Week 190

Hav­ing launched Vic­to­ry Boo­gie Woo­gie just before the week­end it’s only nat­ur­al we had to do a few quick fix­es on Mon­day, the first prop­er day of the game.

I sat down with Niels to review his nar­ra­tive design for KAIGARA. He’s doing a great job of adding “just enough” theme to what is oth­er­wise shap­ing up to be a rather mechan­ics-and-social-inter­ac­tion ori­ent­ed game.

Alper went to a lec­ture by Gra­ham Har­man that day. Har­man is one of a num­ber of philoso­phers we’ve been fol­low­ing with some inter­est late­ly. His treat­ment of Bruno Latour’s ideas is a worth­while read. I’m also quite par­tial to his use of HP Love­craft to explain OOO.

On Tues­day Alper flew to Munich to present our work on FURAPPA to the clien­t’s team. This wraps up the first stage of our work with them. We had lots of fun with this so far, so I’m hop­ing we’ll be able to con­tin­ue and devel­op some of our ideas into more detail.

That same day I had Bas­ti­aan, Niels and Tim over at the Utrecht stu­dio for our week­ly KAIGARA team day. Bas­ti­aan put the final touch­es on the front­door while Niels and Tim worked out a lot of the details of how the theme and the mechan­ics of the game inter­con­nect. We also got to play around with a first rough dig­i­tal prototype.

Alper deployed the KAIGARA front­door on Wednes­day. KAIGARA is titled Rip­ple Effect, and it’s a game for orga­ni­za­tion­al change we’re mak­ing for Shell. The remain­der of the week we most­ly just con­tin­ued work on the project. I had a few calls with the client to dis­cuss our progress and logis­tics of the upcom­ing pilot.

Mean­while Vic­to­ry Boo­gie Woo­gie’s first week came to a close. We pushed small tweaks and fix­es to the live site as we saw things firm­ing up. Mean­while some fun writ­ing and art were sub­mit­ted. Per­son­al favorites include this essay on Mon­dri­aan’s hand­writ­ing by Kees ‘t Hart and this ani­mat­ed gif of var­i­ous yel­low jack­ets by Eva-Fiore Kova­cov­sky. I’m real­ly pleased with how it’s already turn­ing out to be this kalei­do­scop­ic sto­ry­world that you can kind of pick your own way through, and knead by writ­ing some your­self. I’m Kaeru there myself, by the way, and this is my first sub­mis­sion.

And final­ly we were pleased to see Hide&Seek’s Tiny Games Kick­starter make it to the fin­ish line. Not in the least because this means I will get to design a tiny game for the app myself, too.