Week 290

We fin­ished sprints on two projects this week.

For Cam­parc Mark II, Aldo and Arnaud pushed hard to get a release can­di­date ready. Lots of hard­ware tweaks were made and devel­op­ment on the Ocu­lus Rift soft­ware was done. In the mean­time I focused on some final pro­duc­tion details, such as mak­ing sure we have plen­ty of 4G SIMs on hand to burn through when we start stream­ing dur­ing STRP.

Tim, Alper and I worked to get the alpha for SHACHI done. Most of the week was tak­en up by tweaks, bug fix­es and oth­er kinds of pol­ish. In the mean­time we are start­ing mak­ing plans for a first playtest, and the sub­se­quent two sprints on the beta.

Aside from those two sprint end­ings, we also worked on two con­sul­tan­cy projects.

I lead two sketch­ing ses­sions on BANKEN, bang­ing out ideas for spe­cif­ic play­ful inter­ac­tions which will be part of the inter­ac­tive video. In the mean­time anoth­er part of the team shot some rough video, which we will use to devel­op a pro­to­type in the next few weeks.

Alper worked togeth­er with Mar­ius Mörders in Berlin on some nice con­cept visu­al­i­sa­tions for SHIJIMI. After one more iter­a­tion those will be ready for a pre­sen­ta­tion next week. In the mean­time I pre­pared a talk on mov­ing from gam­i­fi­ca­tion to play­ful design, which we will deliv­er along­side the concept.

And aside from this, I vis­it­ed Lei­den Uni­ver­si­ty to review crit­i­cal game pro­to­types made by human­i­ties stu­dents who have the great for­tune to be taught by Joris. I blogged high­lights from Play Mat­ters, Alper vis­it­ed the boardgame design­ers meet­up at Spiel­wiese again, and I’ve heard rumours of an impend­ing Cup­pings user inter­face overhaul…