Week 186

As is the nat­ur­al rhythm of things, we’ve been wrap­ping up a num­ber of projects last week, while oth­ers are pick­ing up steam.

On the wrap­ping-up front, I worked with Her­man on prepar­ing the slide deck for HIRAME’s final deliv­ery. We put in some sug­ges­tions for a visu­al style, a prop­er game title, a premise—that sort of thing. And also a first rough stab at a plan­ning and a budget.

I also had a final stu­dio ses­sion with Anne and Zineb of Stu­dio Papaver. Their pro­pos­al for a col­lec­tive intel­li­gence game aimed at gen­er­at­ing solu­tions for prob­lems relat­ed to pop­u­la­tion shrink­age is almost done. We dis­cussed some details of how the com­plete game process will be orga­nized and also did some back-of-a-nap­kin esti­mates for pro­duc­tion bud­gets. They’ll present their plans at the NAi on Thurs­day, March 21.

This was also a week in which all of a sud­den Pig Chase received atten­tion once more: First a deli­cious­ly long arti­cle at Wired UK was pub­lished about play­ing with ani­mals for which Clemens and I were inter­viewed and which also includes the won­der­ful work of Han­na Wirman on play­ing with orang­utans. Also an episode of De Wereld Leert Door—a Dutch talk show on science—wholly ded­i­cat­ed to the project for which Marin­ka was inter­viewed. And final­ly the open­ing of Yes Nat­u­ral­ly, an exhi­bi­tion on the con­tem­po­rary nature of the nat­ur­al, which includes Pig Chase along­side work from Natal­ie Jere­mi­jenko, Tin­ke­bell and Ai Wei­wei, amongst oth­ers. The project has been dor­mant while we look for new funds, but it’s great to see it con­tin­ues to be rel­e­vant to people.

Alper—who joined us in NL from Wednes­day onwards—provided FURAP­PA’s client with a sneak pre­view of the ideas we’d cooked up for them and got some encour­ag­ing respons­es. So it’s on to clean­ing up the slide deck and trav­el­ing to their HQ for a final pre­sen­ta­tion to their team, soon.

I talked to Dirk Jr. on Tues­day about the final improve­ments that need to be made before Vic­to­ry Boo­gie Woo­gie (code­name SAKE) can launch. And on Fri­day, Simon came over to the stu­dio for a full day of work on those points, tempt­ed by the phys­i­cal pres­ence of Alper and the promise of a FRIDAYS AT 7 to cel­e­brate our recent achieve­ments. Speak­ing of Vic­to­ry Boo­gie Woo­gie: we’re launch­ing April 8. If you feel like join­ing in be sure to sign up at the pre-launch page.

In the spir­it of kaizen we also pushed some small improve­ments to the run­ning game of Code 4, which is in its sec­ond week and from what we hear play­ers are going crazy with it (in a good way).

On Thurs­day we worked from Top­i­ka’s stu­dio at the Open Coop so that Alper could catch up with his col­leagues at the Open State Foun­da­tion and I could catch up with Anne at EYE and Frank at Frog. Being at Open Coop is always a plea­sure, if only because of the won­der­ful lunch­es served by Bite Me.

But the major­i­ty of our time was tak­en up by KAIGARA—although from read­ing this it might not appear that way. I had my project man­ag­er hat on for most of the time—doing plan­ning, bud­get, get­ting Tim (our game design­er) and Bas­ti­aan (our graph­ic design­er) up to speed. And for the remain­der I focused on start­ing to detail the game’s inter­ac­tion design. Mean­while Alper assem­bled the required host­ing envi­ron­ment and built and deployed a first very bare-bones ver­sion of the web app for tech­ni­cal review pur­pos­es. All of which has giv­en us a good posi­tion from which to real­ly push for­ward the com­ing weeks.