A look back on 2011

It’s almost time to close shop for the hol­i­days so I thought I’d do a final post. Here’s a month-by-month look back at some of the major things that hap­pened at Hub­bub in 2011 with links to rel­e­vant posts and such in case you missed it the first time around.

Jan­u­ary – We start devel­op­ment on Code 4, a game for orga­ni­za­tion­al change com­mis­sioned by the Dutch Tax Admin­is­tra­tion. It is code­named Maguro.

Feb­ru­ary – I head to Cog­ni­tive Cities in Berlin which turns out to be an excel­lent expe­ri­ence. I stay in a Kreuzkölln apart­ment with Alper and Alexan­der and man­age to take in quite a bit of what makes this city so appealing.

March – Twee­t­akt Fes­ti­val takes place, fea­tur­ing an exhi­bi­tion of play­ful inter­ac­tive work that I was asked to curate. We also run a This hap­pened with talks on the works on dis­play. This is also the month The Vil­lage opens, a new cof­fee place that becomes an instant favorite of mine.

April – We fin­ish work on Code 4 after a suc­cess­ful pilot run and deliv­er it to the client. By this time Niels has writ­ten a love­ly trip­tych of blog posts on what it feels like to work on the game.

May – I go to Man­ches­ter for FutureEv­ery­thing and present New Games for New Cities.

June – A three-week tour of Japan makes for the per­fect break from work and also pro­vides me with a mas­sive jolt of inspi­ra­tion, culi­nary and otherwise.

July – Sum­mer in the Nether­lands means not much of any­thing gets done.

August – We bid Fource­Labs, who we’ve been shar­ing a stu­dio with since July 2010, farewell and move to a space of our own in the Dutch Game Gar­den. This involves replac­ing the floor, which turns out to be more of a chal­lenge than anticipated.

Sep­tem­ber – A new project for Noord­hoff code­named Iru­ka starts. I also present The Trans­form­ers at dCon­struct, and talk about both Pig Chase and Code 4 at the DiGRA con­fer­ence Think Design Play.

Octo­ber – Work con­tin­ues on Iru­ka, punc­tu­at­ed by attend­ing Play­ful in Lon­don which does not fail to please (and I don’t just say that because they put me in the site header).

Novem­ber – We playtest Iru­ka and we start work on a pro­mo­tion­al video for Code 4 (which at the moment of writ­ing is near­ing completion).

Decem­ber – We have a par­ty to cel­e­brate the new stu­dio. The con­cept video for Pig Chase is published.

Iru­ka and the Code 4 pro­mo­tion­al video will bleed over into the new year. We’re also get­ting ready to start work on Saba, a game for a local muse­um. Oth­er than that there are tons of plans for the next year, so I look for­ward to it with much excite­ment. Which leaves me with say­ing thanks for read­ing, I hope you’ll keep fol­low­ing us in 2012 and hap­py holidays!