Week 802

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 on Monday, I visited RIVM with Kars Alfrink of Hubbub. We were shown the game Ranj is making for them, which we did exploratory research and concepting for, half a year ago. I always find it fun to see a plan that’s been talked about so much turn into an actual product you can touch and analyze. At the same time, there’s a sadness because of infinite possibilities inevitably being whittled down to something manageable.

I discovered there was to be no newspaper on Thursday, because of Ascension Day. So despite preparations, I didn’t submit any game reviews to nrc.next, although I wrote about Watch Dogs for today’s NRC, focusing on commercial games with big themes. I also put my previous NRC games article online (in Dutch): Tikkertje in het café – Sportsfriends en de local multiplayer-trend.

Among other things, I worked on a presentation of my Hybrid Writer’s Toolkit plan (‘digital tools for forward-looking authors’), which I will test drive this week at an author’s meeting organized by my publishing house.

Thursday night was game development hobby night, a.k.a. #thursdev, as usual. I (kind of) fixed the problem in my Japanese Village Sim that I got stuck on the previous week, and spent the rest of the evening improving the game’s internals, supposedly paving the way for ronin that the player can hire to protect his village. I hope to tackle that this week.

On Friday I struggled to finish a short story about sex that I’d been asked to submit to a literary magazine. For Sexy Sadie I’m in full left brain schematics mode right now, and it felt weird to be ‘shooting from the hip’; I filed it away for some other time, in the end. (The irony of struggling with this regarding a sex story is hard to miss; the story is about this conundrum, too.)

I did do some research for Sexy Sadie last week, focusing on city planning and architecture. And I read the first half of Massa by Joost Vandecasteele, which felt like research for the kind of writing I want to do, too.