Week 126

In 2010 I kept wee­knotes at Leapfroglog. I did not con­tin­ue those in 2011, but I feel like tak­ing up the habit again this year. It’s a nice and easy way to keep a log of what’s going on, and I’m kind of sad I don’t have one for the past year, since that’s been kind of tran­si­tion­al. Now that most if not all of my work has fold­ed into Hub­bub, I’ll con­tin­ue post­ing here.

This is week 126 of Hub­bub’s pub­lic exis­tence, since first men­tion of it in a blog post on Leapfroglog.

After a rather qui­et first work­day of the year most­ly involv­ing rather unin­ter­est­ing admin­is­tra­tive duties, things kicked off prop­er­ly on Tues­day. I sat down and wrote texts for the Twee­t­akt fes­ti­val guide, about the games I’ve select­ed for the play­ful exhi­bi­tion. I think I’ll keep these to myself for now, but I can say things will be quite dif­fer­ent from last year, with lots of mul­ti­play­er options, and inter­est­ing­ly enough many more screen-based games (had­n’t planned for that).

On Wednes­day I main­ly occu­pied myself with work on my talk for Noorder­slag next week, and also a lit­tle bit of work on my talk for LIFT (which I thank­ful­ly have a bit more time for).

Yes­ter­day (Thurs­day) I was joined by Karel to work on Galaxy Tours, the game hereto­fore code­named Iru­ka that we’re mak­ing for Noord­hoff about astron­o­my. It’s a team-based boardgame that can be used in the class­room to sub­sti­tute for a tra­di­tion­al lec­ture. We’re near­ing the fin­ish line on this one, just a few final game design issues result­ing from a playtest that need to be tak­en care of, plus some pol­ish on the graph­ic design and we can deliv­er it to the client.

I also met with the Uni­ver­siteitsmu­se­um (the Utrecht Uni­ver­si­ty’s local sci­ence muse­um) to dis­cuss plan­ning of Saba, a game we’re mak­ing for fam­i­lies vis­it­ing the muse­um. The project team for this, con­sist­ing of Karel, Hanne and Alper, will kick off next week. I’ve also inter­viewed a pos­si­ble can­di­date for pro­duc­tion assis­tance on this project, as I could use some help with plan­ning, mon­i­tor­ing and logistics.

Today I was plan­ning to work with Tim on Hamachi (a par­ty game we’ll self-pub­lish), but he has fall­en ill so we’re post­pon­ing that for the moment.

In stead, I will make use of the extra time to put some more thought in my Noorder­slag talk.