Week 711

What’s this? I’m blogging about my work on a weekly basis – a simple way to track and archive whatever it is I spend my time on.

Last week was odd. With merely days left to finish the first draft of my novel De verdwijners, I spent most of the time on other stuff. Luckily the coming week will be all about the novel, so I’m still on schedule, I think.

So what was so important? Well, on Monday I chatted with TNO about an upcoming writing/editing/translating project.

On Tuesday I visited BNN’s Gamer01 offices to help record a pilot episode of a new TV show they’re pitching to their bosses.

On Wednesday I checked in with Two Tribes, for the puzzle platform game Toki Tori 2 that I’m working on with them.

On Thursday I was at home with my kids.

On Friday night I met up with David Nieborg to synchronize, after which I visited Bright Night at Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam, where David gave a talk. Even though I’ve worked for Bright since the early days, I’d never visited one of their events, and really enjoyed it. Especially the talk by Philip Ross about Fonckel. He gave such an enthusiastic talk about the process that lead to his touch lamp that I got one of these sudden outbursts of happiness that you keep hearing about. The lamp is cool too. If I had 700 idle euros I’d buy one.

I also finally got to see the latest issue of Bright Magazine, which has my Minecraft feature in it. It’s such a pleasure to appear in Bright: this time they asked an artist to create beautiful Minecraft imagery.

Otherwise, I wrote a article for nrc.next about games that have permadeath, or in other words, that punch you in the gut when you die. Star of the story is the intriguing Arma 2 mod Day Z. The piece appeared on the Tech spread on Friday, next to David’s inspired gameplay-political column, and will probably be on Bashers.nl soon.

Additionally, I wrote a review of New Super Mario Bros. 2 for Nintendo 3DS (about the inflation of 1UP mushrooms) and edited Rogier Kahlmann’s review of Darksiders 2. Both should be in the paper soon.

I also finished processing an interview I did with Team Plastic, a Polish development group that came out of the demo scene and made the very interesting interactive art exercises Linger in Shadows and Datura. The interview focuses on the demo scene and Polish games, both of which have my attention as topics of interest. The article will appear in the next issue of the Official Dutch PlayStation Magazine.

Finally, on Sunday night I watched the first episode of TV drama meets Alternate Reality Game The Spiral for the third time, and wrote a blog post about it. (I wrote another post, about the site, earlier last week.)