What’s this? Inspired by Kars‘ and Niels‘ efforts to create weeknotes, I will update this website with (irregular) scheduled notes about my work and what I’ve been up to.
This week consisted mostly of preparing for the first Indie Game: The Movie screening in a film theatre in The Netherlands.
I decided to try out working with a new app for the iPad. I usually use the Pomodoro technique and app for keeping track of tasks, how long they take etc. 30/30 is a recently released timer – task manager app by Binary Hammer and uses a gestural based interface for its tasks list. It looks clean and attractive with colored labels, wide-range of icons to pick from and the timer as the center of attention. I really like the design as it is easy on the eye, and the ease of which you can adapt it to your workflow. It would be nice if they implement a system for archival /logs of tasks, data and metrics like this Pomodoro desktop app does for workflow improvements.
On Monday, Richard Boeser sent the IGTM NL Screening team a couple of sketches for the flyer:
On Tuesday I brainstormed with Liselore via skype about names for the untitled event we’re planning in WORM. We like it to be catchy, but not overtly silly. We do have a longlist of names, brainstormed together with Kitty Calis in previous meetings. But we haven’t come up with the perfect name yet. Will need to have one soon so we can actually start working on the flyer and website! We also want to announce the event at the start of the IGTM NL screening so people can already get a little bit more informed and excited about this future event. In the afternoon we got the good news that the IGTM screening was now featured on the screening list on the website of Indie Game: The Movie, which made it all feel even more official!
On Wednesday Richard continued working on the flyer for the Indie Game: The Movie screening, and we reviewed things like layout, colors etc. After those decisions were made, I created events on different social networks, so everyone could show their attendance on their social network of choice (LinkedIn, G+, FB). Richard offered to create special banners for each of the events, as they all need different sizes and dimensions. The results are shown in this post I made on the IGTM NL website.
Thursday I tweeted and emailed a couple of organisations in The Netherlands about the screening. Among others Virtueel Platform kindly retweeted the tweet and also created a dedicated news post the next day, which we were really happy with! IGTM NL screening sponsor Dutch Game Garden added the event to their calendar on their brand new website. In the afternoon I went to Utrecht for the first DGG Summer Talk by Arjan Terpstra about dealing with press successfully. It had some nice pointers and tips. Edit: Dutch Game Garden posted a report about Arjan’s talk and his slides on their website.
After the Summer Talk, I went up a couple of floors in the DGG building to Monobanda as it was Sjoerd Wennekes’ 30th birthday and we had to decorate some cakes! Afterward I went with Eva Nieuwdorp to a local pub to meet up with Arjan and also Matthijs Dierckx from Control Magazine. We had good discussions on the state of game journalism in general and talked a bit about the new Dutch IGN website that has a lot of household names from the Dutch industry and also features Arjan as one of their writers.
Friday was all about indies, meetups and games. The local multiplayer picnic organized by Jan Willem Nijman and Kitty Calis had some wonderful games again, like Chalo Chalo, Spelunky and Ceremony of Surprise. As it was “Poppenkast – Summer of Meat” there were a couple of people from abroad visiting: among them Jukio Kallio and Antti Lukinmaa from Finland. Much to my surprise I was also greeted by McPixel Sos, whom I thought was at No More Sweden in Malmö, an annual gathering of indie game devs to meetup, create games and have fun. But somehow Sos ended up in Utrecht together with his girlfriend, was really nice to see them there. On a side note: Troy Morrissey was also at NMS in Malmö to shoot some footage for the gamejam documentary he is making for which I was interviewed at GDC in San Francisco in March earlier this year.
After the multiplayer picnic it was time for the indie meetup in the local pub which had a whole bunch of people from all over The Netherlands turning up. Somewhere in the evening Melinda, Selma and Joanna came up to me and told me they would love to have a meetup for women in games in the near future. As that was something which has been on my mind for quite some time, I figured it would be a good opportunity to actually make it happen. So, looks like I’m organizing our first meetup soon! At the end of the evening I travelled home by train together with Derk de Geus who had to go via Amsterdam to The Hague. We had some nice discussions about gender, women in games and different approaches and views.
On Sunday I had a board meeting and regular meeting for Global Game Jam, exciting things ahead!
This week’s play:
- Personal Trip To The Moon: a short and experimental game about dysphoria, discovery and astronauts
- Chalo Chalo: abstract multiplayer game / prototype by Richard Boeser
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