Week 292

Some sig­nif­i­cant achieve­ments this week!

Let’s start with Cam­parc Mark II. We had a suc­cess­ful run dur­ing the week­end. Hard­ware and soft­ware per­formed admirably—a tip of the hat to Aldo and Arnaud—and peo­ple seemed to real­ly enjoy it. Lat­er this week we pro­vid­ed the STRP crew with some addi­tion­al doc­u­men­ta­tion so that they can run it inde­pen­dent­ly in the week­end to come. We also pub­lished a nice lit­tle teas­er video made by Syl­van with footage shot on Sun­day. An expand­ed video will fol­low shortly.

I spent a large chunk of this week build­ing a low fideli­ty pro­to­type of a num­ber of inter­ac­tive videos for BANKEN. We are now in a good spot to have our film­mak­ing part­ner shoot rough video, after which we can tran­si­tion into high fideli­ty prototyping.

For SHACHI we had a week in between sprints in which we reori­ent­ed the game’s fic­tion so that it allows us to more eas­i­ly adapt to a range of phys­i­cal con­texts. This was a hard nut to crack, but we man­aged it main­ly through some Boy­di­an cre­ation and destruc­tion. Alper did the heavy con­cep­tu­al lift­ing and Tim rapid­ly sketched out a sto­ry­board of the new play­er expe­ri­ence. We are now con­fi­dent that we can build a game about free­dom that includes the his­to­ry of warfight­ing and resis­tance in the Nether­lands dur­ing WWII as well as cur­rent issues relat­ed to sur­veil­lance, cen­sor­ship, etc.

On to Bycatch. We received a great review from Kill Screen. We are pleased not just because they liked it, but more impor­tant­ly because they very clear­ly describe how it feels to play the game. Also this week Alper talked about the game at Hacks/Hackers Berlin and Lekha did the same at Play­craft­ing NYC. All of which result­ed in a nice bump in pre-orders.

If you like hear­ing Alper talk, I have good news. He has two pre­sen­ta­tions com­ing up. One is on play­ful organ­i­sa­tions at Coun­ter­Play and the oth­er is on issue games at re:publica. Both should be worth your while.

This was Alper’s final week of being with­out a stu­dio. He ben­e­fit­ed from LOL­CAT­BIZ’s hos­pi­tal­i­ty while prepar­ing for the move into KANT’s new digs at Auf­bau Haus on the Mon­day ahead.