Week 194

Last week was most­ly us qui­et­ly work­ing away on our cur­rent projects, with some extracuric­u­lar activ­i­ties in between. Here’s what happened:

Vic­to­ry Boo­gie Woo­gie (SAKE)

• We shipped some new fea­tures to Vic­to­ry Boo­gie Woo­gie, most notably a swanky pre­view mode for play­ers and writ­ers and lim­it­ed markup capa­bil­i­ties for the lat­ter. Not exact­ly rock­et sci­ence but some­thing that war­rants care­ful test­ing and tun­ing nonethe­less. I’m par­tic­u­lar­ly pleased with the automag­ic pret­ti­fi­ca­tion of typog­ra­phy we’ve added with help from typogri­fy.
• Mean­while VBW is hum­ming along nice­ly and we’re get­ting won­der­ful play­er sub­mis­sions which real­ly chal­lenge the writ­ers team’s cre­ativ­i­ty. Once again it was a plea­sure for me join in on the week­ly writ­ers meet­ing on Fri­day and hear them talk about what had hap­pened and how they plan to respond to it.
• We’re mid-way now, but it’s real­ly easy to jump in and start writ­ing along. If you’re a Dutchie, do join in.

Rip­ple Effect (KAIGARA)

• This was the sec­ond week of the Rip­ple Effect pilot so we were fol­low­ing play­er activ­i­ty close­ly behind the scenes. Inter­com is prov­ing an incred­i­bly handy tool for us to keep in touch with our play­er base, which is spread across the globe.
• Mean­while we con­tin­ued to make plans for the sec­ond ver­sion based on the feed­back we’d got­ten so far. This includ­ed play­ing through a new phys­i­cal pro­to­type put togeth­er by Tim. Pok­ing and prod­ding, tweak­ing and tun­ing, that sort of thing.
• Devel­op­ment also start­ed on extra fea­tures which will be need­ed to allow the game to be rolled out decen­tral­ly and scale to a large glob­al audi­ence. These are most­ly periph­er­al to the actu­al game but impor­tant nonetheless. 

KANT

Also this week, Alper moved his work­place from Prax­is to KANT. Also on Oranien­straße, but with a dif­fer­ent crowd in atten­dance, this looks like a ‘lab’ very much in tune with our own outlook.

Alper’s tem­po­rary desk at KANT. I hope they get him a big­ger one soon.

Mis­cel­lanea

• On Mon­day, I joined in on Hans de Zwart’s Under­stand­ing Media read­ing group and shared my thoughts on McLuhan’s per­spec­tive on games. I’m told it was record­ed so look for that short­ly. Update: Hans has shared the record­ing with us.
• On Tues­day, I was inter­viewed about sto­ries in applied games togeth­er with Niels ‘t Hooft at Con­trol Game­lab. The video is up already, note that it’s in Dutch though.
• On Thurs­day I final­ly got around to writ­ing anoth­er Recess! in which I throw down the gaunt­let and attempt to pro­voke Niels and Alper into some crit­i­cal reflec­tion on their own pref­er­ences in game play­ing and making.

Bring on week 195!

Niels and Kars on an inflat­able couch at Con­trol Game­lab #8.