Week 782

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 spent most of my time on the final big deliverable for my current consultancy project, creating a draft of the requirements list for the applied game my client hopes to develop later this year. On Friday, I met up with my contact to hash out the details for the next meeting with our experts panel, in which I’ll be collecting feedback on the draft.

On Monday I wrote a short review of the iOS stealth game République for nrc.next. (Yesterday I published the NRC Handelsblad article about Kentucky Route Zero and other great author games from the previous week on this site: Het jaar van de auteursgame.)

I also worked on a small redesign of the website you’re reading right now, and (finally) on the results of my De verdwijners read test, which turned out to be a lot of fun. I hope to finish both soon.

Also fun: I watched artist Tim Hengeveld’s Ninja Gimmick Girl 2.0 Dropbox folder fill up with reference material and sketches. It’s so great to see an idea come to life! The poor guy worked on the pre-production of my next iPad novel so hard, that he fell violently ill afterwards.

On that note, I had lunch with Peter and Maurice at Codeglue on Tuesday. We did a small postmortem of the Toiletten iPad app, and of course we talked about Ninja Gimmick Girl. Hopefully, we’ll actually be able to develop this during 2014.

On Thursday, I had coffee with Stefan Keerssemeeckers. That evening, I had my weekly game development get-together with Hessel Bonenkamp. I worked on a sprite all night.

Some big news during the week, too. Dutch game development studio Two Tribes, that I worked with extensively on puzzle adventure game Toki Tori 2, announced its ‘reboot’. Essentially, the development branch of the company went bankrupt and had to let all its personnel go. The good news is that Two Tribes continues in a much leaner form.

This marks the end of a tough period for everyone at the company, brought on by the delayed release and limited commercial succes of its last game. Which is a shame. As one of the commenters says: “Toki Tori 2 is one of the most misunderstood great independent games I’ve ever played.” I fully agree, although I have no right to speak as I’m totally biased.