Week 851

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.

Lots of third party games writing last week. On Monday I checked in with Kars Alfrink at Hubbub, who walked me through the current build of childrens’ museum game Home Rule (working title). Later in the week, I made an offer for the story development and copywriting of the next phase of development. Sounds like it’ll be a fun little project.

I wrote a bunch of stuff for a new Antegods grant proposal, as the Gamefonds closing date was on Thursday. The proposal was finished on time, and now we’re crossing our fingers for this (and an earlier proposal) to come through. If all goes as planned, I’ll help Codeglue shape the game (a team-based shooter taking place in an ancient/futuristic universe) and a companion comic book.

On Friday I visited Two Tribes, where we tackled some lingering RIVE issues like voice-over (we’re skipping it) and ratings (we’re going for E with content descriptions, so I can use ‘damn’ and ‘hell’ where appropriate, but not much else). The conversation system of our ‘robot hacking shooter’ was also discussed.

In the hybrid writing / Geometry Girl department, I did some organizing and writing, and I checked in with my editor Sander Blom at Uitgeverij Atlas Contact on Thursday. After that, I interviewed Hanna Bervoets for a podcast episode that I plan to publish in June.

Finally, in the ‘random’ category, I…

• Started a series about Dutch games of yore for the new DGA platform, with this piece: Battery Check, a battery recycling promo game. If you’re there, I’ll do a quick pitch of ‘my’ segment of the platform at the DGA Day on Wednesday.
• Did #hobbydev with Hessel, our weekly game development get-together. I decided that the isometric crane game is pissing me off right now, so I read up on Dijkstra Maps and ds_grid and will be starting something new.
• Saw Ex Machina. I was generally in favor of the movie, liking its setting, style, actors, etc. But it felt like director Alex Garland thought the conclusion (protagonist falls in love with robot) was so unavoidable and obvious that he didn’t really have to show the love. I mean, the gradual process of the hero falling in love, and also, as someone else mentioned somewhere, this would’ve been the perfect movie for robot sex. But alas.

Average step count per day: 7.996
Average staircase count per day: 13
Average sleep per night: 7:51
Average weight: 90,1 kg