Archive for November, 2009

I came, I saw, I enjoyed

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

I travelled to Jönköping, Sweden, for the weekend. I’m still there actually but DreamHack Winter 2009, the reason I came here, is over now. The festival was held from Thursday to Sunday (today) morning. It gathered about 20 000 gamers, geeks, nerdz, whatever you wanna call us. Half brought their PC’s and plugged them to the massive network and 40 GB Internet connection.

I was told they could provide access to 2 billion people with that kind of bandwidth. Why don’t they go provide it to all of Africa then and make the world a better place where we can all live happily everafter, you ask? I don’t know and I will not investigate… But that’d for sure make for a nice destination come next year! No more cold weather and night falling at 4 in the afternoon at least.

Anyway, I had an AM4ZIN9 time at DreamHack Winter ‘09, here’s why…

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Now that the dust has settled a bit…

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

Some of you may wonder why they didn’t get a beta key while they gave us their email address here to the right or on the Gamocracy.com splash page.

If that’s your case, I’d check my spam or junk box to start with because that’s where the key ended up for some people.

If it’s still not there, well it means we haven’t sent a key your way – yet! Fact is we’re putting a lot of ourselves into this site (like me leaving my job for example) and we wanted to start by receiving criticism from close friends first… because it’s easier to take than coming from people we don’t know that well or at all. So we only have about 50 people on the site right now.

I mean, we were pretty nervous… but we’re feeling a little better at the moment thanks to kind words from caring friends.

Now that the dust has settled a bit on the first opening, we’d like to make a couple adjustments before we send more keys around. We estimate it will take Rémi, our (sole) technical guy, 10 to 15 days before we can go for it.

Anyway, it’s been a lot of fun so far, and it’s only the beginning…

Big thanks to everyone who’ve taken the time to visit and participate!

And to the others, thanks for bearing with us and our fears.

The first testers are in

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

We just sent our first batch of beta keys. It’s the first time someone outside the four of us will browse Gamocracy. It’s nothing short of a great moment for us!

betabot

I don’t know about Morgan, dotsMarc and Rémi, but I find myself past the nervous stage. With the dice now rolling, it’s all about pushing and praying for a 6.

If you registered your email address and didn’t get a key, rest assured we’ll send more soon.

I’m also realizing that many of the people we’d like to see join in during the test phase, I’m talking friends and former colleagues mostly, actually didn’t register their email addresses. And I’m pretty sure some of them are expecting to get a key from the get go. So here’s a message to you guys: before you get offended because you didn’t get a key, and for the sake of our working hours (man, we already have tons to do!), it’d be great if you could register your email address to the right.

That would make things much easier on us because this way, we could put you in the hands of our robot.

See, I don’t know if you noticed already: we hired a robot to take some of the workload off of our shoulders. He’s nice and all.


Who you gonna call?

Sunday, November 15th, 2009

Some people’s phone numbers you never write in an address book, you remember them by heart.

dotsMarc_blogI was walking down the street in the early evening months ago when it came to my mind that this site I was thinking about, it wasn’t called Gamocracy then, could use some pixel art. Who was I gonna call?

It made no doubt, it was so obvious: a former captain of Good Game, the Counter-Strike team I managed, draws sprites for a living.

It’d been quite a while since we’d last talked but it didn’t bother me one bit, I decided to call him right away. I took the phone out of my pocket, dialed the number as I remembered it from a previous life and soon dotsMarc (self-portrayed here) was on the other end.

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Living the DreamHack

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

I’ll attend DreamHack Nov 26-29, in Sweden, and it should be not too bad a moment.

200904 - tazz_w163It’ll be the first time I go to a gaming event after Gamocracy’s beta launch. How will people react? I’m excited, yet I don’t want to know?

It’ll be my first time there too. At some point, I’d go to maybe 20 gaming events a year. A lot anyway. Yet this one I’ve never attended, I’ll be making up for a miss if you will.

I’ll get to see all those that I know from gaming and I haven’t come across in a long time. Not the least of which will be TaZzmaJazZ (pictured to the right, thx Esportsfrance). After several years working for another Swedish gaming act, TaZz is now one of those making DreamHack real.

He will better introduce to it than most. So everybody in the house, give a big round of applause, for Mr Tazz-Ma-JazZ!

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