So you heard that in 2016 we’ll have the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Pretty cool, uh? But 2016 remains a year far far away by now. For what that matters, the next big thing in Rio is SBGames 2009, between October’s 8th and 10th. The Brazilian Symposium on Games and Digital Entertainment is in it’s 8th edition and this time will focus in the so called Convergence issue.

I’ve been in the last edition, Belo Horizonte 2008, and the event turned out to be much more interesting than I’ve anticipated. A good surprise indeed. So this time all the Adugans are going, and the expectations are considerably high. Aduge will be flying to Rio this week and we hope to send you some news from the new Olympic city soon.

So yesterday we’ve told you about the Tsar Coffee. Now for the hard work: it keeps going on. Marcel just returned from the 4th Information Design International Conference in Rio, in the Tsar Project I’m in the last steps of the Character Design creative process, Game Design and Plot are tidying up the core events of the game, Vermon is working dutifully to implement a fine a.i. pathfinder algorithm, and Sound Design just finished it’s creative guidelines.

As the new fortnight beings we’re overlooking the administrative aspects of the studio and will go back to the Kremlin works tomorrow. And so those are the news from the last few days.

See you shortly!

Last time I’ve written to you the Studio was dealing with the troubles of working in a city under the fear of Influenza. Our classes in the Universities were suspended, we were avoiding getting out of our homes, and of course, the real tension of the flu threat disturbed us.

But, hey! The sun is shining again!

The Unis reopened, and we’re all healthy, probably immunized and excited to work. Actually during this period of compulsory recession we’ve never stopped working anyway, some new dynamics and methods were introduced to our workdays. One of these is the fact that now we do work in cycles of fortnights, starting in the first Tuesday of the month we work two days in our administrative affairs; that, after a little strategy revision during last July, we separate in four main divisions, being them Personnel, Process, Marketing and Finances; so, two days in our administrative affairs, the next two days we work in our current project; that we’ll announce very soon and that you’ll be able to keep track of trough a production diary; and then it’s Saturday! Party ti- NOT. For the last 2 years we’ve been doing our main meetings in the Saturdays’ evenings. It is in these meetings that we make decisions, discuss the directions that we want our projects to go, plan our weeks and fortnights. Sunday and Monday are the free days for the Adugans; Mondays are free in the sense that we do not work in the ongoing project nor in the administrative divisions, Beto, Bruno, Ingrid and I work in our combined college degree project that we call twinbirds, Vermon has classes in college, and Marcel studies piano and music theory; after this free days we have four days of work in the project, one more Saturday meeting, this time with reports of the fortnight work, and then those free days and the cycles restarts.

The weather is great in Curitiba, so they say. Bright sun and warm dry breeze, this clean celeste skies makes everybody happy. In my humble opinion a plain grey cloudy sky is much better, like an empty sheet of paper, but of course, this warmth is great to utterly send that fear away.

So we are back to work! And back to classes at Uni! After a month of vacation, some trips and field-researches (of which I will talk later on) it’s time to go back to the good and loved Adugan projects and the not so loved but necessary classes. Great.

NOT

Two days ago the Unis closed their doors. All of them. The education facilities are closed here in Curitiba until, they say, August’s 10th, but probably later. The reason?, you may ask, it’s the fear of Influenza A H1N1. The weather around here is terrible in the last few days, cold and moistly, and the numbers are growing fast. I should remember that I do live in an apartment in the old centre of the city, next to UFPR’s Design campus and it’s, oh!, Hospital! Yeah, the one place in Curitiba were most of the Influenza cases are being observed. By the way, that apartment is also Aduge’s Headquarters. Outside our windows it’s easy to spot people walking down the street wearing their panic (flu) masks, it’s sort of uncomfortable, to say least.

The classes are suspended and we can feel a heavy air around, but our work keep rolling. Mostly of it is being done alone, the Adugans staying comfortably at their homes, and here the beauty of the web is on our side. Tools like IRC, Google Docs, Gtalk, Gmail, SVN, Wikimedia, all of which are being used a lot during the workdays. We’ve passed through a similar situation when I was living in São Paulo and Marcel in Köln, however the funny (or not) part is that this time we’re all here in Curitiba less than 8 miles apart. I believe that at least we’ll keep our weekly meetings here in the HQs, but even if not, don’t worry, everything is just according to the schedule. This will eventually pass and we give our best wishes of hope (and good health!) to the world. This will pass. After all, we must be here to watch 2012 come.