Stoicism and sobriety

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 I…

• Taught my writing class to third-year Games & Interaction students at HKU (second run, session 3 out of 5). I tried something new: live editing the students’ homework assignments. Which was kind of cool.
• Worked on shooter/platformer RIVE a lot, as we’re wrapping up its production in the coming months. I was at the Two Tribes office on Tuesday with audio studio SonicPicnic for a game and business update, and on Friday for the regular weekly review. One of the things working pretty well now: context-sensitive Game Over-messages!
• Continued work on team-based shooter Antegods, meeting with Wytze and Tom at Codeglue again. I started putting together a new story document, as well as an outline for the game’s companion comic book.
• Wrote an App Store description text for Free Birds, the museum game for children by Hubbub that’s really almost finished now.
• Visited the VVL (a sort of trade organisation for writers), where Janne Rijkers helped me a lot sorting out my thoughts on things like IP and royalties. Other than that, Geometry Girl is in stealth mode right now, as Codeglue is still looking for assistance on the engineering side of the project.
• Attended a test session of Sytze Schalk’s theater game Revolutie in The Hague, a part of his ambitious world-building project De Wentel. I liked grappling with the interactive component and discussing its merits, and really hope Sytze will get everything together for the shows two weeks from now.
• Also attended the Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses concert on Nintendo’s invitation. I was happy to run into many old friends there, and as the former webmaster of a Zelda fan website I was intrigued to see so many fans of these games together. The concert itself was a little boring, honestly, although it did bring back memories of my favorite games in the series: A Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time and The Wind Waker. And I was disappointed to find Link’s Awakening not included, the excellent 1993 Game Boy episode that started the whole ‘musical instruments as a key game element’ thread.
• Read the article about Minecraft by Marloes de Moor in Parool, which she’d interviewed me for. You can retrieve it here, in Dutch: Met Minecraft mag alles.
• Tinkered with the next version of this website.

Then the terrorist attacks in Paris happened on Friday evening, while I was still working on RIVE, blowing up space junk. I couldn’t sleep, and was upset and confused all weekend. Grunberg wrote this morning in De Volkskrant: “Panic and hysteria are the enemies of freedom. Stoicism and sobriety are friends of freedom.” My stoicism and sobriety are a work in progress.

Average step count per day: 11.764
Average staircase count per day: 17
Average sleep per night: 6:34
Average weight: 88,6 kg