Week 758

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 I mostly caught up with other people, trying to get the creative juices flowing and be a responsible participator in society.

On Monday, I had coffee with fellow author Martijn Knol. He talked about his resolve to focus simply on writing the best possible novels, and I talked about the PR efforts for De verdwijners, as well as ideas for future projects. In other words: selling and dreaming, instead of actually writing.

More coffee after that, with film maker Bram Ruiter, about our plan to make a teaser movie for my book. If anything comes from this – I mean, when it does – it may just be amazing!

On Tuesday, I met with Tim Hengeveld, an illustrator / game designer who just went indie. We talked about narrative games, digital novels, and everything inbetween.

After that, Tim and I visited Digital Dreams, where they’re crunching all the way through Summer to create a playable demo of their puzzle platformer Metrico, for the Gamescom trade show in Cologne, Germany. It seems like they have a ton of work ahead of them.

That night, I visited theatre festival the Parade with game developer Collin van Ginkel. We saw two short performances that we liked, and a third we didn’t like. Then I baked my own poffertjes, which was a little adventure by itself. We tried not to talk about work too much.

On Wednesday, I traveled from Utrecht to Leiden to The Hague and back, first chatting with games journalist / poker expert / comedian Gerthein Boersma, then meeting up with the kind folks at Perceptor, of whom I’d worked with Bastiaan Terhorst on Shell game Ripple Effect.

I was shown an early and rough version of Perloo, the puzzle game they’re making. Like Toki Tori 2 and Metrico, too, it’s a puzzle game that makes a point of not explaining anything. Perloo also does some interesting stuff with optical illusions, as well as the compass feature of the iPhone.

Thursday night, I met up with Hessel Bonenkamp for our weekly game development hobby night. I spent all my time on the walk animation of my main character, which I’m still unhappy with. My hobby game project is quickly losing momentum, and I’m not sure what to do about it. Maybe this is unavoidable with so many other things heating up (such as this very country).

On Friday, I met up with game developer Adriaan de Jongh, who pointed me toward his game 52, and a blog post with some game development advice. (I haven’t read it yet, but it looks useful.)

Other than that, I wrote a column for nrc.next on Monday, which appeared on Tuesday (in Dutch): Kryptoniet? Saai! On the same day, my short Kentucky Route Zero, Act 2 review was published.

I also finished my Pikmin 3 interview with Shigeru Miyamoto, which was published on Friday, accompanied by a review penned by Gerthein Boersma. The full transcript is now online: My Pikmin 3 interview with Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto.

Finally, I continued my research into digital novels and actually started creating a Ninja Gimmick Girl prototype.