Week 313

The big one this week as in the weeks before was Free Birds. After a suit­able amount of UI wran­gling, bug hunt­ing (and squash­ing) we deliv­ered the first pub­lic beta on sched­ule at the end of the week. It is now playable in Air­borne Muse­um. I am super proud of what the team has achieved, and I look for­ward to hear­ing what vis­i­tors make of it. Mean­while, we will start plan­ning work on the next release.

Anoth­er notable event was XOX­O’s announce­ment that Bycatch is part of their Table­top selec­tion. (A huge hon­or!) This lead to us being Boing Boing-ed, and with that, the Twit­ter flood­gates opened…

Peo­ple tend to respond strong­ly to our lit­tle card game. Many “get it” and sup­port our efforts, which is great.

Some come at it from a tra­di­tion­al boardgam­ing frame of mind and seem to have a hard time with the notion of eth­i­cal play. For a great coun­terex­am­ple, check out this red­di­tor’s com­ment on Tom Vasel’s mer­ci­less review.

Still oth­ers dis­like us using a game to dis­cuss the top­ic of drone war­fare, pos­si­bly because in their eyes it triv­i­al­izes a seri­ous sub­ject mat­ter. Here’s an (admit­ted­ly extreme) exam­ple of the lat­ter case:

Thank­ful­ly, some peo­ple whose work in art, games and activism we hold in the high­est regard were kind enough to sup­port us:

https://twitter.com/molleindustria/status/634429389674008576

So yeah, Bycatch is mak­ing some waves, which is great. By the end of the week Alper (who is tak­ing care of ful­fil­ment) had a con­sid­er­able amount of orders to put in the mail.

On to the remain­ing projects. For TEDASUKE Simon deliv­ered a first round of mock­ups which we got reviewed by the clients. They seem to be hap­py with the direc­tion so it looks like we will be able to deliv­er a sec­ond and final round next week.

I also did some read­ing up on agile plan­ning and esti­mat­ing for a final bit of work we’ll do TEDASUKE, which con­sists of a pre­lim­i­nary spec and budget.

For KOKORO I did some more pre­lim­i­nary design work in prepa­ra­tion for some more inten­sive work on a sec­ond pro­to­type togeth­er with Alper in the week to come.

One more thing of note: Alper pro­vid­ed an intro­duc­to­ry talk for the screen­ing of Free to Play (a rec­om­mend­ed doc­u­men­tary on esports) at the love­ly Game Sci­ence Cen­ter.