Week 174

The penul­ti­mate work­week of the year turned out rather packed with work on two new projects—the afore­men­tioned HIRAME and now also KAIGARA, for which con­tracts were signed mid­way through the week.

KAIGARA is game con­cept devel­op­ment for a multi­na­tion­al company—our biggest client to date in fact, so I am quite pleased. I’ll wait with shar­ing par­tic­u­lars until we’re fur­ther under­way. But what I can say is that a first col­lab­o­ra­tive design work­shop is due to hap­pen this Wednes­day. So the past week I spent some time devel­op­ing the agen­da for this in coor­di­na­tion with the client.

Work with Her­man on HIRAME con­tin­ued. We had a client meet­ing dur­ing which we pre­sent­ed some ini­tial game ideas, and also talked about a set­up for a first work­shop. Those all went down quite well, so it’s now time to plan the work­shop in more detail. That is sched­uled to hap­pen some­where in Jan­u­ary of next year, so we have some time still.

We tran­si­tioned SAKE into dor­man­cy for the upcom­ing weeks while the De Gids edi­tors play with the dig­i­tal pro­to­type and col­lect issues and ideas for improve­ments. We’ll sit down to go over those in the new year and then start work on a next iteration.

The week end­ed with rather enjoy­able Christ­mas drinks. I was pleased to see so many peo­ple join us, all with very dif­fer­ent con­nec­tions to the company—collaborators and clients, friends and fam­i­ly, etc. Drinks were had and games were played.1 One can’t ask for much more, right?

Wrap­ping up, let me just say I’m hap­py I man­aged to make it to Den Bosch for the tail end of Play­ful Arts Fes­ti­val on Sun­day. Zurai­da did an excel­lent job col­lect­ing some of the best local mul­ti­play­er games from the past year or two and pre­sent­ing them in a fun and acces­si­ble way. I hope there will be a next edition.

1. To wit, Spaceteam, Ascend­ing Empires and Cards Against Human­i­ty. [↩]