How did people ever manage without Whatsapp?
Resulting from a fun conversation the other day, I was compelled to draw a scenario where people communicate as we do today but using the means of old.
It became an interesting exercise in timing. I read this blog post the other day and was made to remember how excellent the Sad Pictures For Children are in their comedic timing. Like really top of the line.
The blank-faced pigeon tossing away the note makes me laugh every time.
This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independant creative.
We announced Bounden this week! After working on it for a month or two Game Oven was ready to push some press releases out the door, which means I get to talk about this cool project finally on the record. It was fun being in the office for it, everyone was energetic and in high spirits, watching the retweets and articles pour in. I’m planning on writing a blog post talking about the process of defining this visual style, but for now you can look at these pretty pictures – color tryouts for one of the many theme ideas.
If you want to know more right now you can watch our heads talking about the game in the monthly development videos we’re putting out, the first of which can be viewed here.
On wednesday I met up with Niels ‘t Hooft for lunch. Niels recently put out his first interactive book app for Toiletten, his first novel, and we discussed future plans for this format and the stories he wants to write for them. It’s a very different area than what I usually concern myself with making, but it’s very interesting to point my brain at it and come up with some cool ideas.
I’ve also been writing lately as I miss working on narratives now that I mostly do straight illustration, thanks to Writemonkey, a very lean and sexy writing app. I considered opening a seperate blog for those short stories but I might actually bundle them up eventually as an ebook. If you’d be interested in seeing some of them here on the blog from time to time let me know in the comments.
That evening I met someone who shook up my world a bit. Everything after that is a little foggy but let’s see… on thursday I worked from home on Bounden, finishing up the last few mockups for all the worlds we want to have in the game. We explored so many directions that there is almost nothing left but thanks to a crack art team we keep improving and honing the vision of the final product. I think I finished an Off-stage page somewhere inbetween there aswell.
That night I saw The Hobbit 2 for the second time, the HFR version this time. It’s still a great movie but I’m not sold on this 60 fps business. It looks like someone sped up the footage accidentally. Weird.
Friday I don’t remember.
Saturday was spent with good company exploring the city of Utrecht. I returned early morning the next day and slept most of sunday.
Half hour paint to flex the coloring muscles. I was going to add more detail but concluded that it didn’t really need it.
This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independant creative.
Monday was once again the classic blogpost-offstage day. I’ve been letting the significance of that day as the start of the week slide, so I’m going to enforce it more as if that day is off-limits to anything else.
On tuesday I worked at Game Oven again and we’ve been zeroing in on the final visual look. Rami Ismael dropped by and concurred that it does in fact look quite rad. This week we’re announcing the game!
On wednesday I worked from home and in the evening took a friend to the special edition of De Mus, our weekly theatre cafe night, this time in the church at Waterloo square. Next to the music performances and interviews we also played folk games with Adriaan. Aside from a slightly rambunctious crowd it was a great night and these guys are destined for great things.
Thursday and friday I continued with creating assets for Gamesys. I’ve been doing more with interface design recently, something I’ve never really spent much time on, and I’m learning a lot. I’m still no UX designer but designing goodlooking and functional interfaces is enjoyable work.
At the end of the week I went to eat and see The Hobbit 2 with my old colleagues at Paladin Studios in The Hague. It was great catching up with them and they are working on something truly stunning coming out soon. The level of polish on that thing is amazing.
This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independant creative.
On monday I swung by the Gamesys office here in Amsterdam to work on the assets for the game we’re making. I managed to up the catalog of items from 6 to 36 by the end of the afternoon so we made good progress. Their office is right in the middle of the Red Light district, so it feels a little strange walking into the building when all the neighbouring buildings have red windows. And I forgot my laptop charger when I started for home so I got to walk through there twice…
On tuesday I was back in the Game Oven office to film the first production diary for the unannounced game. That should be going online pretty soon so then I can finally talk about what’s going on. On wednesday I was in the building again for the Dutch Game Garden networking lunch where we demo’d the Sinterklaas game we made last weekend. Also caught up with some of my old classmates.
Thursday was the first day in a week that I could sit down at home again for my other projects. I caught up inking Off-stage, and spent too much time figuring out why the site was only displaying the new version when I adjusted the zoom level of the browser. Turned out it was some dumb WordPress CDN feature. I kinda liked the effect though, might be worth making that a feature of the site.
