Week 128

Lots of dif­fer­ent things going on this week. It’s a bit messy at the moment with projects need­ing to be wrapped up while new ones are already start­ing up. But we’re mak­ing progress nonethe­less. Let’s do a quick per-project rundown.

I spent some time ear­ly this week with Frank to dis­cuss pro­duc­tion­al details for the games I select­ed for Twee­t­akt Fes­ti­val. It’s always inter­est­ing fig­ur­ing out what the most suit­able way of pre­sent­ing inter­ac­tive work is. Lat­er this week, the pro­gram was announced and I post­ed a quick overview of what you’ll be able to play. A few more might be added to this list.

Pig Chase got some more atten­tion from domes­tic media this week with a nice arti­cle in Dutch news­pa­per NRC.1 I also worked with Irene on review­ing the first set of blog posts I’d writ­ten and plan­ning more, which I will hope­ful­ly get around to writ­ing at the start of next week.

On the Saba front: Hanne, Karel and I vis­it­ed the muse­um and received a tour from the muse­um’s edu­ca­tor of the room we’ll be ini­tial­ly design­ing for, an awe­some cab­i­net of curiosi­ties. We spent time doing pre­lim­i­nary design and I did some more project man­age­ment type things (bud­gets, plan­ning, etc.)

I also worked with Karel on get­ting the mate­ri­als for Galaxy Tours ready for their final touch­es. And I sat down and wrote a first draft of the rules, which is always a chal­lenge. Writ­ing clear rules is hard.

In between all this I man­aged to dis­cuss prepa­ra­tions for the next This hap­pened with Alexan­der and Ianus (stay tuned for the announce­ment in a few weeks). The group chat for our Glob­al Game Jam Berlin posse was also abuzz with dis­cus­sions about how to best set up Uni­ty for rapid devel­op­ment and group col­lab­o­ra­tion. And Arjen pub­lished a nice arti­cle on his expe­ri­ence work­ing on Kat­suo.

And final­ly, at the end of today, I ran anoth­er playtest of Hamachi, a par­ty game I’m mak­ing with Tim Bosje. I was pleas­ant­ly sur­prised by the response it got. We’ve iden­ti­fied a few rules changes and will do anoth­er round of test­ing, and then it might just be ready for writ­ing, graph­ic design and pub­lish­ing. We already made plans for the next game.

1. I did receive a bit too much cred­it in this arti­cle. From read­ing it you might con­clude I am the sole design­er of the game, which is not the case. At least as much cred­it goes to my col­leagues Irene and Hein. [↩]