A Month in Chiang Mai
This is 3rd trip of my gamedev nomad (for 1st, and 2nd).
Spoiler alert: This post is more about the co-working space I utilized there because my day-to-day is living around it. Yes, seriously. Also by all means, I have no affiliated thingy with the space itself. It’s pure intention. ☺
This time it’s a month long living here in northern part of Thailand. With similar reason of why I decided to go without much a plan. It works out at the end. Gained more productivity pushing Zombie Hero forwards, and more healthy for my life.
What’s different is that this time I bring my road bike with me.
I headed out from my home around 15:00 on Monday 4th May. I cycled to the nearest train station, Don Mueng Station. From there, I piggy back my bike with the train in which whenever I reached Chiang Mai, I go on with my own way. Yes, no need for taxi, or public transport.
With bike you have complete freedom, it’s indie, it’s hippie, or whatever you might call, but for me, it’s my lifestyle.
Firstly, my plan was to grab a free train. It’s train no.109 if you go from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. It will head out from Bangkok station at around 12.30 PM and arrive at Chiang Mai at around 4 AM in the next day. But make sure you are there to reserve the seat a couple of hours before. There’s no ticket. You can check the schedule here.
Anyway, I missed that train. And I have to pay for a ticket for a 2nd class. It’s around 600–700 THB. There’s air conditioner, and good thing is besides the seat, there’s a power outlet.
Not sure I would regard it as luck. I can develop the game while I was sitting tight. I can finish adding 5–6 zombies with a new skin asset from our artist. Ohh wow, really utilize the time! If you heard about train jam. This is it, I prove it that you can make game during a commute via train ☺
It’s ~6 km from train station to PunSpace Nimman which is the place I planned to be working there all month long. From what was happened, it’s really chill-out and relaxing cycling. There’s less traffic, much less compared to Bangkok. Weather is nice during that time even though Chiang Mai people regard it as hot.
I booked the place to stay via AirBnb. I use this service all the time whenever I go aboard or want to look for a cheapest place. It’s good I can find a place that also offers long term stay in which if you book for more than 28 days, you will get a discount. My case it’s totally 60% in discount. Just check it when you select the check-in and check-out date on the reservation date.
And now I arrived, I went to the place I booked first. But realize that I can’t check-in right now, due to the door was locked and as re-checked the check-in time is 2 PM. It’s now in the late morning, thus I need to go somewhere else to spend my time wisely.
The first thought is Pun Space. I don’t know the exact location, thus I peek into the room of the place I stay. I see a password for WiFi. Yayy! I use it to power google map finding the route and location. Yuppie!!
Finally I arrived there. This area is magnificent. It’s really healthy to be working hard and at the same time you enjoy the nature refreshing things up.
In front, the garden area is shared among business entities around. There’s Cube cafe, OpenDream office, and Pun Space.
The benefit of member at Pun Space is as follows
- 24 hours access with finger printing
- Free snack, coffee, tea, and oval-tine
- 2 devices allowed to access WiFi (yes, you can log out connected device and connect with another one, so you can manage it yourself)
- Standing desk available
- Skype room
- Relax at the garden
The speed at Pun Space is down 9.63 Mb/s, and up 1.44 Mb/s.
This co-working space is the very first place that offers 24 hours access to customers. There’s less of Thai people utilizing the space, but almost all of them are foreigners. It’s like offloading the management of the space to customers to take care of themselves. It really works as far as I’ve experienced.
It’s also very nice for them to print my picture along with some text for who I am. This is really nice of them.
Apart from the space stuff, major things I learned is that
- Everything is possible if you really pay attention and keep your mind towards it.
One of the system that I find it very hard to implement. It’s dialogue system that we use in the game. I would say the time that I regard it as a difficult task is because I really didn’t see what’s possible. I didn’t see the pattern existing in the larger problem I’m looking at really closes to my eyes. When you’re working on a large and difficult problem, you should cut it down to smaller piece, and find a pattern that powers the whole system. That pattern is really a key. If you could create that pattern, then you can create such system with any any length or number of input. Long time ago, the game still uses hard-coded version of dialogue that it shows each dialogue bubble with hard-coded text individually one by one. Thus we cannot have more than 2–3 dialogue to make the story interesting. It’s cumbersome to code that part and manage all those internal variables. But as I did that several times enough to notice a pattern and to tell myself that okay, let’s really solve this. Then booms, such difficult system is not that impossible or really hard to implement. It’s just we didn’t see it clearly enough to motivate us to go through it.
2. Suffer now, and live as a legend later.
As the timeline is tight, this phase I keep telling myself during the night out and day in working on the game that if you stop and go to bed now, there won’t be any progress. So just plainly suffer now, and until the work at hand is done, then it’s all good at the end.
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