During the week I also sort of wrecked my Intuos4 pen. It still works but it’s all ductaped up, no good. I wanted to grab the new Intuos Pro right from the store but this model was 350! Thankfully with my comapny’s VAT number I managed to get it for 250 online. It came in on saturday right before I left for Utrecht to celebrate Sinterklaas with my family. For my dad I made a cardboard Xenomorph head as a gift container, and I like how it turned out (considering I started on it two days before). A ‘gezellig’ weekend was had!
Sometimes I turn a corner somewhere and I am hit by a stunning composition that I just want to draw. Today I walked out of Bijlmer ArenA station to the busstops and the midday sun cast everything in a silhouette, in the middle of which, this.
Bonus challenge: is she facing you or facing away?
This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independant creative.
It’s been a busy week! I’ve been creating webgame assets for a company here in Amsterdam, which is progressing nicely. It’s a good exercise in setting a strict time budget for each thing to make, and the fast turnaround on all these chunks means you get a lot of those ‘completed something’ highs.
Unfortunately my busywork also cut into my time for drawing Off-stage, so I had to put up a sketch version of last week’s page. I’d rather get something up and have it be less polished than miss a post date completely. That’s the whole point of publishing on a schedule. I had hoped to finish inking it later in the week but no such luck yet.
On wednesday I worked out of Adriaan’s kitchen again, and we made great progress on the unannounced game. Feels like we’re zeroing in on a coherent style which is a great feeling after all this experimentation. In the evening we went to our usual weekly theatre cafe hangout, and the rest of the week I also continued working on aforementioned game at the Game Oven office.
Over the weekend we also gathered at Game Oven with current and past employees to do a self-regulated gamejam for Sinterklaas, a dutch holiday. We decided to try and make an HTML5 topdown procedurally-generated local multiplayer action game about the pepernoten prohibition of 2015, and the taskforce erected to enforce it. We got quite far for an engine we had never used before, and learned a lot in the process.
* the actual game doesn’t look as good as this yet.
This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independant creative.
I startled from a lenghty gaze out of a train window on saturdaynight to the wondering if I had even written a blogpost last week. I had, but I’ve been so absorbed in things it felt like a million years ago. In a good way.
On monday I wrote aforementioned post and processed some feedback on a few projects. A tricky thing when working remotely can be that the people you need feedback from are hard at work at their job too and it might take a while before they get back to you. In this case I didn’t mind as it didn’t mess up my schedule.
On tuesday I focused purely on Off-stage. Writing one comic a week is messing with the feeling of continuity in the comic, so it was nice to plan out the arc for the rest of the chapter and write a few comics in one go. The page I drew afterwards immediately had a better energy than most of the preceding ones, I like how it turned out.
Wednesday evening the guys at Game Oven started their 24h livestream for Friendstrap, and I joined them for a few hours. Talked to the Ostrich Banditos about their amazing game Westerado and the challenges of dialogue systems. It was weird to go home and go to bed and still be able to see how things were going in the office. Watching their stream was a bit of a productivity timesink on thursday too.
Friday was mostly a socializing day. And over the weekend I upgraded to Unity 4.3 to try out the new 2D stuff, and it is rrreally good. I’ve been debating whether or not to reaquaint myself with Adventure Game Studio or bite the bullet and move up to Unity full stop, and I think this made the decision a lot easier. It even has the best errors.
I’ve never really been to a life drawing class, which seems odd for an art student, so recently I’ve been thinking about going to one when I came across a really cool tool that infinitely doles out random life drawing poses, so I just sketched a bunch!
On each pose I took a maximum of two minutes. With some you can still see the lines of action (or “swooshes” as Joeri Lefevre likes to call them) with which I started the sketch. It’s useful to first capture the motion of the entire body in a single line and then start building up the drawing from there.
Detail on the one I think turned out the best:
This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independant creative.
Monday went by as the classic blogging + Off-stage day. Took a trip downtown when I got stuck on drawing to get some fresh air and restore focus. Tuesday and wednesday I spent at the Game Oven office working on sexy visuals again.
