Week 734

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 was at Two Tribes on Monday, where my work on puzzle adventure game Toki Tori 2 is shifting from helping out on development to marketing, as the team is tying everything together for the big release.

Marketing turns out to be interesting, too: I get to write and edit the blog posts, fact sheets and e-manuals I hardly ever read when wearing my journalist hat. Additionally, I was asked to co-direct the upcoming Toki Tori 2 trailer. I came up with a pretty fun concept, so let’s see whether we can bring that concept to life.

I also did an interview with Rami Ismail of Vlambeer, which I edited into a nice 4-page interview for the Dutch Official PlayStation Magazine.

On Tuesday I visited my agent Paul Sebes and his sidekick Willem Bisseling, of the Sebes & Van Gelderen literary agency. They’d both read my manuscript, were very nice about it and gave me some helpful feedback. I fed it all into my notes file (which is nearing the 10.000 words mark) and spent the rest of the week applying it to De verdwijners, piece by piece. And yes, I’m on track for an April release.

On Wednesday, the film appendix of NRC Handelsblad published the piece I wrote on Level-5/Ghibli RPG Ni No Kuni.

At night, I visited Jurjen Tiersma, who was semi-nearby. We discussed games journalism and fiction writing, among other things.

On Thursday, I wrote a Next Level column for nrc.next, about the Global Game Jam, that appeared on Friday. I’ve put it up here, too (in Dutch): De Global Game Jam als les in creativiteit. This will be the last Next Level column: nrc.next gets another redesign, moving David Nieborg and my column to Tuesday and renaming it ‘Games’. Which is probably better.

I also edited two game reviews for the paper: Alper Çuğun on Proteus and Rogier Kahlmann on Devil May Cry. That last one was bumped by an advertisement, but will appear later. Generally, there should be more frequent games reviews after the redesign, though the pieces will be shorter. Good news overall.

On Friday: coffee with Kars.