Young enough to feel old on the internet

With these weeknotes I publicly track and archive whatever it is I spend my time on.

Last week marked an anniversary: on Saturday, April 2, it was 20 years ago that I started my first website. It was about a game I was looking forward to, then known as Zelda 64, released two and a half years later as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I was 15, going on 16, and I’d been online for just a few months. I dove deep into Nintendo fandom at the time, meeting fellow fans through excruciatingly slow HTML chat boxes, which was nonetheless a huge part of the fun.

My site, The Unofficial Zelda Headquarters, was based on another site, The Unofficial Nintendo 64 Headquarters, by a guy named Scott McCall. But it was also a continuation of the comic books I’d been making, with cartoon drawings of Zelda characters as well as badly rendered 3D logo’s.

‘ZHQ’ made me some advertising money, and writing for it lead to games journalism, which in turn lead to almost everything else. I stumbled upon a (Dutch) blog post about this period in my life from 13 years ago; back then I considered it “unbelievable” that all this happened as many as 7 years ago. I guess I’m young enough to feel old on the internet.

The week was a bit compressed, as Monday was part of the extended Easter holiday. Work-wise, it was all about my talk at TEDxDelft on April 15. There was a coaching session on Tuesday, and a speaker’s lunch / medium-scale practice session on Saturday. It was nice to get a sense of what other people are doing, and I received a stack of highly useful feedback forms. As for the talk itself, I changed the third act around, and worked on audio and visuals. Surely that will continue into this week and the next.

What else? I…

• Started writing an elaborate blog post on scrolling, and scrolling alternatives. I really need to get going with working my hybrid writer’s research into manageable chunks, and publish them, as I want to present some of it in June.

• Visited Two Tribes, as Martijn and Collin were back from GDC in San Francisco. I continued my work on platformer/shooter RIVE, which is going into its last phase.

• Spent time looking for artists for Codeglue’s Antegods comic book, as we want to be able to choose from some good candidates. I’m really looking forward to writing this; my first comic book in, well, 20 years.

• Had lunch with Joost Rietveld in Rotterdam, at the university where he now works as an assistant professor, after adventures in London and New York. We chatted about Two Tribes, which he worked for too, Nintendo, its upcoming ‘NX’, the games industry, the creative industry in general, games education, and the educational system in general.

• Met up for beers with Coert Wigbels in Haarlem. Like Joost, Coert and I go back many years. We don’t talk often, but when we do, it’s great. Coert is active in the advertising industry and we had an enjoyable conversation about work, art and more.

• #hobbydevved with Hessel, working on my puzzle shooter prototype. I nearly finished the rewrite I started the previous week, losing a lot of time on a bug that turned out to be quite funny (to me at least): I had a script go through the game’s main grid cell by cell, commanding each enemy it bumped into to consider and make its next move. However, if this caused enemies to move down the grid, as it usually did, the script would run into them again and again, moving them all the way down near-instantaneously. Making the whole prototype collapse on itself.

Average step count per day: 9.086
Average staircase count per day: 13
Average sleep per night: 6:34
Average weight: 86,3 kg