Women in Games NL twitter:

Anna Kipnis’ start in game dev

[Video Interview] Tweet: Interview with Anna Kipnis, Gameplay programmer at Double Fine and one of the main Molyjam organizers, about how she started her career in game development:

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Kim Swift

[Article] Tweet: Interview on Gamasutra with Kim Swift, co-creator of Portal, about the “Inclusive Design” of her new game Quantum Conundrum.

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Dear Mitu, Dear Emily

[Letter conversation] Tweet:  “Dear Mitu, Dear Emily“ a personal letter correspondence between Mitu Khandaker and Emily Flynn-Jones.

“The letter series explores their ‘origin stories’ as well as feelings about feminism and about their identities as women in games development and/ or academia“. A very interesting read and would suggest everyone to read it, as it shows the ongoing struggle of women in games, even if they are initially not aware of it or try to ignore it.

“It’s jarring how so many women and girls think we live in a post-sexism world. But, they are wrong. I was wrong” – Mitu.

  zoewi twitter

Sworcery A/V Jam

[Art & Design] Tweet: Superbrothers, Capy & Jim Guthrie have a Sworcery A/V Jam in the weekend of May 11th-13th and ask the community/fans etc to join them and “create artwork, sounds & whatever else in the key of #sworcery”. They created a Tumblr page to showcase everything that is sent to them that weekend.

And wow does the community provide, really amazing and creative art works in the spirit of Sword and Sworcery. People have created: sculptures, minecraft worlds, paintings, photos, soundtrack rearrangements, animations and so much more. If you want to be inspired, make sure you check the Sworcery A/V Jam tumblr:

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7DFPS

[GameJam] Tweet: Taking inspiration from 7DRL, Jan Willem Nijman (of Vlambeer) had this idea of a 7-day gamejam/ challenge to create first person shooters.
He teamed up with Sos Sosowski and Sven Bergstrom. Cactus made the retro and awesome looking logo.

And there it is: #7DFPS  will take place from June 9th to 15th, 2012. There is a #7DFPS IRC channel on freenode where people are flinging around ideas and support @jwaaaap in his venture, a twitter hashtag and a website.

No One Told Me

[Blog / Slice of life] Tweet: Alex Noriega ‘is a cartoonist that is very confused about things and doesn’t really know what he’s doing”. His drawing style has a certain kind of cuteness to it, and with that he also has some important messages to tell the world, things he learned along the way (without anyone telling him). Some very sensible things are among the wide range of cartoons he made.

Other:

• With Game Audio & Music, I linked to Plink, a nice multiplayer music experience by DinahMoe (needs Chrome / HTML5)
• Thought it would be about time to pick up the Global Game Jam twitter again and share game jam news and awesomeness.

 - Among them: June is announced as the “National Game Development Month” or NaGaDeMo after “National Novel Writing Month” (NaNoWriMo).
 - The seventh Toronto Gamejam is taking place May 11 – 13, 2012. Participating is also Project Overboard, one of the biggest gamejam teams ‘ever’ with 37 team members.
- ‘Top 6 reasons why you should try Global Game Jam” – Girl Geek Dinner Philadelphia article by Bri Lance.

And that is all for the links for today!

If  you like more see: zoewi, global game jam, wignl on twitter and game audio & music, wignl and ggj on google+ or my passionlicious tumblr.

Independent games: A MAZE
On Sunday I played through the finalists for the Most Amazing Game Award from the upcoming A MAZE. Indie Connect 2012 festival in Berlin. What a wonderful selection it is! I really enjoyed playing all the nominated games, I’m foreseeing a lot of discussions with the other judges, as every game has something unique, adorable, wonderful. Such a tough choice. The award ceremony will be on Friday at the .HBC in Berlin. Just a couple of days to go! Really looking forward to meet my fellow jury members, the A MAZE. organizers and of course the indie game devs.

Independent Magazines: Facing Pages 2012
On Saturday I traveled down to Arnhem with Eva Nieuwdorp and Jim Biekmann to visit Facing Pages 2012. This festival is the ‘biggest event on independent magazines’ and promised lectures, workshops and of course great magazines to leaf through.
Together with journalist Niels ‘t Hooft and graphic designer Jim Biekmann, I’m working on an idea for a magazine on games, so this was an excellent opportunity to meet like-minded people, get inspiration and some fresh ideas.

Below you find a small photo report of the second day of the festival.

Above: The festival hall: organizer Tanja Koning (you can spot her in the middle) had been painting and rearranging the whole building the weekend before, together with a crew. Amazing what they have managed to create. Wonderful space.

Above: The designer who designed the format of the exhibition (something with library cards)

Above:  Max Bruinsma talks about the redesign of magazine Items

Above: Dimitri Nieuwenhuizen did a lecture on Lustlab‘s research projects. He showed a couple of really interesting projects such as Urban Echo, Res Sapiens and Airport The Hague.

The magazine exhibition space.

