Week 140

Work on Saba con­tin­ued apace this week. We have one more week to go before the next playtest. So Hanne did some final adjust­ments on copy and Karel pro­duced the last bits of art need­ed for the final stages of the game. I’ve been spend­ing most of my time inte­grat­ing all of that in the game, while Alper is focus­ing on mak­ing all of this stuff actu­al­ly work (which means lots of cod­ing for him).

I’m also very hap­py about the addi­tion of Rik Nieuw­dorp of Claynote to the team. He’ll be tak­ing care of the game’s audio. We’ll use sound spar­ing­ly as this is a game for a muse­um and we don’t want to annoy non-play­ers too much. How­ev­er, some care­ful­ly placed audio will cer­tain­ly enhance the play­er expe­ri­ence greatly.

In the mean­time Hanne and I have been prepar­ing a few exer­cis­es for a work­shop next week with Kani’s client. We’ll have a siz­able group of hos­pi­tal employ­ees to work with. The main exer­cise is aimed at get­ting some ear­ly feed­back on one game idea we con­sid­er promis­ing. At the same time we’ll test if our tar­get audi­ence can relate to some of the con­cepts we have made cen­tral to our approach. It’ll be a bit game-like but loose enough to allow for impro­vi­sa­tion and surprises.

On Buta’s front, the search for a cre­ative tech­nol­o­gist who will com­plete our team con­tin­ued. I’ve approached a few folks again, with some pos­i­tive respons­es. This per­son will be respon­si­ble for build­ing the tablet app, work­ing close­ly with Aduen, our hard­ware engi­neer and Hein, who has joined us again to do graph­ic design.

I also wrote two sub­mis­sions — one on Code 4 and one on Pig Chase — for GDC Europe. Although none of our work fits neat­ly in any of the con­fer­ence’s tracks I still felt it was worth a shot. Let’s hope one or both get accepted.

Final­ly, I met up with Noord­hoff to eval­u­ate Galaxy Tours. As I wrote ear­li­er, the pro­to­type we’ve pro­duced won’t be devel­oped fur­ther which although the rea­sons for this are sound is a bit dis­ap­point­ing of course. How­ev­er we’ve learned a lot from this project about using games for learn­ing in sec­ondary edu­ca­tion. We’re plan­ning to share these things with the client inter­nal­ly and I hope to be able to do the same here at least in part after that.

As a nice round­off to the week, the shiny laser cut door sign I ordered from Ponoko arrived this morn­ing. It com­ple­ments the dark wood of our stu­dio door nice­ly. Now you’ll have no trou­ble find­ing us, next time you’re in the Dutch Game Garden.