San Francisco

All my colleagues from Megapop left on Friday after GDC, but I decided to stay over the weekend. I had found a new hotel, Club Quarters, in the financial district, not far from the piers. I was very happy with it, a well kept and efficient business hotel with nice rooms. There was a common area where you could get free coffee, soda and fruit as well. Pretty cheap too.

Off the Grid But Not Alone

On Friday evening I went to Off the Grid with Ivan and Henning from Rock Pocket Games. It's a food festival where they park a bunch of food trucks at Fort Mason. Mostly young people there, it was pretty crowded and the queues were long. We got a couple of beers, and I tried out a dish called My Mother's Lumpias since it sounded weird but was a meat filled roll. I think it was from Hawaii.

I have been to San Francisco a few times before, but for some reason I never got around to see Alcatraz. They had made some special extended trip, so I bought that one. After a morning of shopping gifts for the family, I was on the boat.

(Front to back) Me, birds, San Francisco

I didn't really know a lot about the place, except that it was a prison. Turns out it was originally a fortress, that was already obsolete when it was completed. Then it was turned into a military prison, a federal penitentiary, later occupied by Native Indian demonstrators, and finally it was turned into a national park.

The actual tunnel under Alcatraz

We got to go into the tunnels, which are not like in any of the movies at all. There were three tunnels that were made to get the cannon crews safely from one side to to the other. No prisoners ever found these tunnels.

The view from Alcatraz to San Francisco was great. There were lots of birds on the island. The guide said it gets pretty crazy during mating season, when there are thousands of birds courting all over the island.

No WARMACHINE for the prisoners back then, but they had Autobridge

Afterwards we got a tour around the prison block, where there were recorded messages on the headphones from guards, as well as from inmates. It was interesting and well made.

On the way back the wind was blowing an it had started to rain, so pretty much all the tourists on the boat were below deck. Only I and two guys from Chile were on the top and enjoying the view. They were super nice, and we decided to go out for dinner. They were going to check out a restaurant called The Stinking Rose (!!!). Their speciality was garlic. When we opened the doors it really did stink!

I had bread with garlic spread (basically garlic marinated in oil) and a spicy garlic sauce. Then I had chicken with 40 cloves of garlic. The only thing not garlic was the chocolate cake. The food was really good!

Chileans enjoying garlic

The next day I decided to check out the warships they have here. There is a WW2 submarine that has been converted into a museum, and a fully working and restored WW2 merchant ship that was part of the landing force during D-day in France!

USS Pampanito

The submarine was also an audio tour. It was pretty cramped in there, hard to believe it had a crew of 80ish people! There were even bunk beds over the torpedoes.

Entertainment, submarine style!

The merchant ship was quite impressive. They assembled one of these ships in only 42 days, and over 2700 of these ships were built during WW2. They were run by civilian crews.

Liberty class ship SS Jeremiah O'Brien

 I could go into the working engine room, and the cargo hold was converted into a museum.

Multiple floors of engine room, ready to make into an FPS level

I got to chat for a while with the master carpenter, he had been working there for 17 years. He told me that they had sailed the ship to France for the 50 year anniversary of D-day, and they had occasional cruises around the bay. Not many people in the world are licensed to operate ships like this, there are only a handful of fully working WW2 ships in the US. It's great that they have managed to save this ship for posterity!

And, that was it! I flew back to Norway with a long layover in Reykjavik, ready for a week of jetlag!

GDC 2017

After the great road trip to Monument Valley we made our way to San Francisco to showcase our next game, Trolls vs Vikings 2!

We went to the Herbert Hotel which is right in the city centre. Jørgen had made some error with the bookings so there were somewhat fewer beds in the rooms than expected, but the hotel staff was nice enough to add in extra beds.

At Mel's Diner with Thomas and Mikael.

The first two days were spent at at the Game Design Workshop. Of course I am not actually a game designer, but still I need to try to figure out what is going on in their twisted minds and convert designs like "we need a some kind of timer system" into working code. We had several exercises where we took a game and "skinned" it (changed the theme), combined various smaller games into bigger games, and made a card game version of Overwatch. It was quite interesting!

Turning "Sissyfight 3000" into game about dueling gentlemen

Merging a dice game, a card game and a dominoes game into some unholy monster

An attempt of writing down the rules.

Turning Overwatch into a card game.

After the game design sessions there was some late night panic trying to get our latest build installed on our new demo iPads. How they can still not get xCode to download certificates properly after almost 10 years of iPhone is a mystery to me. Every time they change it is broken in some new and non obvious way.

