Week 203

Last week got us into a good rhythm for our sum­mer engage­ments. A quick slice from our cur­rent stack.

Kars pre­pared and facil­i­tat­ed the sec­ond work­shop for ASARI where tons of sketch­ing result­ed in a rough­ly final con­cept which can go up for pre­sen­ta­tion before the start of the first design and devel­op­ment sprint. Kars and I also brain­stormed a bunch of fun games to add to the final prod­uct to give it that elu­sive fun fac­tor but still keep the nec­es­sary broad appeal. Some of these are real­ly extreme­ly fun and I hope they make it into the final site. Kars sketched these out for pre­sen­ta­tion in the next session.

We’re approach­ing the next work­shop ses­sion for SAME and prepar­ing for that by get­ting more con­text infor­ma­tion from the client. SAME revolves around a very chal­leng­ing prob­lem for a very large com­pa­ny but at the same time we are also get­ting a lot of free­dom to work in and con­tribute our bit to the solu­tion. Very excit­ing stuff and I hope to be able to share stuff from that here at some point.

We shipped the new ver­sion of Beesten­bende to the Uni­ver­siteitsmu­se­um and we look for­ward to see­ing their reac­tions on the sim­pli­fied game flow.

AJI is a new project where we will be mak­ing things to explore the social issues we treat­ed in pre­sen­ta­tions over the past years. We find that the approach that best fits with our sen­si­bil­i­ties is to deliv­er stuff that does some­thing. This means pro­to­types, games or prod­ucts that gen­er­ate the expe­ri­ences we want to con­vey. We sketched out the screens for this app and it should go into devel­op­ment next week.

I am going to be pre­sent­ing on this year’s Retune, prefer­ably on AJI but I think our recent approach to cre­ative con­sult­ing as well as our prin­ci­ples for cre­at­ing games are also ger­mane. It is going to be love­ly and it is orga­nized by some very nice peo­ple, so if you’re in Berlin then you should get a tick­et.

Kars reviewed Per­cep­tor’s upcom­ing puz­zle art game. We’re not real­ly fans of puz­zle games, but we can tell if some­thing is well made (not that we expect­ed any dif­fer­ent from these guys). Look for this to be in an app store near you soon.

Kars iter­at­ed the KOHI cof­fee tast­ing game pro­to­type and did a playtest on it. We’re try­ing to demys­ti­fy the cof­fee tast­ing expe­ri­ence and cre­ate a fun expe­ri­ence where you help each oth­er refine your palates. Cof­fee is an ongo­ing inter­est of ours and we hope to use this game to improve cof­fee tast­ing for our­selves and others.