Week 158

I’m run­ning late with these notes so I’d bet­ter get them out there.

A big chunk of my time was tak­en up by final exams at the Utrecht School of the Arts. I was part of one of the com­mit­tees assess­ing the projects and research done by stu­dents pur­su­ing a mas­ter of arts in game design or inter­ac­tion design. Much of the work was excel­lent, which is heart­en­ing. I have been review­ing work at the HKU for the past four years and the qual­i­ty keeps improv­ing. Of course as it goes, not all of it was great and we had to fail a few stu­dents. I’ll nev­er quite get used to doing that, but it’s part of the job and impor­tant too, oth­er­wise an MA would be meaningless.

I worked on SAKE a bit, bang­ing out a paper pro­to­type which inte­grat­ed some of the ideas I had the week before. I’m get­ting excit­ed about the direc­tion this is tak­ing. There are some neat choic­es around lim­it­ing what play­ers can do so it does not become a crowd-sourced sto­ry­telling free-for-all. I have also fig­ured out some fun ways in which play­ers can more or less force each oth­er to write about spe­cif­ic things.

I also had a meet­ing with the Gids edi­tors to plan some of the upcom­ing work around a brief­ing for writ­ers who will par­tic­i­pate in the game, and a sneak pre­view of the game at the anniver­sary event this fall.

And final­ly, for BUTA I man­aged to con­nect the things Alper has made with the stuff Aduen has been work­ing on and so for the first time I was mov­ing a dot on an iPad and see­ing its twin move on an app run­ning on a Mac­Book, which will go on to become the “pig client”. All of this over the inter­net, so we’re near­ing a first com­plete pro­to­type that we can set up at a farm. There are a few more things to take care of before we can do this, however.