Tim makes things

The ramblings of dutch illustrator and game developer Hedgefield

Category: Freelancing

Stories about what it’s like to be an independent creator.

  • Week 25

    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.

    2014! Time to start things up again.

    Last week I drew a new Off-stage page, one that was half done when I took a christmas break but which honestly read like shit then, I didn’t like it. Now I came back to it fresh and found the missing piece that made it a nice rounded out page. Chapter two will be complete soon and then I think I’m going to take a break from it and plan a whole chapter in advance, writing a chunk a week is just not great for an ongoing story.

    Between wrapping that up, my work for Bounden tapering off and closing out another project this month I have plenty of time coming up to devote to two things: a second pass at the ideas I worked up with Niels ‘t Hooft for his upcoming iPad novel Ninja Gimmick Girl, and diving into Adventure Creator for my own game.


    Classic Jake and Toby, IN SPAAAACE (placeholder dudes). The scene is actually all 3D, textured planes with navmesh and collision

    My meddling with Unity so far was all well and good but I was still a bit in over my head when it came to building things like a dialogue system (I hate the Unity GUI system, it’s bonkers) or competent 2D pathfinding. But Adventure Creator is basically all the features I already know how to use from another engine I used to use and love (because the maker did too), so jesus I was over the moon. Now I can start making the sort of game I want right away.

    On wednesday I had an extremely productive day working on Ninja Gimmick Girl, and then I got VIOLENTLY ill. Just like that. I could tell you platitudes like ‘life can always intrude’ and ‘be prepared for anything’ but mostly being sick just fucking sucks. So better just submit and get it over with.

  • Week 22

    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.

  • Week 21

    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.

  • Week 20

    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!

  • Week 19

    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.

  • Week 18

    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.

  • Week 17

    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.

    Gilles van Leeuwen filming some dev diary action

    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.

  • sWeek 16

    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.

  • Week 14

    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.

  • Week 13

    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).

  • Week 12

    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.

  • Week 11

    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.

  • Week ten, or How to be okay when your creativity takes a vacation

    I wasn’t going to write anything this week, since not a lot happened on the work side. I had other things on my mind. But I realized that that’s part of the job too. Especially when working on your own. If something affects you personally it affects your business. If I don’t feel like drawing for a few days (for a good reason and not because I’d want to play GTA), things come to a standstill. It happens. I’m glad I get the time to feel things and sit and think about things whenever I feel like I need to, and not just on bathroom breaks during crunchtime.

    It’s a scary thing when you lose your incentive to create art, even for a little while, so it’s important to know that it will come back. And I write this as much for myself as for you, the reader. I, like every other creator I’ve ever talked to about this, have my moments of self-doubt. We’ve come to accept it as part of the trade, and when it happens we give it space. But we cannot give in to it. We have to learn from it.

    Stephen Pressfield wrote an excellent book about this called The War of Art. Read it.

    Creativity comes from a very personal place. Everything you make, even things you don’t like or want to make, even if it is assets for a Zynga game, it has a little part of you in it. Who you are and what you experience in your life leads you to do what you do, and in turn it will tell you more about who you are. I’m convinced your best work only comes from listening to that urge. And how much you listen to that urge is up to you. I quit my job for it; you don’t have to be that drastic.

    When you experience something that stands counter to that urge, some hardship, something with an impact, it can mess you up. Some people find creativity in these things (I’ve never worked so hard as times when I was angry about something), and for other people it puts everything in perspective, and creating new worlds to explore and different lives to experience doesn’t seem as important as living their own. But don’t be scared of it. We all have these moments, and if you become aware of them, they will pass, and leave behind more experience to draw from.

    I can feel this one leaving too.

    Someone once related to me this quote. It captures quite well how I feel about creativity. I hope it resonates with you too.

    “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action. And because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique, and if you block it it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, how valuable or how it compares to other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

    – Martha Graham

  • Week Nine

    GTA V.

  • Week eight

    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.

    sketch for off-stage page 29

    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.

    gamejam bruddas

    Congratulations to Menno Deen and his team for winning!

  • Week seven

    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.

  • Week six

    Pretty much why I went indie.

    Monday (or technically tuesday) marked the official return of a consistently-updating Off-stage. I would like to go twice-a-week, but at the rate I draw a page and the days I have allocated to the project (one) I’m comfortable staying at once a week for now. My next step will be ramping up the advertising a bit, both outgoing and incoming. It’s time to dust off my old friend Project Wonderful (where I also found 25 dollars in old Dinerdate ad revenue collecting dust!)

    On wednesday I went to Niels’ book presentation for De Verdwijners. It’s a cool what-if story about the near future and Google’s growing grasp on the world. Hearing about his process was also very interesting. Pick it up if you’re dutch or enjoy this trailer while you wait for the translation.

    My thursday evening I spent by tinkering around in Unity, with some help from my buddy Jens. Things seem quite daunting in there sometimes, but taking things one step at a time often yields surprisingly fast and fine results.

    https://vimeo.com/73655259

    This is all to emulate an old prototype I did in Adventure Game Studio, which the game and my ambitions for it have since outgrown.

    On friday I went to see two of my friends graduate – Bojan of Game Oven fame with his research on cloud simulation, and long-time friend Twan on SCRUM management tools – which gives me an opportunity to point everyone at the excellent Trello again.

  • Week Five

    It’s been over a month since I went freelance, crazy.

