Its the end of June 2024 and I’m sat in a hotel lobby in Riyadh with a couple of hours to spare before I need to head into work with the rest of the d3 programming team. The week started by flying form Newcastle to Heathrow on Monday where i bumped into Adam who was also flying out to Riyadh to work on the same job.
We had a couple of hours to kill and had a lovely catchup over some very spicy bloody mary and some pretty good lounge food. The flight was good, we were stuck on the tarmac for a couple of hours before takeoff due to air traffic and i managed to watch the film poor things before being airborne, the film was really good, I highly recommend it. We eventually got to the hotel around 02:00 in the morning and was up agin for breakfast at 08:00. It was nice to catch up with people id not seen in ages and hear how thing were progressing onsite, everyone said the whole place was still a building site and they weren’t exaggerating.
The control room was looking good, many of the guys had been here for over a week already and had done a great job. There was still grinding works going on in the building and everyone was working around each other.
l
This is the third year Ive worked with Bright Studios on this esports event and it evolved considerably each year. Its grown from 1 games arena and 2 studios to currently 3 games arena and 6 studio. Previous years the operating positons were all at the respective stages so we were all spread out, this year for the first time we are all operating from the same area remoting into the servers at the relevant stages. The first thing I did when I arrived was find my desk and figre out how i was going to arrange things to make it a comfortable and an efficient place to work at for the next few weeks, this invoived going round site, scavanging some wood and asking the chippies to cut it into sections so i cold build a small shelf on the desk to make more space
Shelf image here
Ince that was all done with i settled dow and got familiar with the system, it was nice to be sat next to Kris and Dan, and bounce ideas off each other with the initial round of programming.
The event which we are working on is called the the Esports World Cup previously called Gamers8 and seems to be growing year on year. From what I understand there is a huge chain approvals needed for all of the assets and content and because of this, much of the content needed to be re-rendered as there was so many changes. For the team of us programming this meant there was limited things we could be working on and we completed all we could on the first day.
Several of us were told we didn’t need to come into work the following day and were given the day off so decided to do some planning on what to do with a whole day free in a city were the main entertainment activities are going to a shopping mall or eating shawarma. So thinking of ideas on what to do, the following day Nick, Robin, Carsten and Myself decided to go to a mall and the first one we got an uber too was closed and looked quite derelict inside.
We eventually went to a more lively mall, and did a bit of mooching around and grabbed some food. The rest of the day was spent by the pool wondering if we were going to have any content to program with the following day. I think it was late afternoon/evening we got the message that there was still no content ready and no need to come into work the following day! With that news I suggested we hire a car and drive to a place id been told about called “The Edge of the World” which is a tourist spot 2 hours outside of Riyadh with magnificent views, with this suggestion, an adventure was brewing.
Little over 12 hours later, 6 of us were at the airport picking up a Chevy Tahoe hire car ready to drive to the edge of the world, we knew the “easiest” route by some instructions from the internet. After a quick pitstop via the supermarket for plenty of water, snacks and general supplies we were headed off towards Sadus Dam, this was allegedly the “small car route”
The first part of the trip was pretty straight forward, leaving Riyadh in tarmac roads all the way to Sadus dam via some nice changing landscapes.Once we got to the dam the satnav took us directly across the bed of the dried up dam and west toward the edge of the world. At this point it started to get interesting as the road was becoming more and more rugged, Brigsy and Carsten were sat right in the rear seats over the back axel and were getting bounced around all over the place.x
The road continued like this for about 30 mins, some rough bits and some smooth and it was reassuring that we had a big land cruiser to get us around. We did encounter a couple of chunky obstacles which took a bit of figuring out if we were gonna clear the ridges but Dan and Nick who shared the driving did a sterling job of navigating over them
After arrond an hour of offroad driving we made it to the lookout pont, we could only drive so far and had to walk for about 10mins in. the baking heat to get to the vantage points. We were the only people there when we arrived and it was pretty amazing to have the place to ourselves.
And a selection of photos from Robin Verlinde with his new Sony camera
On the way back we weren’t sure the truck would make it up the flatter hill we went down when going out so we decided to try going over the big berm, when i say we i mean, we collectively suggested it and then Nick had the balls to try it.
We had bought all the snacks to have a picnic in the desert but none of us fancied traveling over this terrain in the dark so we decided to aim to get back to Sadus dam before sundown and have the bread cheese hummus and meats there.
Thats the end of this weeks blog post, its been a great week catching up with old friends and meeting new ones. Theres still a bit of a delay with various knock on things on the production and I’m sure were going to have a couple of mental days next week during rehearsal’s once we get everything.
Until next time, heres a Face
