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.
It had been a while since I had properly updated the website event calendar with events. I still have an idea for a proper conference and events website where you can easily see upcoming game festivals and deadlines. But I don’t have the time, money or team yet to do this, so I settled for updating my own event calendar with many of the events around the world I come across (and wish I could go to). On Monday and Tuesday I sorted out a lot of the events and had to rearrange things on the website a bit. Apparently images are still an issue when I want to upload them to WordPress. On Tuesday I tried to find ways to solve the problem (SQL, php etc), but other than much frustration it didn’t get me much further. In the end I decided to manually upload pictures over 100kb via ftp. Hurray.
Earlier I was approached by Roger ter Heide (Game in the City) if I could share the upcoming Guts & Glory Awards with European Indie Game devs, so I decided to write a post about it, and to delve a little bit in bit.ly again. After twitter introduced their own shortlinks, I had shied away from bit.ly in favor of twitters’ own. But Bit.ly seems a good way to keep track of links and who clicks them, which is quite handy.
Due to other limitations of the website theme I’ve chosen, I fiddle around with a lot of different tools and plugins to get the result I want for certain kinds of posts. I discovered I can use the online photo tool PicMonkey (from the same brilliant team as the deceased Picnik) to achieve certain effects for my photos that otherwise would have been implemented in the theme itself. But hey we make do! And now quite happy with how the post turned out.
On Wednesday I continued writing bits and pieces for the funding application for the exhibition. On Thursday I finally worked on the press release I was supposed to write for the Global Game Jam. The writing itself took me quite some time as things needed to be put in a concise manner.
Meanwhile I also discovered Jurie Horneman was setting up a gameconference website with as sole purpose : a directory of game industry events. Was quite delighted! I offered to help out and we might be able to collaborate on something in the future.
Friday was finishing up day. I tweaked the GGJ press release a bit after feedback from my GGJ colleagues. Also worked on the last bits of game descriptions for the funding application. And then it was time to pack up and go the Flight 1337 offices for the first Women in Games NL meetup! I was really curious if anyone would show up other than the people that were already in the office (aka the Flight 1337 people). It actually turned out quite well for a first time. We had about five different nationalities and discussed startups, self-funding, appsterdam and start-up weekend projects. It was really nice to have so many different backgrounds, stories and ideas. Will definitely organize another one.
On Saturday I had to work on the website again as somehow the category section and internal appearance section of wordpress had become a mess and a bunch of stuff was not working anymore. Cost me all of Saturday to fix it, realizing that a lot of people I know were enjoying the last bit of the amazing Joue le Jeu (Play Along) exhibition in Paris that same day.
Sunday I was able to implement a couple of pages I had planned for quite a while now. There are a lot of resources out there for indie game devs and people interested in indie game culture. I wanted to provide different collections of links and worked on that on Sunday. I added both the Indie Game Dev collection (with worldwide jams, collectives, festivals etc) and the Dutch Game Industry directory pages.
It was also a lovely sunny day and I managed to take a break and enjoy the weather! And: Olympics 2012 closing ceremony (back to the 90s).
Games
- Released: Sound Shapes – wonderful PSP Vita and PS3 music game
- Released: GasketBall by MikenGreg – a quirky physics based puzzle basketball / hoops game. But not all sunshine for the creators.
- There is talk that Sony ditched “The Last Guardian” trademark which might indicate it cancelled the much anticipated game from the maker of ICO and Shadow of the Colossus.
Festivals / Conferences
- IGF chairman Brandon Boyer announces that the submissions for the 2013 Independent Games Festival are opened.
- First independent games festival for Latin America is announced: BIG Festival, 22 November – 2 December, 2012 in Sao Paolo