What is an office?
Phew we made it. We got the Beta version live! Go play it now!
We have developed Shadow Bug for over a year now and during that rather short amount of development time we have had many ups and downs. Great moments of discovery and dem dark moments caused by dat infamous indie pain. Oh the pain. But as colorful is the darkness of our indie developer journey as many different “office” spaces we have occupied.
So basically we have had a couple of different options to choose from:
Juha’s place a.k.a. The Old Headquarters was the first “most official office of the moment” it was a rather spacious, not quite tidy, single flat for Aalto University Master students. This was an awesome place to work at! No worries where to put trash or how piggy you needed to be in order to achieve that glorious flow of creativity all original indie development must succeed to master in order to OK BOSS. Sadly Juha had to say goodbye to this shithole because he only had a certain amount of time to live there provided by the Aalto University and when the time came he moved to his girlfriend Camilla’s place.
Camilla’s place is rarely if ever available for Muro quality development time because Camilla has to work at a place where she has to wake up super early. So it’s not so convenient to whisper communicate while developing. Creativity needs sounds. Voice to be heard. Idiotic jokes to penetrate holes to the dam of good manners holding back the freedom of speech and innovation!
Kim’s and Pia’s was and still is a bit smaller shithole, decorated with a lot of cute Pikachus from different Pokemon genres, compared to The Old Headquarters. As you can tell from the name of this smaller office space, it’s not available for our high standard indie working conditions as often as we want because Pia, Kim’s partner, wants to live her life as humane as possible as often as possible.
Veli’s place #1 was an interesting tiny place full of different junk. Some of the garbage made sounds when you accidentally touched them. Some of them massaged you. That was ok.
Then Veli moved with all his junk to a bit bigger place. Veli’s place #2. Actually quite similar space as The Old Headquarters. Actually in the same house. Into a neighbor flat. So this was pretty freaking handy! First of all Veli likes to work in quiet place when he is practicing his sorcery when Juha and Kim quite often has to act like two boneheaded red ass chimps to achieve the level of communication they need to be able to develop the diamond called Shadow Bug. Living so close made it possible to have all three elephants to quickly meet at the same place while giving Veli the possibility to quickly evade to the darkness of his sound cave when he needed to. Anyhoo, soon Veli moved to another flat from this one as well. So for a short amount of time Muro Studios pretty much happened in this one house that was dedicated for hard working master students of Aalto University. Cough.
Veli’s place #3 is the newest and the most spacious spaces provided for Muro Studios. Also it includes a dedicated room for sound wizardry with a door. This is a great place to develop and have meetings. Could have better office chairs thou. The microwave is a great plus definitely. All dat crap that tries to represent a pizza you can eat now while developing and having the time of your life.
Remember Summer of Startups? Yes we were there during the summer of 2015. That was an interesting era in Muro Studio’s life. I could tell you thousand stories about it. But I don’t feel like it today. Instead I can tell you about the office space they kindly offered us. The building is called Startup Sauna. It exists at the Otaniemi region quite next to our school building. It was an open space office. Sort of. It was good. Thou we demanded more. Greedy basterds as we are. We needed no-sun-no-distraction space. A space where the horrible jokes could exist without any extra ears that could witness that we actually are crazy and should be thrown to a padded cell. Well. They gave us the spot. How nice! Once more a big Thank you for Summer of Startups!
Man’s Street a.k.a. space provided by school meaning basically our university classrooms. These are available for us quite often.
Thou quite often they are taken by other, more relevant, students. Why is it called Man’s Street? Well someone named the address of the building that way. Quite manly I would say. But so is Muro Studios.
So. We have and have had quite many different office space options available for us. Some more often than others. This makes us happy. Thou maybe one day… Muro Studios will have it’s own cute tiny office space solely dedicated for Muro Studios. Oh that would be quite something now wouldn’t it. Please, Shadow Bug. Do your duty so Muro Studios can pay rent like all the other grown ups do.