By the end of tuesday my erratic sleeping schedule caught up with me and I basically fell into bed at 9 PM. Finding some sort of rhythm or schedule as an independant is so important because sometimes a bad sleep can sap all the energy I need to be creative in favor of just keeping this meaty husk up and running. It’s a struggle but I have an alarm set at the same time each day.
On thursday I did some sketches and interface design for a small webgame I’m collaborating on. I like these short projects where I can focus intensely on making art assets over a short period without too much back-and-forth and get a nice paycheck out of it at the end. If I reliably have two such projects each month I will be a happy camper.
On friday I was back at Game Oven again, and in the evening I was invited to a violin recital at the Utrecht conservatory. It’s not the sort of music I ever end up seeing live so that was a fun experience. It made me think a lot about what kinds of things I like about the music I generally listen to and how it fits in with my creative preferences.
Over the weekend I followed Sean’s advice and just ’embraced everything I love, idiot.’ I hadn’t played an actual goddamn videogame in weeks and I almost forgot how good that stuff can be. Found some new music. Read comics. Went to the cinema. Walked around Amsterdam. Planned a trip. The good stuff.
This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independant creative.
Week 15 I can be brief on, it was mostly spent messing with Unity and doing other tidbits not worth chronicling.
Last week I spent two days trying out visual styles for an unannounced game I’m collaborating on. We tried a bunch of things and we’re nowhere near the final look but we made exciting strides, and it’s fun to have everyone together so we can prototype things quickly.
Wednesday I spent doing business stuff and talking art and inspiration with Lowen over dinner. THURSDAY was wordpress day. Jesus. There is something addicting about tinkering with WordPress, but when something breaks it is hell to fix. My backend was very slow so I tried a few things then decided to pull the trigger and upgrade the entire system from old Comicpress to new Comic Easel. Transferring the content was surprisingly easy, but then I loaded up my site and, well, it was in shambles. I wish I had taken a screenshot – the comic was aloft in the middle of the page, no background, the menu was transparent and the sidebar was under the comic. I knew this would happen when upgrading themes but fixing all the little CSS bits in my custom theme took forever. But I made it through! It all works fine now, and all the user might notice is that the sidebar is now slightly wider. But man Comic Easel works pretty smoothly, I are not regret.
On friday I made strides with the design for Deck 5. Here is a bit of concept art I did in week 15:
Leave a comment below with your favorite design!
Over the weekend I caught up with some old classmates to talk shop. It’s nice to see how we’ve all found our place in the games business.
I wanted to do a simple free painting again today, not for some specific project or goal, but I wanted it to convey a story without words. So I sat down and drew the first thing that came to me.
Face detail:
It’s funny how drawing Off-stage has influenced the way I draw noses.
This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independant creative.
I can keep this one short. Monday I did my Off-stage thing. Tuesday I worked at Game Oven again, and played a solid run of DayZ with a friend. Wednesday I got well sick. Thursday I got to see a beautiful part of Amsterdam and worked from the dining room table in Adriaan’s house because he was also sick. We also played the Stanley Parable together, which is GOOD though ironically I think the demo is even better (which I played afterwards). And friday was spent under the covers until ‘sushi+drawing’ night with some good friends, where we painted crazy things on household objects.
It’s fun to break out of established methods sometimes, I hardly ever draw anything on paper anymore, so taking a marker to a wooden box felt refreshingly visceral.
I’ve been thinking more about my scifi game idea this week – tentatively named “Deck 5” – after reading this killer article about narrative design which anyone interested in game storytelling should read. It made a few things click together and finally gave me the outline for the plot. I’m doing early concept art for it now, more on that soon.
Today I want to talk a little more about something I touched on a few weeks ago, and I’m seeing it more and more now when I’m talking to people about their creativity. We can call it Imposter Syndrome.
That is an actual clinical term, describing people who are ‘unable to internalize their accomplishments, despite external evidence of their competence.’ They remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve the success they have achieved. That sounds strange, but it is more common than you think.
The first time I noticed it was when it was a running gag among cartoonists. We joked it was part of the job, and we didn’t really see it as a bad thing. It seemed like something everyone has to go through from time to time, this crippling fear about your work and career (especially if it is also your source of income). The idea was most clearly expressed by Scott Kurtz and Kris Straub in their daily podcast from way back in 2007 when they talked about being scared of the ‘Failure Police‘ – listen to the clip here.
