Week 136

I’m writ­ing these notes while out­side spring seems to have seri­ous­ly kicked in. It’s nice and sun­ny. Which is per­fect tim­ing, since Twee­t­akt Fes­ti­val has start­ed. Its pavil­ion, adorned with south­ern-euro­pean style lights, has descend­ed on Neude square. The games I’ve curat­ed are all set in their respec­tive green­hous­es. So I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing a lot of peo­ple play in the com­ing 10 days.

On the project front, here’s what hap­pened this week:

• Saba: we’ve start­ed inte­grat­ing art and copy into code. Alper has been send­ing out the first pro­to­types through Test­Flight. They’re quite rough still, but progress is good. We also spent some time look­ing at where we might want to use sound. We’ll do this spar­ing­ly as it’s a muse­um game and we don’t want to dis­turb non-play­ers too much, but some non-visu­al feed­back is wel­come. Final­ly, plans for a sec­ond playtest in two weeks have been made.
• Buta: I put fin­ish­ing touch­es on a new set of blog posts, which also includes a bit of video shot dur­ing field exper­i­ments. Hein helped us out with adding sub­ti­tles and some col­or cor­rec­tion. We’ll prob­a­bly start pub­lish­ing these next week. We’re also get­ting close to com­plet­ing the team for pro­duc­tion of a playable pro­to­type, so hope­ful­ly we’ll man­age to kick that off in a week or two.
• A new project, Kani, which is relat­ed to health­care, kicked off today. So I spent some time prepar­ing for that. Read­ing some research sent to us by the client, think­ing about ques­tions we might ask folks we’ll be inter­view­ing, writ­ing up some pre­lim­i­nary thoughts on how games might help, that sort of thing.

On the stu­dio front, I pur­chased two pieces of art from the bril­liant Joost Stokhof, which I first spot­ted when it was on dis­play in The Vil­lage. So now I have some cyclists, and Bill Mur­ray steal­ing a bike on the walls. Rolling cur­tains also arrived, so we’re all set for summer.

And with that, I’m hit­ting pub­lish and head­ing out­side to play some games and sit in the sun on the Neude before the Twee­t­akt open­ing show starts. Have a great weekend.