Week 795

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 started with Indievelopment, an indie games event in my home town, which I visited for a couple of hours. Long enough to say hi to some acquaintances, listen to talks by Jonathan Blow (of puzzle games Braid and The Witness) and Michael Cook (of game making AI Angelina), and interview the latter. I’d planned to interview Blow too, but he had such a big entourage of fans around him that I didn’t try after all.

Using the Cook interview, I wrote a piece for NRC Handelsblad, which should be in there tomorrow. My previous NRC games article (in a series I do with Arjan Terpstra and David Nieborg) was recently published on this website (in Dutch): Met Sony’s virtual reality-helm naar diepzee of Mars.

For nrc.next, I wrote short reviews of iOS games FTL: Faster Than Light and Monument Valley. These appeared on Thursday, together with Harry Hol’s review of The Elder Scrolls Online.

I also wrote two articles for the Dutch Official PlayStation Magazine last week: a Wishful Thinking column (about ‘procedural’ games) and a profile of Japanese action games developer Platinum Games.

Finally, I got excited about a game idea… it’s a sort of reverse FTL set in a Japanese village, that’s actually inspired by Kurosawa’s Shichinin no Samurai. I worked on this in Game Maker on Thursday evening during my weekly game dev night with Hessel, and some other days, as well.