Week 202

It’s an absolute­ly gor­geous sum­mer day out­side. One of the first of the year, in fact. Sun may not be note­wor­thy in your part of the world, but this is the Nether­lands so it total­ly is. You can imag­ine the willpow­er it takes for me to stay inside and write this. Any­way, on to what we did last week.

Alper tells me he spent most of his time work­ing on Beesten­bende. This was the last week before the new ver­sion’s release, so he had his work cut out for him. We got a nice rhythm going, him tick­ing of stuff in our sprint back­log as he com­mit­ted code, myself test­ing it all, catch­ing the odd bug. I also tweaked copy and art to match the slight­ly adjust­ed game play. The new ver­sion is eas­i­er to pick up and play. We most­ly took out stuff, stream­lined inter­ac­tions, etc. I can’t tell you how nice it is to get anoth­er chance to pol­ish a game that was already quite well done.

We do a lot of con­sult­ing late­ly. Although I should qual­i­fy that and say our con­sult­ing is less about talk­ing through slide decks and dis­cussing and more about col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly sketch­ing and pro­to­typ­ing. The for­mer can be use­ful, but the lat­ter is more suit­ed to our tem­pera­ment. To this end, Alper put some time into prepar­ing for upcom­ing engage­ments. Mean­while, I par­tic­i­pat­ed in a work­shop focused on the cre­ation of a new phys­i­cal space for play­ful culture—which was sup­port­ed by a lux­u­ri­ous amount of graph­ic facil­i­ta­tors. I also co-facil­i­tat­ed the first work­shop for project ASARI on which we are col­lab­o­rat­ing with Info.nl. This is about enabling peo­ple to expe­ri­ence future out­comes of large pub­lic infra­struc­ture projects.

Odds and ends:

Alper con­tin­ued to meet with new and inter­est­ing Berlin peo­ple. Sim­i­lar­ly, I had a few nice chats with poten­tial new clients at the month­ly Dutch Game Gar­den net­work­ing lunch.

And final­ly, I head­ed to Dalf­sen to attend a pho­to shoot for an upcom­ing Dutch Design Week exhi­bi­tion on design­ers and farm­ers, which Pig Chase is part of. Pre­dictably, the humans (me, Irene and farmer Dick) were upstaged by a rather fetch­ing piglet.