Week 676

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.

I took the week off, but still got some stuff done.

I finished my interview with Michel Maas of GameHouse Studio Eindhoven, about the Delicious series of restaurant time management games and the recent new episode, which was published in nrc.next. It turned out well, I think, though it was perhaps skewed a bit towards GameHouse – of course they’re enthousiastic about what they do! Luckily my story was balanced with a sharp Harry Hol review. We’ll probably publish both articles on Bashers.nl next week.

Secondly, I gave this website a (tiny yet fresh) lick of paint. You can actually navigate to my weeknotes now! I’m always going back and forth between Dutch and English for the front page, and settled for English this time. Let’s see for how long that’ll stick.

As I was tweaking HTML anyway, I also fiddled with the Bashers.nl and Bashers Beat sites. Just some small changes before I start building an entirely new version of the main site, which will integrate the various parts. (Three big Bashers projects are planned for the first half of 2012: the iPad app, the revamped podcast and the new site.)

Additionally, I finished 11/22/63, the recently published time travel novel by Stephen King. After the Steve Jobs bio by Walter Isaacson, this is the second book I’ve read on my Kindle. I have to say I like it, even for fiction, despite the nagging sense that I really should own a physical copy and display it on a shelf in my house. A false sentiment – when was the last time someone checked out my book collection in detail?

Instead of mourning my old-fashioned, dust-gathering carbon artifacts, I should spend energy on more constructive things. Like actively reflecting on what I’m reading, analysing what I’m learning, then somehow using the newly gained insights and knowledge. In short, one of the few new year’s resolutions I have is to regularly write about the books I read.

Starting off, 11/22/63 got me thinking about recursivity in these kinds of stories, and about the game-like puzzle mechanics of a character figuring out the rules of time travel. That could very well become my next newspaper column.

Finally, I’m not even sure whether this happened last week, but I recently decided to join the Global Game Jam again. Only this time I’ll head to Berlin to make my 48 hour game prototype.

I’m not going alone – four colleagues slash friends are coming too. All of them are more experienced game builders than I am, so I’m trying to invest some time in brushing up my pixel animation skills beforehand. (See this 32×32 pixel John McClane sprite. Made it today while watching over the kids, in the excellent iPad app Sprite Something.)

Anyway, we’re on the list at the venue and our train tickets have been booked, so there’s no way back. The Global Game Jam will commence worldwide during the last weekend of January, and I can’t wait.