I always took solace in the idea, this shared burden that united us. But it wasn’t so much at the forefront of my thoughts until I heard Alec Baldwin’s interview with David Letterman on WYNC’s Here’s The Thing podcast earlier this year. Listen to the clip here, and tell me what you think that sounds like to you.
Here are two very succesful people, famous, wealthy, loved, with a revered body of work, and they are just as scared of the Failure Police! It was like a lightning bolt to my brain. Clearly everbody creative struggles with this in some way or form. And you don’t have to look far to find more examples. In Indie Game The Movie we saw the creators of some of the best indie games of the recent years profess to feeling horribly insecure about whether or not their game was any good. For the dutch readers, HollandDoc did a great documentary related to this years ago called Alles Wat We Wilden. And last week Donald ‘Childish “Troy” Gambino’ Glover instagrammed a series of notes in which he said the following things:
I’m afraid that this was all an accident.
I’m afraid I’m here for nothing.I’m afraid my show will fail.
I’m afraid people hate who I really am. I’m afraid I hate who I really am.
I feel like I’m letting everyone down.
I’m scared I’ll never reach my potential.
I’m scared that sounds pretentious.I got really lost. But I can’t be lonely, cause we’re all here.
Wa are all there.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing per sé. It’s not a great thing, to feel like that as a human being, but I think eventually it helps you get better at what you do.
And if you, right there, are someone who enjoyed the creative work of someone else, think about taking a minute or two to send them an email saying that. It means more than you think.
This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independant creative.
On Monday I set up a new Off-stage page for publishing as I do each week. This one I had already drawn a few weeks ago so I was done quickly. Which freed up the rest of my afternoon to have coffee with Charlotte van Grunsven, an up-and-coming game designer with whom it turns out I share a lot of views on design and inspiration.
On tuesdaymorning I met up with blogger and new media specialist Anke Hans, who like me recently dove into the exciting and terrifying world of working for yourself. We shared tips and ideas and had a good laugh about the fact that neither of us is really making any money yet.
Afterwards I started work on a project with Game Oven, and it was fun to hang out in their office and be part of a team, although I did miss my home office after a few days. Being in the Dutch Game Garden building also gave me an opportunity to catch up with my old internship collegues at Monkeybizniz, which may yield some new business in the near future aswell. All in all I think this was the first week I felt good and confident about my decision to go at it as an indie.
Wednesdaynight me and Adriaan went to our usual wednesday evening event De Mus, a night of music, literature, film, thought-provoking art and fun at a tiny theatre in downtown Amsterdam. Our friend Joost van Dongen was there that night showing off his Cello Fortress project (uhmazing), which he works on next to his full-time job. Respect. We had a great night, and I hope more people come to check out this phenomenon in the future (although it’s doubtful if they’ll fit in the theatre!)
The rest of the week I sketched some more Off-stage pages, played The Stanley Parable, Did some painting in the new Photoshop contender Mischief (which you can see below), resurrected my legendary character in DayZ, and over the weekend hung out with friends and saw Gravity (so good).
Seeing Men In Black again recently I realized it is up there as one of my favorite movies. I was going to paint this frame but then I thought ‘no, where’s the challenge in that, let’s try something else – see if I can get these iconic faces down in as little shades as possible.’
Arguably the earlier version where Tommy Lee Jones’s eyebrows were the only thing on his face was even more iconic, but with the extra shades it looks just a little bit nicer. Hardest part though was the shape of Will Smith’s three-quarter head.
Below is a little chart of the process on the Willie painting. When I paint realistically I don’t usually do a line sketch, I just go to town with big blobs of color. Well, in the cases of these moviestill paintings at least, since I already have the composition by looking at the framegrab, so no sketch is needed. I just sort of estimate the proportions and refine as I go along.
On the right you can see the sweet detail that the Mischief vectors bring. You don’t have to set a canvas size or resolution, you just start painting and whatever size you need it as you enter in the export dialog and it takes care of it for you. Massive headache saver.
