Real people

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

Well, last week, the plan came together! The entire team’d worked hard to finish the first public prototype of Geometry Girl. Saskia delivered final symbol sprites, Tuur and Yorick from SonicPicnic produced some last-minute audio and Maurice did an impressive amount of late-night, last-minute coding. I tweaked the text of the two chapters we were going to show and played around with the audiovisual hooks.

On Friday, at The Future of Publishing Summit, the organisers created a nice reading corner where real people could give my app novella a try.

I’m not sure why this was something of a surprise to me, but instead of playing around with the app, everyone just started reading. (Which is a nice counter to the criticism I heard whispered, that my work is somehow more about the form than the content. I’d say it’s about using form to emphasize content.) If you want to be a beta tester, let me know.

I’d also been preparing my presentation for the same summit, a part of the Nieuwe Types festival in Arnhem, during which I sketched my vision of writing a decade from now. (Photo by Tim.) The prototype, of course, represents a step towards that future. Maurice and Tim were in the audience to represent the team, which was great!

The summit was rounded off by two other presentations and a panel discussion, that were interesting for sure. (Sketchnotes by Dennis.)

I returned to Arnhem on Saturday for the presentation of this year’s ArtEZ creative writing graduates, including the student I mentored, Dore van Montfoort. This made me super proud, like a surrogate dad. Her graduation work is now online for you to try. Please be aware that it’s a seriously long piece of interactive fiction: Homunculus 0.9. Enjoy!

What else? I…

• Finished the second episode of Radio Laika, a monthly fictional podcast pastiche I make for literary audio magazine Ondercast. Actress Amy van der Weerden helped me by recording two roles, and I used a Geometry Girl track by SonicPicnic, as well as some music by Ondercast founder Dennis. The episode was released on Saturday night; go check it out now.

• Visited an advisory board meetup at the Dutch Foundation for Literature, where two gentlemen from the Dutch Journalism Fund gave a compelling presentation mapping their insights into the future of journalism to the literary world. This lead to a nice discussion.

• Met up with Rob and Paul of Utrecht-based escape room Get out of here again. They’re planning to build a second room, and they approached me to help out with its storyline. So we exchanged some thoughts on that, after which I made a proposal that they then accepted. To celebrate, and as a teambuilding effort, we visited another escape room in town, The Queen.

• Visited Two Tribes, tying up some loose ends on our platformer/shooter RIVE. This week I’ll be delivering another batch of text to our voice actor.

• Had lunch with KIJK editor Jean-Paul Keulen to discuss article ideas, and some stuff beyond that too.

• Edited a blog post about Codeglue’s Antegods.

• #hobbydevved with Hessel, making multiple objects move on my Dijkstra pathfinding grid. I started out confused about C# and Unity, but experienced some clarity and happiness at the end of the evening.

• Gave PlayStation VR a spin during a small Sony event in Amsterdam. It was the first time I tried the device since early 2014, when it was unveiled as Project Morpheus during the Game Developers Conference. Surprisingly, one demo was exactly the same as two years ago. In fact everything I played was a bit underwhelming, though the unit itself seemed to work very well.

Average step count per day: 9.539
Average staircase count per day: 13
Average sleep per night: 6:46
Average weight: 87,3 kg