Dreamhack, Day 0-1

So this weekend we went to Dreamhack Stockholm! Let me tell you a bit about that and how we went about doing things while being there!

Day 0: Thursday

We left for Stockholm on Thursday. Since we live on a silly island off the Swedish coast, it takes us 3 hours by boat to actually get to the mainland, then another hour or so to get to Stockholm from there. First thing we did was go to the expo area to unload the car and start setting things up. It's really cool to see expo areas before everything's in place, cause it's totally amazing how such huge and empty rooms can turn into loads of awesomeness after just a few hours!

Below is a bunch of pictures I took while we set everything up in our area of the booth:

As you can see it kind of starts off like a mess! But in the end, everything tends to come together. What we do this first day is that we put everything where it's supposed to be, test-run the game on all computers and make sure everything is working just fine. Basically, we don't want to do any last-minute additions or changes or anything to the booth in the morning - ideal case is just that we press the on button and everything runs fine.

We got to the expo area around 20 (8pm) in the evening, and probably left around midnight. It's kind of crazy that it takes that long to just set up a few tables and computers, but then again there's a lot of small details like moving things around to fit perfectly, finding the cables in the different boxes (we shared equipment box with another game to make things more confusing as well), and when sharing expo space with other projects, make sure everyone is happy about the layout and things like that.

Once we were done we went to our hotel room and got a short night of sleep; breakfast was served around 9:30 and just a short while after we had to leave for the expo area again!

Day 1: Friday

The Street Fighter area, before they got there!

The expo opened to the public at 12 am and was scheduled to close around 22 (10 pm). Since we were there ahead of everyone else we got to walk around and take a look at everything. Apparently, the pools for the esport games were played in the expo area, and our booth was just next to where they were going to play Street Fighter, so we got to see a lot of real time action while managing our booth!

 Both the Starcraft 2 pools and Hearthstone pools were going strong all day (and way into the night, apparently) in the expo area, but on the main stage there was only CS:GO for today. What that meant for us was that most of the people attending on Friday were people who loved CS:GO, since anyone else would save their money for the SC2, Hearthstone, Street Fighter and WoW finals on Saturday (jeez, that planning)!

In other words, the expo area was kind of slow and with not a lot of people walking around. That, on the other hand, meant that we could take more time to walk around and enjoy the expo before all the other people would arrive the day after.

A very blurry Fred by the Hearthstone tables!

The expo as seen from above, on one of the areas where the SC2 groupstage matches were played out

The main stage being prepared for CS:GO, a couple of hours before the actual event

A couple of people playing Grindea by our booth!

The CS:GO event getting started!

After the expo closed (and let me tell you, it did not really close at 22, the Hearthstone group stage apparently went on to 5 am or so, tho we didn't stay that long), we went back to the hotel room (pretty exhausted from standing all day!) and watched one of the League of Legends world group stage matches that we had missed during the day. What better way to end a day of esports and gaming with more esports and gaming, right?