The magazine The Ride is a great example of taking a topic out of its usual magazine format and focus on the actual lifestyle and personal stories. Add great illustrations, photographs and artists, et voila a magazine I now intend to buy.

I had never heard of the ‘It’s Nice That‘ website before Saturday, but it looks like I missed out. It ‘exists to champion creativity across a whole host of disciplines’. Just up my sleeve! Will Hudson talked us through the history of the blog and the start of the magazine.

Michael Bojkowski did a live review of a couple of magazines just as he does online with linefeed.

Love the title of this magazine. Jeremy Leslie of MagCulture blog took us on a history of magazines.

This guy, doesn’t he look a lot like a young Steve Buscemi? I tweeted this and Facing Pages picked that tweet to be featured on the website….

CoverJunkie Jaap Biemans showed us a whole range of magazine covers. The cover above was rejected but the image is speaking a million words.

Tired but super happy organizer Tanja Koning closes the conference programme.

We left the event location, super inspired and ready to create!

Last week I started a timeline on Facebook for the history of the Dutch Game Industry. As some will have noticed through my twitter feed I was so excited with adding milestones to the timeline, I had a hard time sleeping and was still updating it around 5AM on Sunday.

So many things I was remembering that should also be added to the timeline. When I posted an announcement of the timeline to twitter and FB, the wonderful Jurie Horneman responded via twitter and had a couple of great milestones to add such as Aackosoft’s Sprinter:
Henri van Straaten, a train driver  had been translating a couple of games for an importer in 1984. At a certain moment he figured he could also make his own games. This led him to create Sprinter, a train simulator for the ZX Spectrum and later Commodore 64. The idea reminds me a bit of the popular train series in Japan: Densha de Go!  But this was back in 1984 in The Netherlands! So many great stories to tell in the Dutch Game Industry history. Still in the process of adding more and more milestones and history to the timeline. Have something you like to see added? Let me know.

In my background post I asked if anyone wanted to create a logo for the timeline. The lovely Richard Boeser of ibb and obb fame immediately responded with a couple of draft versions he created. On Monday he sent me the final versions: both a logo and a timeline cover image! See the flying Dutchmen below. Totally love it. Thank you Richard!

I am fascinated by timelines, history, chronological order and overviews. As I have been involved in the Dutch Games industry for about a decade now I decided it was time to create some sort of timeline. In comes Facebook. Some time ago I read about the NY Times using the new FB timeline functionality to create a history of NY Times. Love that idea! So with that in mind I thought about something similar for the Dutch Game industry.

We’re such a small country and we are lucky enough to live in a time to witness the growth of the game industry. However, it is in constant motion, people move, companies disappear, knowledge is lost. I love to have some sort of overview that shows the changes that happen.

Personally I have been involved in and attended many (historical) Dutch game industry events. I still got a load of pictures spanning from 2003 until now from game events in The Netherlands that cover academia, game business, culture etc. Ranging from DiGRA Level Up in 2003 where I was an intern, to Playful in 2004 (giving a talk, taking photos), to Indigo in 2010 (initiator) and Global Game Jam (director). Although the timeline is more suitable for creating milestone events, I hope to also add some of those photos, as I believe photos can tell a lot of stories about the events and the people that make up this industry.

I am currently still in the process of adding events and milestones to the timeline. But as with every industry, it’s in constant flux: many websites, studios etc. don’t exist anymore. I’m hoping to find traces of it though and add it to the timeline wherever I can, giving an overall picture of the changes, new initiatives, major events etc. I hope it will add to the sense of history and what kind of changes the industry goes through. While uploading to the timeline, I realize that the industry might already be growing too big to add everything to it. But lets see what happens. Have ideas or suggestions? Please let me know!

As you can see in the picture below, 2008 for example, was a big year for the Dutch Game Industry. But that is not all that happened. Go see for yourself:

Timeline: https://www.facebook.com/DutchGameIndustryHistory

PS: Would love to have a logo for this timeline. Any takers? -  The awesome Richard Boeser offered me to make one. Thank you!
PS2: The timeline is a work in progress. Suggestions are welcome.

Happy and honored to announce that I will be part of the international A MAZE. Indie Games Award jury. Together with game designer Marek Plichta, game designer Thierry Platon and game journalist Chris Atkins, I was asked by A MAZE festival director Thorsten S. Wiedemann to be a judge for the first ever A MAZE. Indie Games Award. Different from other award shows there is only one award to give away, the award for: “The Most Amazing Game”.

Today A MAZE. published the list of entries for the award. With about 75 high-quality entries (many of them from Europe) it will be a tough choice indeed! Am looking forward to playing the games and having discussions with my fellow judges. Good luck everyone!

If you want to follow what is going on with Molyjam 2012, here are a few quick links:

The Netherlands

Last but not least, Epilogger a new startup in Montreal created an aggregation site for social media, blogposts, check-ins etc, related to specific events. Great to sense the scope of an event, to track an event and to keep a record so we can remember the events we participated in or wished we could have attended.

