Week 837

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 finished my article about 3D graphics for KIJK, as expected. I got some feedback from my editor and rewrote the piece; I then sent if off to the interviewees and an expert reader. This week I’ll do one more rewrite.

On Tuesday I had a job interview. It went OK, but the last one went great and I didn’t get the job then. Still, that was in 2005 or 2006 and I haven’t gone bankrupt since, so I probably shouldn’t worry about it. (I think I have a fair chance of becoming an advisor at the Gamefonds, but could also see why they’d pick someone with a slighty different profile.)

Halfway through the week I went to The Hague with my mom, to attend a live interview with Michel Faber, whose The Book of Strange New Things I enjoyed a lot (probably the most I enjoyed a novel in years). It was nice to see and hear the man tell about his life and work, despite an unimpressive interviewer.

Thursday morning, I met with fellow journalist / games guy Arjan Terpstra. Later this month I’m taking over the (non-creative) writing class he gave at the HKU, and he talked me through his notes and materials.

After that my big winter cleaning commenced. It took me all of Thursday afternoon and evening, all of Friday, and some of Saturday too. I threw away at least 20 kilograms of paper, made my home office an inhabitable place and felt all zen afterwards. In the midst of this I also did my quarterly financials, which I think is why I started cleaning in the first place; I didn’t plan for it to take me two full days though.

Friday night was #hobbydev with Hessel, our weekly game development hobby night. I threw away most of my isometric crane game Game Maker code and started over, and in the end managed to fix the mouse controls (and the Z-axis object sorting, too, I think). I’ve sinced moved on to other things that aren’t working for unclear reasons.

Finally, on Sunday, I wrote my second tech column for KIJK, and made my first SVN commit to Two Tribes’ hacking shooter/platformer RIVE, altering a text file (rewriting some stuff and adding two new dialog pop-ups) and a level file (so the pop-ups are actually invoked). Pretty cool to be able to do that from my home office! The game will be shown at the GDC and PAX game shows in March, so we’re currently making a new demo.

Average step count per day: 6.170
Average staircase count per day: 17
Average weight: 89,0 kg