I watched Die Hard 5 recently, and this scene captured my attention. I had to paint it, it has everything: rimlights, specular highlights, subsurface scattering, indirect global illumination, bruce willis…
I didn’t do this one in Photoshop but in Mischief! Gabe from Penny Arcade pointed me to it, and it is pretty incredible.
That’s right. You can paint as if it were pixels, there are brushes with pressure sensitivity and opacity settings, but everything is infinitely zoomable. And the resulting file was only 300 kb! It’s lightweight, responsive, and only $65. It might be a few features and hotkeys away from bumping photoshop from the top spot for me in terms of painting. Check out the free trial to see for yourself.
It will be really interesting to see where it goes.
This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an indie.
Inked another Off-stage page on Monday. The one for next week has been in the can for a while, so maybe I can start building up that buffer this week! I also tinkered with the wordpress/comicpress back-end to iron out some weird kinks that have been in the site design for too long. WordPress is fun, there are so many knobs to dial and settings to mess with, but you have to know what you’re doing because she can be cold and unforgiving if you mess something up.
On tuesday I went to have coffee with Adriaan and talk about his next project which I will have a role in defining the visual style. It’s a cool, ambitious and unique project – the sort of thing I like working on because it breaks out of the bounds of traditional games. And it’s nice to have a project with a paycheck lined up! I’m starting work on that this week. It’s also a nice opportunity to hang out at the Dutch Game Garden again, I’ve missed all those guys over there.
On wednesday I compiled all the blogsposts I wrote about my adventures with Ralph in zombie survival game DayZ into a nice concise pdf that you can find here. I read through them after I linked someone who was just getting into DayZ, and I had one of those ‘man this is actually pretty good’ moments, combined with a sudden fear of the blog ever going offline and all that content being lost in the intertubes, so I spent the afternoon compiling and editing it. Everything looks nicer in Helvetica Neue.
On thursday I finished some more mockups for Niels’ upcoming literary project. I’ve been doing a lot of experimenting lately with more abstract art styles, ditching the outlines, working with vectors. It doesn’t come naturally yet but I like what’s coming out so far. I’ve been neglecting my painting exercises lately (making the blog a bit of a barren waste aswell) so I want to get into those again this week.
The rest of the week I honestly didn’t do too much. Felt a bit uninspired. Hung out with my roommates. Watched the torrential rain batter down. Finished GTA V.
This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an indie.
This is the first week where I felt like I am no longer incapable of sitting alone for days to just work. Right after I quit my office job I had a hard time sitting still and not going places and seeing people. It made me kind of homesick for being able to work comfortably in solitude. I think I’ve struck a good balance now where my days do not become monotonous, yet I can turn off my phone for a day or two and get down into it.
Last saturday I swung by the INDIGO dutch games expo to meet up with some old friends and check out what everybody was up to. Every year they have some really cool indie games on the show floor, and talking and having beers with all the people afterwards reinvigorated my passion for game development. We also celebrated that my pals at Game Oven were awarded a sizeable grant by Gamefonds towards developing their next game.
On Monday my friend Adriaan from Game Oven called me up and asked me to do the art for a small game based on Miley Cyrus. We talked before about doing some small, news-relevant games, and Adriaan found some guys who were thinking the same thing and had some money to throw at it to boot. It’s a very silly project but it had a very gamejam-y feeling which I liked, just coming up with things on the fly and polishing it later. We’re finishing the game up this week so I’ll be able to link to it soon.
On tuesday I went to help some friends move. I had to be there at 8 AM, which meant getting up at 6:30. Crawling out of bed and jumping in the shower while it was still dark outside and then heading out into the cold gave me flashbacks of having an office job, and I felt so thankful that I don’t have to go through that every morning anymore. The knowledge that it was a one-off thing eventually made it quite enjoyable and I didn’t feel tired at all. My friends and I talked previously about how nice it would be to have one day a week for doing some manual labor in the open air. It puts you back in touch with the world.
On wednesday I inked the Off-stage page that I couldn’t complete due to other projects on Monday.
Thursdaymorning I met up with Anne Bras and Misja van Laatum (and Hessel van Hoorn in spirit) to discuss the revival of our graduation project Trusted Soil. We had built a demo and had big plans for the story and tech, but we never got around to it. Now that we all have some time to spare we decided to try and make it a full commerial game. Expect to hear more about that in the coming months.
