Week 137

We’re near­ing anoth­er playtest for Saba so most of our time last week was tak­en up with pro­duc­tion on a new pro­to­type. We drew up an asset list to guide Karel’s work on art. This in turn lead to some tweaks of my sketch­es. Mean­while Hanne put more time into the copy. Erwin wrote up ques­tions and obser­va­tion points for test, sched­uled the ses­sions with fam­i­lies we’d recruit­ed and so on.

I met with the client on Wednes­day, dis­cussed var­i­ous prac­ti­cal­i­ties relat­ed to the game’s con­tent, its brand­ing, etc. I also showed work in progress, which I think is an impor­tant thing to do so that clients remain involved beyond the for­mal deliv­ery moments.

Lat­er that week I pro­duced a sim­ple pro­to­type of the com­plete game using my sketch­es. This act­ed as a kind of san­i­ty check on the inter­ac­tion design and as one might expect result­ed in more changes to my sketch­es. Alper joined me in the Utrecht stu­dio from Berlin and we went over how we’d inte­grate all the con­tent in the app. There’s still quite a bit of devel­op­ment work to do, so he’s been keep­ing busy.

We now have one more week before every­thing needs to be pulled togeth­er and we can hand it to a few test fam­i­lies we’ve recruit­ed. Excit­ing times.

Mean­while Twee­t­akt was in full swing. I man­aged to spend quite some time at the fes­ti­val pavil­ion and observed lots of peo­ple play­ing the games I’d select­ed. It was encour­ag­ing to see all games get lots of play­time, I think my strat­e­gy to go for social, acces­si­ble games real­ly payed off.

We also ran an edi­tion of This hap­pened as part of Twee­t­akt. Sev­er­al of the talks were about the games on dis­play, oth­ers were about dif­fer­ent but equal­ly inter­est­ing work. We had a good turnout, a great atmos­phere with lots of laughs and hon­est talks. As this was my last event as a cura­tor, I could­n’t be more pleased.

Final­ly, some posts else­where that you might have missed: anoth­er bit on the cre­ation process of Pig Chase – about how we dis­cov­ered pigs respond to light – and a post in Dutch over at Bash­ers on why I think The Resis­tance is an excel­lent psy­cho­log­i­cal game.