Week 800

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 played more games than usual: the brilliant time traveling shoot ’em up Super Time Force (which I reviewed, and is one of my favorite games of the year), the stylish but so far somewhat bland science fiction RPG Transistor (which I’ll review this week) and Mario Kart 8 (which I’ll review next week).

I also collected my notes on Two Tribes’ next game and wrote a story proposal including dialogs that can literally be blown up. I talked Collin through my concept on Friday, and Martijn chimed in via e-mail; both founders seem to like the direction, though as usual there’s implementation details still to be decided as well as new elements that have to be incorporated somehow. There will probably be a lot of back-and-forth like that, as there was with Toki Tori 2. This time, though, there’s quite a bit of text to be written.

Another thing is that I joined the jury committee of a Creative Industries Fund NL / Dutch Foundation for Literature program called Literature on the screen, and on Wednesday I attended the first meeting. We discussed nearly twenty submissions, picked our favorites and invited the creators to present their concepts live at the next meeting.

Wednesday afternoon, NRC Handelsblad published my article on Sportsfriends. The next day it was in nrc.next, accompanied by short reviews of the four modern sports games included in the package. nrc.next also published my short review of Super Time Force, and Harry Hol’s review of procedural horror shooter Daylight, which I edited.

Thursday afternoon, I visited Abbey Games, where Manuel Kerssemakers showed me the procedural elements of Abbey’s upcoming traveling tactics game Renowned Explorers. I was told, among other things, about Voronoi diagrams, which was quite educational. All of this will become a part of an article I’m writing for popular science magazine Kijk.

That evening, it was #thursdev with Hessel, our weekly game development get-together hobby night, and I used the session to redesign the time and food system for my Japanese village prototype.