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Author Archives: Kars

Week 315

Last week once again was very much a heads down kind of week. Alper more or less exclu­sive­ly worked on Free Birds. We also talked to the client about the next phase of the project, which kicks in after we fin­ish this sprint, and involves scal­ing up to mul­ti­ple muse­ums. Fur­ther­more, we pre­pared a bug […]

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Week 314

This week’s big project was fin­ish­ing a sec­ond ver­sion of the KOKORO pro­to­type. Alper and I spent a cou­ple of days writ­ing javascript, html and sass, as well as good old copy. By Fri­day we had man­aged to com­plete most of the items in our back­log, and were quite sat­is­fied with the result. Next up […]

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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, […]

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Week 312

The big focus this week was once again Free Birds, our iBea­­con-enabled muse­um game app for fam­i­lies, about free­dom. Alper con­tin­ued devel­op­ment, Tim worked on art and UI, and I did a lot of build­ing and test­ing, and pro­­duc­­tion-type stuff. On TEDASUKE, I got every­thing ready for brief­ing Simon on Fri­day, who will help us […]

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Week 311

The big thing this week was the start of a new sprint on Free Birds. Niels and Tim joined us again for copy and art respec­tive­ly, while Alper donned his devel­op­er hat, and I switched between my pro­duc­er, agile coach, and design­er roles. There’s a lot to do, as usu­al, but we’ve made good progress. […]

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Procedural Instruments Enable Powerful Ways of Making and Seeing Playable Systems

“No Man’s Sky is so big, the devel­op­ers built space probes to explore it for them.” That’s from a Poly­gon report on what is prob­a­bly the most hyped videogame of the moment. The main thing that seems to fas­ci­nate peo­ple about No Man’s Sky is its exten­sive use of pro­ce­dur­al con­tent gen­er­a­tion (PCG). Put simply, […]

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Week 309–310

It’s been a while since we fell off the wee­knotes horse, but here we are. So let’s get down to it. In week 309 we reviewed Q2’s OKRs, and dis­cussed our plans for the future. Let me tell you, it isn’t easy being a bou­tique play­ful design agency. But we’re sol­dier­ing on. The big project still on […]

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Week 308

Lots of work on KOKORO this week. We fin­ished the first pro­to­type and playtest­ed it with a bunch of teenagers. Received plen­ty of help­ful feed­back. We need to do a prop­er eval­u­a­tion but my first impres­sion is that our deci­sion to struc­ture the prod­uct around a con­ver­sa­tion­al UI has been val­i­dat­ed. For the remain­ing projects […]

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Week 306

At the start of this week, we looked back on the playtest of project SHACHI’s sec­ond beta ver­sion. I went over to the client to dis­cuss the out­comes, and the whole team col­lab­o­rat­ed on a plan for the next sprint. Mean­while Alper took a moment to update the project finan­cials. More plan­ning hap­pened on KOKORO. […]

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Week 304

Yes, we work hard. But we man­age to enjoy our­selves as well, as you can tell from the nice pho­to above tak­en by Tim dur­ing a rare occa­sion: All of project SHACHI’s team phys­i­cal­ly cop­re­sent in our Utrecht stu­dio. Alper was in NL to run project KOKO­RO’s first work­shop togeth­er with me. We spent a […]

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