What I’ll be doing this summer
Notes on week 860
- 860 14 juli 2015 EN
With these weeknotes I track and archive whatever it is I spend my time on. They’re public so you can keep me in check.
Last week on Monday the Game Fund jury committee ensconced itself in the library of the Dutch Foundation for Literature. I was allowed to jump into the fray and help judge a stack of nearly fifty wildly varying proposals for the recent Open Call Literary Games. It was fun: lots of consensus, just enough dissension, a dash of strategic maneuvering. We ended up with five wide-ranging, promising literary game ideas that’ll receive a small budget for what will hopefully be stunning proofs of concept. The best projects will then get additional funding.
On Tuesday morning I visited Peter and Maurice at Codeglue to discuss the plan I’d finished the week before, for the Geometry Girl app, which they will build. They seemed to like its direction, and weren’t as taken aback by its scope as I’d perhaps feared. Development will commence later this summer.
That afternoon I got acquainted with Marijn and Rommert at Thinkbright. They were kind enough to show me what they’re building as Fosfor’s next-gen reading app, and share ideas and experiences. I promised them to come back with a Geometry Girl prototype soon, and return the favor.
Then I spent another day editing my plan into a glorious 1.1, mostly based on Codeglue’s feedback, which I shared with more people. Next up: writing the actual book. I know what I’ll be doing this summer.
Finally, in the ‘random’ category, I…
- Posted an interview with my old friend Jos Bouman, creative director at Gamious, on the Dutch Games Association platform: Gamious discusses the launch of Turmoil and Lines.
- Nearly finished my Hybrid Writer’s Podcast with Dutch author Auke Hulst. I really was going to put it out last week, and now I really will this week.
- Stumbled upon this report on The Future of Publishing Summit in Arnhem, where I spoke a while back.
- #hobbydevved. My roguelike prototype now contains a sequence of levels that are generated in a step-by-step manner; the game checks whether the player can reach the exit and fills out dead areas with trees, among other things.
- Visited Two Tribes, where I demoed the first encounter between RIVE’s two main characters using the new conversation system. I also got the screen text for Toki Tori 1 on Nintendo 3DS finished, making sure each tutorial message would fit in a single text bubble. For English and Dutch, that is.
- Hired someone to paint our house’s exteriors, which was overdue.
- Wrote poems for my daughters’ teachers, as Friday was their last day at school before the summer holiday.
Average step count per day: 5.166
Average staircase count per day: 10
Average sleep per night: 6:33
Average weight: 90,4 kg