We met at The Park Plaza restaurant in Amsterdam, which is in the Victoria Hotel across from Central Station and a great place to sit quietly and work, so I stayed behind to do some writing for a bit. I considered going to the Unity meetup that evening but decided to hang out at home with friends.
On friday I trekked down to The Hague to pay a visit to my old buddies at Paladin Studios. I distracted them from work for a few hours to see what they were up to and exchanged indie experiences with a freelance programmer who was also visiting. It’s cool to see their games all having a recognizeable unified style now. There are interesting things coming out of that studio real soon, keep an eye out.
On saturday I did some more polishing for the Miley game, and made a few mockups for an interactive ebook app that Niels ‘t Hooft is developing.
There is art that makes me want to get better and there is art that makes me want to quit. Kent Barton skirts the line with his amazing crosshatching. I like to use the technique, but this guy.. so I gave it a shot, drawing a classy old man from memory. It’s way too messy, but it’s getting there.
GTA V.
Two months, christ.
I couldn’t work on Off-stage on monday on account of coming back from London, so my buffer is dry now, I’ll have to double-time it today.
Now that I’m updating it regularly and it is an ‘active project’ in my repetoire, I’m looking into ways to monetize it. At the most basic level I’ve activated Google Adsense; There is a lot of empty space on the site for those kind of things. I really don’t enjoy ads generally, but as long as you don’t plaster the site with ’em I like it as a low-intrusive way to generate a bit of revenue. With the advent of adblockers it is becoming less and less of a viable solution though.
The rest of the week I got back into the Fawlty Towers game, pushing out one background a day.
Merlin Mann pointed me to an interview with Joss Whedon, who shared his tips on Getting Thing Done (even though he couldn’t come to finish the book). And he said “absolutely have your dessert first.” I’ve never really worked super sequential on my own projects, but I tend to try and get dull but important things out of the way first so there are only fun tasks left. But as Joss points out this might actually burn you out on a project before you get to the really good stuff. So I’m going to try it his way.
On friday I set off for the PinkRoccade offices in Apeldoorn for the 2013 Games For Health Dev Camp, together with my pals from Game Oven. From that afternoon until Sunday mid-day we were tasked with creating a playable concept for a game that will help some part of a mentally handicapped person’s life. We created a multiplayer game where you place three ipads next to eachother and each player has a small view of a kitchen, each with a specific task, and the objects to accomplish these tasks with (find a pan, fill it with water, boil an egg) can be passed around between the screens. Besides teaching these kids how to prepare food it encourages communication and bonding.
Congratulations to Menno Deen and his team for winning!
This week has been largely uneventful.
On Monday I inked another Off-stage page and fiddled with the design. I have a strong desire to upgrade software to any newer version when it becomes available, but often I regret it because something invariably breaks. So I had to exert some self-control in not pulling the trigger on upgrading my entire Off-stage backend from Comicpress to Comic Easel (both wordpress plugins). Maybe someday I’ll dare to. If the site is down, you’ll know I did.
I like the convenience of having a buffer, something that really only exists in comics. I have to draw a page on the day but it doesn’t have to go up right away, it goes in a queue which automatically posts it even if I’m not there (like yesterday, more about that later).
Over the weekend I watched some Syria reporting and through the week I had conversations and discussions about it with people, which gave me an idea for a sort of war-themed short game, but more about society and the media leading up to a situation like that. It’s the clearest idea I’ve had these past weeks, in the sense that the structure is laid out from start to finish already. I gotta finish some stuff so I can make room for all this, because I also had an idea for anóther scifi game while watching a documentary! It reminds me of wise words Rami Ismael once said; that you should take inspiration from things outside of games, otherwise you’ll only make games that look like other games.
On wednesday I dove into a new book: the handbook for setting up a design burea. Valuable knowledge about all this business business spillt out of the first chapter alone. It mostly caused a cascade of having to look up things that the government expects me to know about myself, puncuated by realizing I had forgotten the password to my account. Better luck next week.
On thursday I blasted out some of the final drawings for the thesis assignment. That one’s almost done now. Then I packed up my bag and spent the rest of the week up until yesterday in the UK, visiting for the birthday of a cute little lady.
