Week 840

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 spent some much-needed time sketching out plans and making small and medium sized decisions. Everything was less cloudy after that.

One thing is that I got a little frustrated with the newspaper, so I sorted out a lot of my notes and ideas, and sent off some e-mails. As my time gets divided between more (and, above all, different kinds of) projects, it’s becoming essential to have a steady rhythm… if the editors aren’t responsive, it gets harder to keep doing games journalism at all.

Well, my mails, and some encouraging replies, made me feel better, so I wrote a second version of my NFC games article, and a first version of my Tour Bueno article; they might be in the paper next week. To complete the upswing, nrc.next printed my Mean Girls movie/game piece, which can also be found via Blendle (€). A significant amount of Mean Girls fans came out of the woodworks after that to tell me they read it, which was a nice side effect.

Also somehow helpful was my lunch with illustrator / game designer Tim Hengeveld. While we really just talked about random work stuff, the encounter made me decide to put Sexy Sadie (the big analog novel) aside for a bit and focus on Geometry Girl (the small digital novel) for now.

It’s something I should have done a lot sooner, that’s not entirely true either, because GG has somehow turned into an SS spin-off. Which means that developing the characters for GG also contributes to SS. Tim will actually help with this; I asked him later in the week to imagine the characters in a series of concept drawings. This is so great: we’re doing pre-production work like they do for the movies! (Yes, SS and GG are terrible acronyms, I just realized that too.)

Another focus area was games writing. I did quite a bit of work on Two Tribes shooter RIVE, writing and editing text for the demo that the team will show at GDC in San Francisco and PAX in Boston soon. On Thursday I had dinner with co-founder Collin van Ginkel, and on Friday I visited the studio in Amersfoort. It seems like the demo is coming together. As it should be!

Then, on Thursday, I visited Codeglue to talk about the concept, story and grant application for their team shooter Antegods. The next step is that I have to write it all down in my words, and I feel like I’m nearing the stage where I can actually do that and have it make some sense.

Finally, in the ‘random’ category, I…

• Met with the Dutch Games Association to discuss a new platform for the local games industry they’re launching. I will likely contribute, although I’m still wrapping my head around how I can and want to make a difference there.
• Had a meeting with Bob van der Burg and Marlies Bonnike of Editio, which offers online writing courses. We had a broad-ranging conversation about my hybrid writer interests, and how these might overlap with theirs.
• Did another round of #hobbydev, my weekly games development hobby night with Hessel. I tried to create rails for my isometric crane to move over; the rails pieces had to be modular so they could be carried around. As usual, I got stuck because of earlier systems colliding in ways I don’t fully grasp.
• Received the latest issue of KIJK, which has the first edition of my new technology column in it. Which makes me really proud!

Average step count per day: 7.578
Average staircase count per day: 10
Average weight: 89,7 kg