Week 181

Such a full stack last week that I’m a bit unsure what to start with. Lots of new busi­ness being dis­cussed too vague­ly to write about, but we can say 2013 is off to a good start. Though Berlin is still rather cold:

Kars spent a large part of the week prepar­ing the HIRAME playtest togeth­er with Her­man. That will hap­pen this week, so a good kind of ten­sion is building.

The team for SAKE (Kars, myself and Simon) spent a full day sprint­ing to work towards the release ver­sion which is smash­ing fun across two stu­dios. The syn­chronic­i­ty makes it so much eas­i­er to bang out lots of good work. I catch myself wish­ing that we would do noth­ing else, but a stu­dio revolves around many more kinds of work which all have to hap­pen (un)fortunately.

We got this hand as a sou­venir from Simon’s upcom­ing short movie The Light­house:

We’re col­lat­ing notes and sketch­es on FURAPPA to head for deliv­ery on that short engage­ment. We hope to be able to fol­low up on it because it is such a ripe ter­ri­to­ry for lots of play­ful and social experiments.

Prepara­to­ry work on KAIGARA con­tin­ues and forces us to con­sid­er lots of things before actu­al pro­duc­tion which is very use­ful even though it may not be our usu­al agile modus operan­di.

Wednes­day I post­ed the first install­ment of ‘Recess!’ an episod­ic cor­re­spon­dence series on games between myself, Kars and Niels. We all write a lot about games in var­i­ous con­texts, but we felt that more free­dom would result in more cre­ativ­i­ty. With­out any edi­tors breath­ing down our necks, in Recess! we will be writ­ing about what­ev­er strikes our fan­cy. This week Niels —hav­ing fin­ished his book draft— is up. I’m look­ing for­ward to his con­tri­bu­tion a lot.

Not coin­ci­den­tal­ly my Recess! was about Pro­teus and Fri­day my review for the nrc.next was pub­lished about it. I try to com­bine game crit­i­cism and ideas from the sci­ences and the arts in my reviews as far as that is pos­si­ble in 250 words. You’ll have to read it your­self to see if I’ve succeeded:

Fri­day also Kars went to Ams­ter­dam to present our progress on SAKE to the Gids and make sure we are all aligned for final descent.

The Utrecht stu­dio may receive rein­force­ments rather soon if you remem­ber the call we made for res­i­dents. We are look­ing for high­ly capa­ble peo­ple who do their own work but also enrich the stu­dio’s prac­tice by their pres­ence. We have received some bril­liant appli­ca­tions and we’re excit­ed to see where this lit­tle sce­nius is headed.