Always crashing in the same ship

With these weeknotes I publicly track and archive whatever it is I spend my time on.

Last week I launched this website! I’d been working on the new version, on and off, for the last year or so, and now I finally got it done. These are the main talking points:

• New logo, featuring the spaceship Anticlimax from an old comic book, after which I named my sole proprietorship. I’m always crashing in the same ship!
• Responsive design that’s way more readable on phones.
• Simplified main menu.
• More narrative homepage that’s now primarily in Dutch, with a shorter English version just a click away.

The final stretch consisted of much HTML, CSS and PHP tweaking (the later suddenly seeming easy after my Game Maker tinkering), finalizing copy (mainly of the homepages and the new-ish About page), and the all-important ‘filing away non-essential features for another day’. Then, post-launch, I squashed some bugs pointed out to me by friendly Facebook commenters. If you still see anything weird, shout!

Last week also saw the announcement of Two Tribes’ early retirement. The company finally, sadly, told the world it will quit game development after finishing its current project. Which is a crying shame, as they’re not just a great game maker, but one of my favorite clients too. I’ve been coming to their studio semi-weekly for years and these guys pretty much feel like co-workers to me.

Toki Tori 2+ and RIVE are as dear to me as my novels, and I hate that there won’t be a third project we’ll do together. Yet I love the gist of the announcement: we’re quitting, but not before making RIVE the best damn thing we’ve ever done.

Last week I helped them get the blog post and trailer (above) finalized. When I visited them on Friday, a day before they left for San Francisco and the Game Developers Conference, I updated their Steam pages and worked on some in-game RIVE stuff. For now, it’s business as usual.

What else? I…

• Did my monthly planning, which now includes going deeper into notes and timelines for my two biggest projects: Geometry Girl and RIVE.
• Wrote a column for KIJK about Every Frame a Painting and the Patreon model, as they posted the Apple TV one on their website (the new one is the fourth one since).
• Wrote something about games and art for Zachte krachten, Pim van den Berg’s thing.
• Got acquainted with Floor Buschenhenke, who is doing some interesting research for the Huygens Institute.
• Met up with Saskia to talk through all art-related matters on Geometry Girl, as its development will soon continue.
• Edited and recorded a short experimental story for Ondercast, and while I was at it, also recorded the intro for my hyper-delayed Hybrid Writer’s Podcast interviews with Hanna Bervoets and Annelies Verbeke. I feel rather guilty about these and will get them online soon.
• #hobbydevved with Hessel, spending all night trying to get one special attack working in my puzzle shooter prototype. It involves a projectile pushing enemies up, against other enemies, crashing against rocks or out of the screen. There are a lot of things that can (and do) go wrong, but I felt like I was almost there when I had to stop.

Average step count per day: 8.591
Average staircase count per day: 12
Average sleep per night: 6:48
Average weight: 86,3 kg