Week 183

Kars start­ed last week by giv­ing a lec­ture to indus­tri­al design stu­dents at my alma mater. He walked stu­dents through Beesten­bende and shared with them the fin­er points of inter­ac­tion design for hybrid games. That week we also dis­cussed next ver­sions of Beesten­bende with the Utrecht Uni­ver­si­ty Muse­um.

We received this paper from a game about shrink­age in Dutch com­mu­ni­ties we’re advising:

Kars also wrote his first Recess! post, which means I am up again this week. Look­ing for­ward to that a lot. All three of us have found the open for­mat to be very refresh­ing. On Tues­day I gave an inter­view as a pre­view for a con­fer­ence where I’ll be talk­ing about the cre­ative prac­tices of our stu­dio and how the way we work influ­ences what we make and vice ver­sa. I hope to share both the inter­view and details about that con­fer­ence in the very near future.

We’re devel­op­ing Code 4 into a more repeat­able ver­sion which is tak­ing less time than expect­ed thanks to the solid­ness of Djan­go. Speak­ing of which I attend­ed the Berlin Djan­go meet­up gra­cious­ly host­ed by our friends over at the Gidsy office.

Kars and Tim are also work­ing on a new game with the work­ing title ‘Fields of Dark­ness’. Coin­ci­den­tal­ly their pre­vi­ous col­lab­o­ra­tion The Cer­e­mo­ny of Sur­prise was played at GEEK 2013 last week.

Sander van der Vegte moved in over at Utrecht to be our first stu­dio res­i­dent. We are immense­ly pleased to share the space with some­body of his out­stand­ing track record in games and we look for­ward to many­fold pleas­ant inter­ac­tions in the future. His K.K. Slid­er is already stand­ing proudly:

The end of the week was most­ly busy wrap­ping up SAKE both in soli­tary sprints as well as a full day one on Fri­day. It is sat­is­fy­ing to see that game being pared down to its essence and receiv­ing its fin­ish­ing touch­es. And we end­ed Fri­day in Berlin with an impromp­tu FAT7.

Besides all of this also lots of bor­ing stuff to keep both stu­dios run­ning. More pub­lic speak­ing logis­tics: next week Kars will speak at Mov­ing Sto­ries about how musea can use dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences to engage their audi­ences. We’d love to see you there.