Week 170

So anoth­er week has passed. It dawned on me this week­end that for me, there are four more work­ing weeks left in the year. That’s a bit of a shock, but then work will just con­tin­ue on hap­pen­ing in 2013, so it’s odd near­ing the end of the year still feels like a thing. Any­way.

Last week start­ed with me attend­ing TEDxBrus­sels. Irene was invit­ed to speak on Pig Chase there and I tagged along for moral sup­port. I’m always curi­ous what the response from the audi­ence is when we show this work. This being TEDx we’d pre­pared a small exclu­sive in the form of a tiny doc­u­men­tary film of a playtest we ran at a farm recent­ly with an actu­al work­ing pro­to­type. The game you see here is not as slick and shiny as the con­cept video, but this is the prod­uct of a small team of tech­nol­o­gists and design­ers nego­ti­at­ing a lot of tech­ni­cal com­plex­i­ties and the unfa­mil­iar real­i­ty of installing tech in a pig pen. I’m pret­ty proud of what we’ve achieved.

Play­ing with Pigs: Pig Chase Playtest from Utrecht School of the Arts on Vimeo.

I also start­ed writ­ing my chap­ter for The Game­ful World. This is a book edit­ed by Stef­fen P Walz & Sebas­t­ian Deter­d­ing. The offi­cial announce­ment isn’t out yet but I can tell you they’ve gath­ered a great group of writ­ers and I am hon­ored to take part. My chap­ter is on the built envi­ron­ment. I’ve out­lined it, drew up a list of sources and have planned the writ­ing of my first draft which should be fin­ished by the end of this month. To make sure I stay on track I did a bit of game­ful design myself and set up a spread­sheet to keep track of how many words I have left to go.

More hap­py news: Alper has returned from Aus­tralia unscathed despite get­ting up close and per­son­al with var­i­ous mar­su­pi­als. His Mac­Book had faired less well though, so while a repair shop was mak­ing amends he joined me in the Utrecht stu­dio to work on a loan­er. In the age of the cloud it turns out it’s not much trou­ble to be up and run­ning on a for­eign machine.

Alper being back means we got project SAKE rolling again with a standup. We’re now shoot­ing for a first dig­i­tal pro­to­type to be avail­able for play­ing by the De Gids edi­tors by the end of this month.

The rest of the week was most­ly tak­en up with busi­ness development—meeting with a poten­tial client, talk­ing to a poten­tial future col­lab­o­ra­tor, and writ­ing a project pro­pos­al for the Uni­ver­si­ty Med­ical Cen­ter Utrecht with my younger broth­er at Pony Design Club. That sort of thing.