A few remaining hard nuts

With these weeknotes I track and archive whatever it is I spend my time on. They’re public so you can keep me in check.

Last week E3 took place in LA, and while I haven’t been to the show in years, physically, its presence did make itself known. I followed the big games companies’ press conferences and wrote something about them, which appeared in nrc.next on Wednesday and a day later on business site NRC Q: Dit kunnen gamers de komende tijd verwachten.

Martijn Reuvers of Two Tribes was in LA, to show our shooter/platformer RIVE to the press. I did some work on the game’s copy, within a new conversation system, to get it ready for showtime. The game was part of Nintendo’s ‘Nindies’ programme, too, so a free demo could be downloaded on Wii U all week (without the new conversations as of yet).

Alongside that, I tweaked and expanded the new copy for puzzle adventure game Toki Tori 2+, for its PlayStation 4 launch later this year.

On the hybrid writer’s front, I did a lot of work on the big Geometry Girl plan, which I’m hoping to finish this week. I also got acquainted with Sytze Schalk on Monday, and met up with Sidney Vollmer on Wednesday. Two fellow hybrid writers if you ask me, that I hope to collaborate with in the future.

Finally, in the ‘random’ category, I…

• Spent a bunch of time on Home Rule (working title), the museum game for kids I make with Hubbub. I rewrote all the copy and tried to crack a few remaining hard nuts before this week’s playtest at the Airborne Museum.
• Wrote a short ‘Orange Oldies’ piece on the ancient (and at the time quite advanced) Dutch CD-i game Christmas Country.
• Did a proper #hobbydev (my game development get-together with Hessel) on Wednesday night, for the first time in a while. I tinkered with my Dijkstra grid test, which is slowly developing into a new version of the roguelike exploration game I worked on months ago. I got so into it that I continued tinkering later in the week, adding monsters and treasures, among other things.
• Read this piece by Joost van Velzen at newspaper Trouw, on literary games, for which I was interviewed (via Blendle, so €): Spelen met de letteren.

Average step count per day: 6.637
Average staircase count per day: 10
Average sleep per night: 6:27
Average weight: 90,3 kg