies starts to grow, the importance of communities becomes important. Communities are basically a meeting where participants from different teams gather to share their latest knowledge and questions that have grown in the distinct team rooms. Moving from working with a game project where everyone involved in the project was located in the same room to a location where the teams are distributed not only in the same room nor the same building but as well in different countries was a quite big change for me.

Don’t be afraid of this. Naturally, the cycle of taking decisions is way longer, which can sometimes be annoying when you are used to take decisions at the quite same moment as the question arises. At the same time, it is really interesting to share the knowledge between teams and the concept “everyone has something to teach others” becomes really important at this stage. When starting your new career, don’t be afraid to raise your voice as your voice is clearly as important as everyone else’s.

Pokemón in da sun

Sometimes, even developers need to rest their fingers and take the day of with something completely different. This time I went to get my ass kicked by some of Skellefteås most fearsome Pokemón players. Isn’t it funny that this game is still going stronk? Let’s call it great game design, shall we?