Week 157

As I write this, I am sat in my sec­ond home The Vil­lage, sip­ping a nice cup of Cos­ta Rica Monte Cadet.

Last week around this time, I was get­ting on a train at Berlin Haupt­bahn­hof, hav­ing just spent lit­tle under a week work­ing with Alper and play­ing at Play­pub­lik. Before my depar­ture I squeezed in a standup via Skype with the team build­ing the Pig Chase playable pro­to­type. I spent the ride home doing a lot of writ­ing, and some reading.

(As an aside, I should men­tion that around this time I also start­ed my dai­ly rit­u­al of play­ing Vesper.5. To make sure I keep at it, I have set a recur­ring task in Things which links direct­ly to the game. Here’s where I am at the moment.)

On Tues­day, I met with our friends at the Uni­ver­siteitsmu­se­um to talk about the var­i­ous PR things we need to take care of for Beesten­ben­de’s launch. We’re mak­ing a pro­mo­tion­al video, and are also cre­at­ing art­work for the muse­um to use in var­i­ous ways. Per­haps most excit­ing­ly, we might stick huge ani­mals from the game on the muse­um’s glass facade. That will cer­tain­ly draw vis­i­tors’ attention.

On Wednes­day, the stu­dio was graced with a vis­it from Simon, an occa­sion­al agent of Hub­bub who was respon­si­ble for the graph­ic design of both PLAY Pilots and Code 4. Simon’s secret iden­ti­ty is film mak­er. He’s just shared the first frame from his upcom­ing stop motion ani­mat­ed short. It looks gor­geous. We talked about a pos­si­ble col­lab­o­ra­tion on Sake, which looks like­ly to happen.

The fruits of some of that furi­ous writ­ing on the train back home were pub­lished on Thurs­day in the form of a post based on my World Design Cap­i­tal Helsin­ki talk about PLAY Pilots. Virtueel Plat­form also pub­lished a video of the whole thing, as well as all of the oth­er ses­sions that made up Dutch E‑Culture Days.

That day I also had a very last round of meet­ings with the stu­dents whom I have been coach­ing at the Utrecht School of the Arts. We went over their prepa­ra­tions for final exams, which were sched­uled for the next week.

And final­ly on Fri­day, I spent a bit of time writ­ing up some ideas I had for Sake’s game design so that I could pro­to­type them the next week. I also gen­er­at­ed some ideas for a prospec­tive client. I talked those over with Her­man and wrote them up for review.

And that’s about it. To fin­ish, I should men­tion I sched­uled a game of Dun­geon Petz. I’ve had the game on loan from my friends at Sub­cul­tures for a while now but haven’t had the chance to actu­al­ly play it until now. It’s designed by Vlaa­da — Space Alert — Chvátil, so I have high expec­ta­tions of it. If you feel like join­ing us, head over to the event page.