Two new ways to play

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

RIVE is a ‘vintage action game’ for which I created the world, story and dialog. It’s out on Steam and PlayStation 4, and now the writing is done, I’m heavily involved in support and marketing at studio Two Tribes. This week we pushed out a major update we worked on for the last two months or so, featuring two new ways to play: Challenges and Battle Arenas. I wrote about this in a blogpost, and the game was discounted on Steam for the first time.

There’s a program for digital literature at the Dutch Foundation of Literature that more authors should know about! (There are actually two relevant subsidies: Interdisciplinary Talent and Digital Literary Projects.) I’m in the committee helping to decide what gets funded, and this week I attended a session of authors live-annotating their plans.

Radio Laika is a monthly mini-mockumentary I make for literary audio magazine Ondercast. I write it, record some of the voices, send parts off to actors, and stitch the whole thing together. The installment in Ondercast 31 is a little different, as actor Amy van der Weerden did almost all the talking.

Geometry Girl is my upcoming app novel, a new literary story taking the shape of an innovative app. It’s also the start of a general iOS reading engine, which I hope will become a thing in 2017. This week I talked about it with Chris Kooi at De Bezige Bij / Cargo and Jan Paul Grollé at Renew the Book / Rockstart, among other things.

Every Wednesday night I #hobbydev with my friend Hessel, working on personal game projects together alone. We sit at the same kitchen table and drink beer, so there’s a social aspect, but there’s lots of staring at screens in confusion and silence too. Hessel is a professional Unity developer, and I’m just starting out, but it seems like programming frustration is universal. This week I made a lot of progress on what is essentially an autopilot roguelike, to then trip over saving data between level switches.

Finally, on the personal side, I was in the hospital for a test related to my diabetes. Something might be up with my kidneys, so there will be further investigations. On the plus side, I saw Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, which I loved!

Average step count per day: 8.862
Average staircase count per day: 10
Average sleep per night: 7:27
Average weight: 88,8