Other than a good time

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 was still rather aimless, but there were too many distractions to worry about this a lot. I did decide to shift my focus to client work for game makers for the next few weeks, and pick up on my own projects along the way.

Geometry Girl was almost inactive, though I did have a great session with Tuur and Yorick at SonicPicnic. I love ideas that solve multiple problems at the same time, especially when they simplify a project instead of making it more complex. And I think we found a few that’ll help them to create audio for the app and me to write the text.

As far as the client work for game makers goes, I attended an all-hands creative meeting for Antegods at Codeglue. I’ll be visiting them more to hash out the game’s story again, and to figure out how exactly I’ll contribute to the project. Among other things, we’re talking about a companion comic book, a glossary for internal use, and even some generative text stuff.

I also spent a bunch of time at Two Tribes getting RIVE stuff done, during which they announced that the first Toki Tori is coming to Nintendo 3DS on November 5th! My contribution to this release was really small, but I did give some feedback on the touchscreen setup, and I edited the tutorial text to fit the screen, improving some age-old copy in the process.

Beyond that, I…

• Gave a guest lecture about writing at the Delft University of Technology, borrowing from Paul Graham’s The Age of the Essay a lot. It was so much fun I wanted to write essays afterwards. Which I didn’t have time for.
• Wrote two articles for the Dutch Games Association: The company that came from the game jam, part 1 (about Caromble! maker Crimson Owl) and Part 2 (about Bezircle, Sumico and Unfated maker Ludomotion).
• Met up with game designer/developer/producer Dylan Nagel in The Hague. We spoke about work, of course: what we do and how we do it. Perhaps something will come from our conversations, too, other than a good time.
• Got acquainted with critic Pim van den Berg. We talked about criticism and the lack of games in the media, topics that are slowly becoming more distant to me… which doesn’t say anything about their importance.
• Did my quarterly revenue taxes, kind of screaming through. I’ll have to tie up some loose ends later on.
• #hobbydevved with Hessel, working on something that’s starting to turn into a puzzle game, though not very quickly.
• Saw Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth! Went to the zoo!

Average step count per day: 11.603
Average staircase count per day: 10
Average sleep per night: 7:12
Average weight: 88,8 kg