Molyjam 2012 has its own Epilogger record! http://epilogger.com/events/moly-jam-2012

Very last minute, I decided to see if it was also possible to set one up in The Netherlands. I reached out to Dutch Game Garden as a possible location for the jam and they said yes! I put up a FB event to see if anyone was interested. Sign ups were slow initially but in the end we got about 8 people interested in participating. Thursday 29 March I decided that we should make Molyjam happen for sure.

So  yes MolyjamNL is going to happen! FB event page: http://www.facebook.com/events/210175445753367/

Do you think your game deserves the award for “The Most Amazing Game”, no questions asked? Your chance is now: Submit your game for A MAZE. Indie Games Award 2012. Deadline is fast approaching with March 30, so you have to be quick about it. Click the link here and you’ll be there in a whiff!

A MAZE. Indie Connect is a new Indie games festival in Berlin that takes place in April for the first time. The European indie scene will gather together in the German capital for two days of inspiration, celebration and play on April 26 and 27.

The festival offers talks and workshops from internationally renowned folk like Doug Wilson (J.S. Joust, Die Gute Fabrik) and Jonathan Brodsky (IGF nominee for Pugs Luv Beats). But the festival has more to offer: the exhibition and game showcase will feature work from international indie devs such as Cactus and media artists like Aram Bartholl. But that is not all: Dutch indie devs represent! Vlambeer and FourceLabs will head to Berlin to showcase their work to the public. Exciting days. Of course no festival without a party, so A MAZE. promises to deliver on that as well with A MAZE. Jump’n Run.

Award
One of the highlights of the festival is the A MAZE. Indie Games Award for “The Most Amazing Game” which will be handed out for the first time on April 27. Festival Director Thorsten S. Wiedemann:  “The Games Award for “The Most Amazing Game” reflects developers’ courage, taking risks and experimenting recklessly with the medium. They push forward gaming’s potential for intellectual and cultural-political exchange.”

Are you one of those courageous developers? Don’t hesitate and submit your game!
Deadline: March 30
Submission fee: €45

PS: Currently only digital games are considered (so no analogue or games with kinect etc.)

:::Quick links:::

* This post was originally written for the English Control Magazine beta site.
* Read the Dutch post here.

After months of preparations, designing and finishing touches, zo-ii’s logo is here! Designed by the brilliant and lovely Liselore Goedhart (aka Lizzy wanders), co-owner of Monobanda and creative extraordinaire.

Right in time for GDC 2012, so thanks to Liselore I’m also bringing brand new and shiny business cards (limited edition) to the conference next week.

The logo shares in the playfulness, connectedness and “(global) happiness” zo-ii aims to bring forward.

To keep things fun and varied, there are some small variations on the logo, but the main logo used, will be mr Green below.  Say hi!

Update: Liselore wrote a small blogpost on her portfolio site about the creation of the logo: http://lizzywanders.wordpress.com/2012/03/21/zo-ii-logo-design/

Below you will find a short photo report of the event.

Dutch Game Garden brought about 15 INDIGO arcade cabinets for the evening to showcase a bunch of #ggjNL games.

Control Gamelab #2 Opening screen

Showcasing Audience Awarded game Croctail (GGJNL Hilversum)

Showcasing Audience Awarded game “You Keep Dropping These Things And Don’t Seem To Notice” (GGJNL Enschede)

JP van Seventer and Matthijs Dierckx talking with Dylan Nagel about his GGJ experiences as a professional.

Kars Alfrink (Hubbub) and Karel Millenaar (FourceLabs) talk about their GGJ experiences abroad (GGJ Berlin by A MAZE)

The “Kleine Uil‘ (little owl) little brother of the Dutch Game Awards, for audience voted Dutch ‘winner’ of GGJNL.

A couple of international games were shown to the crowd. Below Hyper Manly Rainbow Chesthair Shooter (FGJ Kajaani)

Joost van Dongen (Ronimo Games  & Proun) watches the crowd from the stage.

Guus Hoeve talks about his team’s game Catch-22 (GGJNL Amsterdam)

Jury Award winner “The Small Bang Theory” (GGJNL Breda)

Jury Award Winner “Size Matters” (GGJNL Hilversum)

Control Gamelab #2 audience could vote for #ggjnl games to receive the “Kleine Uil 2012″

Audience voted “Kleine Uil” winner: Catch-22!

Vlambeer & Friends accepted the challenge to do a hyper game jam during the hours of Control Gamelab. They created the game “Café Noir” within 2 hours.
In the photo: Rami Ismail, Eric Bartelson, Roy Nathan de Groot and Rutger Muller.

Jan-Willem Nijman plays through the game that was made within 2 hours from scratch.

Read more about Café Noir game: http://www.vlambeer.com/2012/02/15/cafe-noir-hyper-game-jam/

Café Noir timelapse video:

Berlin experiences by Dutch team:

Want to know more?