Week 755

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 started badly, by getting my bike stolen. Things could only go uphill from there. And they pretty much did.

Despite being consumed by frustration (as well as filing a police report and looking for the bike in the neighborhood), I finished my article about paid alpha games, which was published in nrc.next the next day. It included my review of Don’t Starve, as well as reviews of Kerbal Space Program by Harry Hol and Prison Architect by Alper Çuğun, which I edited. The article is online (in Dutch): Het paid alpha-succes: een halve game kan ook leuk zijn.

On Tuesday, I went to Amsterdam for meetings. First, I chatted with Iris Peters about art games and game artists.

Then, I interviewed Martin de Ronde of Vanguard Games, who seems to have a pretty unique position: not only did he broker a deal to make a top-down Halo game, he is also its creative director

Finally, I visited my publisher to talk about my future as a novelist. This turned into a pretty interesting conversation about what digital novels could be like, among other things. When I was there, the galleys of De verdwijners had just come in, so I got to take these with me. I’m now checking them for errors: anything we don’t catch in the page proofs will be in my book for all of eternity. Well, in the first print run anyway. (And so far I only ever got a second print run in Germany, so…)

Thursday night, I continued working on my first game prototype, during my regular game dev hobby extravaganza with Hessel Bonenkamp. I focused on rewriting the movement system: now my main character switches between modes depending on whether he’s walking, climbing or crawling through tubes. It’s all quite fiddly, but it kind of works. I guess I should leave this stuff for now and work on the theme, graphics and levels next.

My work week was cut short, as my wife went away for a couple of days, leaving me to take care of the kids. We had some wonderful weather, a perfect time for strawberry hats. Finally, I did get some work time on Sunday night, checking out the presentations at the Utrecht location of the Molyjam.