Influx of tourists

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.

Temperatures rose to uncharacteristically high levels in The Netherlands last week, even for the summer, but I managed to embrace the heatwave, adjust my rhythm and speed, and remain productive. Working in the garden in the nighttime certainly helped.

During the weekend, the Tour de France started here, in beautiful Utrecht, and I tried to keep track of it on TV but ultimately decided that guys cycling rapidly aren’t my cup of tea. (I do like how they cleaned up the town for the Tour – the construction workers and cleaning people, not the guys cycling rapidly – and I also have a soft spot for the influx of tourists; aimless, confused, giving new meaning to my home turf.)

In the midst of this madness, I finally finished up my Geometry Girl blueprint, which took me longer than expected (because of other things popping up and it just being more work than anticipated; I swear that not much procrastination was involved). It turned out nicely holistic though, as it includes all of the project’s elements: the story, the tools, the app. I then started sending it off to team members / advisors / friends / random other people who I now expect detailed feedback from.

A good chunk of the week was spent reading all the literary game proposals of the recent open call, which I’m judging for the Dutch Literary Fund and Game Fund. There were many plans and they were all very different, but I still managed to decide on my favorites for yesterday’s committee meeting.

I also tried to publish the Hybrid Writer’s Podcast with Auke Hulst, which we recorded as long ago as April, I’m embarrassed to admit. About half of it got edited, and I’ll be sure to really put it out this week.

Finally, in the ‘random’ category, I…

• Did some planning on the kids’ museum game I’m working on with Hubbub, which is no longer called Home Rule but Vrije vogels (Free Birds) instead. As we’re regrouping for the next development sprint, we discussed and prioritized what we want to add and change.
• Posted Jurjen Tiersma’s article about his visit to Herald developer Wispfire, and set up this week’s Dutch Games Association blog post.
• Did some long-overdue invoicing, on the edge of the second quarter.
• #hobbydevved on Wednesday, spending all night fixing what turned out to be a really stupid bug. I did get the game running in full-screen in the end, and made it so it should now be easy to create a sequence of levels. Hessel’s laptop spent all night updating, so I probably still was the most productive.
• Met up with Frank Hartman on Friday morning, which was nice; it’d been years ago. Frank was a big part of my starting GameSen, starting a blog, and even starting to use Twitter, I think.
• Visited Two Tribes on Friday afternoon, where I played the newest levels and discussed the next version of the game’s conversation system. I also worked on the text for Toki Tori 1 for Nintendo 3DS, as well as the Dutch translation of Toki Tori 2+ for PlayStation 4.

Average step count per day: 6.747
Average staircase count per day: 10
Average sleep per night: 6:09
Average weight: 90,4 kg