Week 753

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 got a release date for De verdwijners from my editor: August 29th. So my next novel is a little more than two months away. Time to start thinking about PR and marketing. By the way, it doesn’t hurt if you ask for the book at your local bookstore. Let them know there’s demand for it!

On Monday, my review of The Last of Us was published in nrc.next. I also edited Rogier Kahlmann’s review of The Swapper, which was printed later in the week. Both games scored five balls.

On Tuesday afternoon, I had lunch with game designer Sander van der Vegte, who is doing something interesting with Cty.

That night, game journalists Arjan Terpstra, David Nieborg and I met up and talked shop.

On Thursday night, I made games with Hessel Bonenkamp again. I wasted a lot of time trying to get a DualShock to control my game, only to find out there is no joypad support in Game Maker for Mac. Then I wasted yet more time trying to draw some on-screen text. After Hessel had gone home, I finally got the text to work right, and added mouse controls (to aim projectiles). Over the weekend, I rewrote almost everything, improving and enhancing it. I then felt pretty good about the pace at which my Game Maker skill and knowledge are growing.

On Friday afternoon, the award ceremony of the Creative Game Challenge took place at Utrecht University. It’s a Game Maker contest for high school students. I had the honor of doing a short, somewhat philosophical talk before the award winners were announced, which was a lot of fun to do.

After that, I took the train to Amsterdam for the final Your Daily Victory Boogie Woogie editorial team meeting, where we evaluated the game.

During the week, I also added a work overview to this site.