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.
With returning late from a weekend of Indie Gameleon in Groningen the Sunday before, I started relatively slow on Monday doing some administrative work and preparing classes for the next day.
Tuesday I was in Utrecht to teach classes at the HKU, afterwards I went to Dutch Game Garden where the new INDIGO DIY cabinets (by Retrospace) had just arrived. The DGG guys started to build the cabinets excitedly, looking at big sheets with instructions. On their first try, I think it took them about 3 hours to construct it. This week, a whole bunch of them are shipped to San Francisco for INDIGO in SF during GDC, it’s gonna be quite some work to put all 20 together!
At the end of the afternoon I wandered to the fourth floor of the DGG to check in with Paul (Veer), we chatted a bit about going to GDC in San Francisco. After that I went to the Monobanda office to say hi to Liselore Goedhart and Simon van der Linden.
In the evening I sorted through a couple of Indie Gameleon photos and sent them over to Willem Groeneveld of Game & Co as he had asked to use them on the website for an event report. You can see them in this ‘fotoverslag‘.
Wednesday I finally had some time to sort, edit, process and upload my Indie Game Concert photos. I had used two cameras during the even but decided to use only photos from one camera as those images were better. Sent them to Than van Nispen and the Indie Games Concert organization for use in promotions and news posts.
After dinner I took the train to Utrecht to meet up with my regular tabletop roleplay group. Our DM is a wonderful storyteller and always has some great twists and turns up his sleeve, even though we always manage to surprise him with our silly take on things. Next to telling fantastic stories our DM Miez is also a great (game) designer and looking for some more freelance work. Check out his website: http://miez.nl/
On Thursday I traveled to my old hometown Enschede where a new exhibition in TETEM opened, called: “Game-City An Artistic Game Experience“. The exhibition is a spin-off of the six-week long Game-City event in Den Bosch organized by bART in 2011. Eight works are exhibited, ranging from independent games such as Botanicula, FlOw, Fract and Proun to more experimental interactive experiences such as the Graveyard by Tale of Tales and work from artists who use game mechanics, environments or control mechanisms (Dotbots, Rainbow X Apocalypse, Robert Overweg).
I was asked by Iris and Tessa from bART to open the Game-City exhibition. I briefly talked about game development and playful initiatives from around the world and the way the Game-City exhibition adds to the mix with the presented works. Joost van Dongen was also in the exhibition space, I introduced him to the audience so they would join him for a live performance with Cello Fortress. The exhibition was officially opened.
At the opening, I ran into a friend of mine who happens to study at the art school nearby. She showed me her graduation thesis (read here in Dutch) in which she combines philosophical questions about the self with explorations and experiments of her work. Was great to catch up with her and her work.
Friday I bought the much anticipated Ridiculous Fishing (Vlambeer) for the iPad, which received raving reviews, New & Noteworthy in the US app store and a lot of coverage. Which reminds me, Nightsky by Nicklas Nygren (Nifflas) was also released on iOS that week and Knytt Underground also by Nifflas was released on Mac.
Other interesting notes I shared on social media:
- Dutch Game Garden announced the line-up for INDIGO in SF
- Elijah Wood (actor) is addicted to Ridiculous Fishing he stated in a tweet.
- A father hacked Donkey Kong for his daughter so she could play as Pauline.
- DGA Dag: “Player Experience” report by Control Magazine.
- Tomb Raider has been released. Dutch company Nixxes did conversions to PC & PS3
- Game professor Marinka Copier (HKU) went on de TV-show “De Wereld Leert Door” to talk about the game Pig Chase.
- GDC Experimental Gameplay Workshop session 2013 announced with Brenda Romero, Emily Short, Keita Takahashi and more.
