Week 849

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 was all about my hybrid app novella Geometry Girl, again, as I continued building the project’s website and a design doc / mock-up overview to communicate everything to contributors, and frankly, to figure it all out. I don’t want to spend too much time here though, and hope to move on to interactive mock-ups (and working prototypes!) soon.

On Monday I met up with Saskia Freeke, who’s sketching Geometry Girl’s constellation symbol. The idea is that the story’s ten chapters are spatially related in an underwater dreamscape that the main character imagines in his LA hotel room bathtub. The symbol visualises this, and will be animated in the app.

After that I met up with Dennis Gaens, in Arnhem, to chat about the talk I’m giving to his creative writing students at ArtEZ this week. Originally I’d planned on doing another story workshop, but we decided that a general look at my writing practice is a better idea for these (final year) students.

By the way, Dennis released a new installment of his literary podcast Ondercast on Sunday, which is definitely worth listening to. Just so you don’t have to ask: the insanely catchy tune that goes with the café segment is I Was Kaiser Bill’s Batman by Whistling John Smith.

Also firmly in the hybrid writing category: the Creative Industries Fund NL and the Dutch Foundation for Literature announced their open call for literary games, which I’ll be part of as an advisory board member. I hope that these foundations will be inundated with wonderful applications! For inspiration, check out the 609 article I posted last week: De vrije modus van het spelen – Hebben literatuur en games iets met elkaar?

Finally, in the ‘random’ category, I…

• Worked on Antegods stuff as we’re preparing a Gamefonds application at Codeglue and on RIVE stuff as we’re now in full production at Two Tribes.
• Taught my fourth practical writing class to Games & Interaction students at the HKU on Thursday, which went well. I think I overcame my ’two sequential classes’ problem!
• Visited KIJK Live on Thursday night, which was fun. Four speakers with interesting, totally different scientific subjects, and a great location.
• Heard myself in Adventure, the second episode of The Life We Play, Erwin Vogelaar’s new podcast.
• Tinkered with my isometric crane game on Wednesday, during #hobbydev with Hessel. I worked on getting my crane to pick up crates; I’m almost at the point where I was a couple of months ago before I started retooling, so soon I’ll be facing some tough game design questions again.
• Celebrated my youngest daughter Sun’s fourth birthday.

Average step count per day: 8.500
Average staircase count per day: 13
Average sleep per night: 6:51
Average weight: 90,0 kg