I began the week with finishing my share of judging games for the Mozilla Game On competition. The competition wants to push open web technologies for making games and sought games in three different categories:
- Hackable Games (Winner: Code Injection)
- Multi-Device Games (Winner: Zumbie: Blind Rage)
- Web-Only Games (Winner: Bombermine)
Mozilla announced the winners shortly after. The ‘Grand Champion’ is the game Zumbie: Blind Rage by Jonatan Van Hove (@joonturbo), Mads Johansen, Jonas Maaloe Jespersen & Tommy Rousse (@ludist) from Copenhagen.
Have a look at all the winners here. Mozilla also posted the runner-ups on their blog. Congratulations to all!
On Tuesday I went to Utrecht to teach at the HKU and had taken the opportunity to plan more meetings in the city. One was with writer and journalist Niels ‘t Hooft and designers Jim Biekmann & Cristian Smets to discuss our plans about a literary / artistic magazine centered around games. The guys had worked on some concepts for the design of the magazine, which is looking really good. Got us excited to pick up on the project again and make some headway with it.
The second meeting was with Liza Groeneveld who started working at the Province of Utrecht recently to take care of foreign investment for the creative industry, among which are games. We discussed some ideas about getting their website up to date with relevant information. I had previously worked with her and Liselore Goedhart on InvestUtrecht poster design for the international edition of Control Magazine for GDC 2013 in San Francisco, so we figured it was a nice start for more future collaborations.
Art & Technology festival STRP was still going this week, my friend from New York, Kaho Abe was there with her game Hit Me! after she had first showcased the game at our Playful Arts Festival in December last year. I had planned on meeting her at the airport just before she returned to New York on Wednesday but sadly the trains were not going to Schiphol due to an accident. Luckily she will be in San Francisco for GDC, so we will be able to catch up soon.
On Thursday I had an appointment with Iris Peters (bART) to discuss future plans for Playful Arts Festival for 2014 and other things we could do meanwhile during 2013. I was supposed to go to Den Bosch to meet her and afterwards go to the DGA Dag taking place in Breda. But seeing that I had still a lot of work to do I decided to skip the DGA dag for once and do the meeting with Iris via Skype. Some great plans and new focus for 2013! She also tricked me into saying yes to do the opening of their Game-City exhibition in Enschede next week. More on that in weeknotes 81.
The weekend I was heading off to Groningen for the first ever Indie Gameleon event, organized and initiated by Mendel Bouman. An independent game festival for the North of The Netherlands, bringing together developers, students, educational institutes and many more for a weekend of talks, gamejam, music and networking. I was invited as a judge for the game jam and was asked for the keynote talk on Saturday morning, kicking off the conference part of the festival. On Thursday and Friday I worked on preparing my talk, trying a new slide design (background from here) and figuring out how many stuff I could put into a talk of 45 minutes. On Saturday it turned out of course that I had too many slides for the allocated time, next time I might want to do a talk of 90 minutes or more. Or several talks!
The talk was received well. After enjoying other talks, an Eindbaas party and great food, I went to sleep in the local ORKZ ‘hotel’ (awesome bunkbeds and in the company of Eindbaas’ Klazien Schaap and Frans Twisk).
The next day I met up with the other judges around 3PM to start playing and judging the Indie Gameleon game jam games. The theme for the jam was ‘compass’. We played all 11 games, discussed a lot and eventually decided on a top 3. Read more about it on Game & Co, mediapartner for Indie Gameleon. Report part 1. Photo report.
Winner: Team ‘Zombies Ate My Game” with “Wilted Flower” – a horror exploration game which had ‘compass’ integrated in its concept in almost every detail.
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