For some inexplicable reason all the Norwegian game developers ended up in a carousel for a photo shoot. I am sure this is somehow symbolic of game development.

You know you are in for a rough time when the name of the presentation is an entire paragraph unto itself.

Progressive San Franciscan transgender-friendly toilets. They had not actually remodeled the bathrooms though, so if any females want to experience for themselves the deathly smells of long rows of pissoirs they can do so here.

Lots of people at the expo hall! To the left is Agents vs Villain, which pits three players against one. Fun and frustrating - this is one game that can ruin friendships! :D

Our booth in the Nordic area. Fingar is showing our creation! He made quite an effort manning the booth almost all the time.

In my opinion the most interesting game project the last few years in Norway, a game about raising one of the Lebensborn kids in Norway after WW2. These innocent children were treated quite cruelly, and event today there are people in Norway who hate them foe who their fathers were.

They are going to a have a Kickstarter soon, and deserve your support!

I did not get much time to explore the expo itself, but I got to try out Nordic Trolls' new VR game, Karnage Chronicles! It was good fun to run around and slash at goblins with the HTC Vive controller!

After the expo we had no way to get our TV home. Hopefully some lucky person got a new TV!

I also went to the Nordic party, forgot to take any pictures. It's always super nice and a great opportunity to meet other devs and former colleagues!

After GDC was over all my friends from Megapop went back home, but I spent another couple of days checking out San Francisco.

Road Trip to GDC 2017 - Day 3

We were still pretty jet lagged. I woke up at 4:30 in the morning. The clouds had disappeared, and we had a beautiful view of the stars and Milky Way. Jørgen took a bunch of photos. My dinky iPhone camera can't take pictures of stars, of course, but I got the sunrise over Monument Valley!

Big black birds were gliding over the hotel.

Breakfast just after sunrise.

After breakfast we drove down to Horseshoe Bend. Jørgen crawled up to the edge to take photos. I did not, just thinking about it made me dizzy.

This is as close as I will get to a 300m drop. It was an incredible view!

This seemed to be a common trick - having a normal car attached to your huge camping car.

We drove by a huge power plant on our way to Page.

In page, we went on a tour into a slot canyon. These are canyons that are really narrow and built up by millions of years of flash floods. These shots are from the bottom looking up.

The canyon is about 400m through. Here I am at the entrance!

We stopped for BBQ in Flagstaff. It was really good. :D

And then, we drove for hours down to Phoenix and got a late flight to San Francisco. It was a great road trip, we got to see quite a lot and drove about 1250 km in two days!

Road Trip to GDC 2017 - Day 1 and 2

Next week is GDC (Game Developers Convention) 2017, and our company Megapop is traveling to San Franscisco to be there in force - 5 people showing off our Trolls vs Vikings 2, our latest game.

I am travelling down a couple of days before the conference with my friend & and Megapop CEO, Jørgen Tharaldsen, for a couple of days of driving through Arizona and Utah. We're flying Oslo - Los Angeles - Phoenix, landing around midnight. We picked up a rental. The one we had booked was a convertible or something. This is what they actually had:

Enough room for both our families in this monster

The plan was to just find a motel along the road to Monument Valley in Utah, but it turned out that several festivals were happening, so we drove for two hours before we were finally able to find a place to sleep in Sedona. We went to bed at 4:30 in the morning after almost 24 hours of travel. Fortunately they allowed us to keep the room a bit longer, so I got a good night's sleep.

Jørgen is a really good amateur photographer and crazy person, so of course he went up at 7 in the morning to drive around Sedona taking pictures while I slept. I woke up to this view of of the hotel room:

Johnny Cash on the stereo, driving through Sedona. This town is very proud of their (probably rather imaginary) magical vortexes, which even feature on the tourist maps. There are places selling crystals and stuff everywhere. While driving we spotted a bunch of people standing on the top of a rock, probably being vortexed or something.

On the road again...

We drive up to a lookout point above Sedona.

Jørgen and the view of Sedona

Yours truly has forgotten his sunglasses

 After driving through Flagstaff we see these beautiful peaks in the distance.

A sign along the road says "Dinosaur Tracks"! Of course we go to investigate. After a little while we find the tracks!

We are getting closer to monument valley. There are beautiful rock formations everywhere. Jørgen is cursing the poor lighting conditions.

Monument Valley itself is breathtaking. This is the view from our room at the rather aptly named The View, the only hotel in the Navajo Reservation.

We had both been looking forward to a nice beer after a long drive. Turns out that alcohol is banned in Navajo Nation. We try out the local tea and some Navajo dishes for dinner, pretty good stuff!