    Chief achievement this week I would say is setting up a schedule. With multiple projects and no hard deadlines, every morning requires a mental exercise to figure out what the smartest thing to be working on right now is. And ‘what I most feel like’ is not a very good qualifier. It also scatters my attention as I can switch activities at any time. So I decided to set aside certain days for certain projects, and to include at least one day where I work off-site and dive into business research. It’s up on my wall right next to my workstation.

    In part thanks to this Off-stage is updating again. Every tuesday to start off. I could probably do twice a week but I need to get faster at drawing it first. While posting I also glanced at the date of the last update – over three months ago. Yowza, time really flies sometimes.

    I also started work on a short science fiction Flash game with a friend. We’ve talked about collaborating since we were in highschool and it is finally happening. The game is mainly GUI-based, think Oblivion meets Google’s iOS design, which is an interesting challenge as I don’t normally do much interface design. I’ll have something to show off soon.

    Also: holy crap Mark Of The Ninja is super super good.

    And oh yes there’s this.

  • Week four

    Week 3 wasnt very interesting so I skipped it. Last week I’ve mostly been working on my Fawlty Towers game. I discovered some cool optimalizations I could do code-wise, and I polished some of the puzzles I implemented so far. The game is pretty playable already so I think I’ll work to finish this one soon.

    Other than that I kept trucking along with the thesis artwork assignment. We’re down to the last batch now so I think I can wrap this up by the end of the month.

    I’ve noticed that time seems to be flying by too quickly. Without a commute and colleagues it gets hard to tell the days apart. So to become more concious about working hours etc I installed Breaker, an app that keeps track of work cycles (like every 45 minutes for instance) and alerts me to take a short break when one is over. It really helps to brings some structure to my day.
    To that end I’ve also moved my desk away from my wall to face outside, so I have a view and can also keep track of the time of day better.

    On friday I played Gone Home by Fullbright. I’ve been excited by this environmental storytelling game since I heard about it through the Idle Thumbs podcast, and it definitely lived up to my expectations. It was very cool to play it in one sitting with headphones as it was dark and raining outside. Recommended if you enjoy good stories and dark basements.

  • Week two

    While trying to fight against the heat to get stuff done, this week just flew by.

    At the start of the week controversy around Phil Fish and David Vonderhaar caught my attention. We’ve seen disturbingly often before, but instead of writing it off as “oh well, that’s the internet!” more people are starting to report on it and get in on the discussion. This is a good development for an awful phenomenon.

    Progress on Off-stage has been steady but slow. Drawing full pages takes forever. I don’t know if it’s the heat or if I am not yet honed enough with this style to do it under two hours. Hopefully after next week I will be able to start posting them regularly.

    On Saturday I went to the opening of gallery Pepper in Rotterdam. A friend of mine did a mural there so we went to check it out. I met some cool new art people to chat with about freelancing and illustration, something I was jonesin’ for. I feel like I have so much to learn.
    Sitting in the park the next day I was thankful, despite the whirlpool of uncertainty, for having the time now to sit and think about these things and figure out what really drives me as an artist.

    Oh, also updated a wordpress installation somewhere along the way. Nothing broke. There was much rejoicing.

  • Week one

    Week one has been a quiet one, as I expect some weeks to follow will be too. Although the first gig is a fact: I’m working on a series of cartoons to accompany the thesis of a friend of a friend. They’re fun to draw and don’t take a lot of time, so it’s a good way to start.

    After watching Star Trek First Contact again an idea for a scifi story popped into my head, tentatively named ‘Deck 5. I’m not sure yet whether it should be a game or a comic, but I like where it is headed. I will continue to explore it further with my bro Ralph who has a penchant for these kinds of stories.

    On tuesday I met with Niels ‘t Hooft (ka-pow, pingback) to chat about narrative games and the craft of being a freelancer. After that we visited Digital Dreams to take a look at Metrico, a very intruiging game that uses inforgraphics as platforming puzzles, really smart and cool. It also gave me a chance to wonder what the hell Sony was thinking with that PS Vita UI…

    After that I drew some things here and there which you can see below this post. On Friday I visited the Human Adventure expo by NASA with my family and witnessed all facets of the museum experience at once, as my dad and his friend are super knowledgeable about this stuff and the rest is not really, right down to my cousin who just wanted to press some buttons. Had a good conversation with my uncle about the absence of an engaging narrative in most museums.

    Other than that I’ve mostly been surrounding myself with media to extract inspiration from. I’ve watched more movies this week than the past 3 months I think, a lot of them scifi, and I dove into Fallout New Vegas, which I was initially not too excited to look at or play with, but some great mods helped me get past that so I could get to the masterful Bethesda/Obsidian storytelling which has engrossed me once again.
    Funny enough the best quest so far was one that was unmarked, so it had no tell-tale markers to tell me exactly what’s what. It was the story of Vault 11, a shining example of environmental storytelling without any real reward other than knowing what had happened in the depths of that Vault, which turned out more satisfying than any old XP boost or weapon upgrade. Something to remember.

    As the week wraps up I’m staring at my Trello board with the page scripts for Off-stage. I want to get back into the swing of releasing at least one new page a week again.

  • Week Zero

    Last week I decided to return to being a freelancer after a year and a half as a game designer at Paladin Studios. I had a great time there among fantastically talented people, but I felt the need to make the games and the comics that I want to make.

    I like stories and what they can do to/for people. Interactive stories make that experience even stronger for me. But I realize now that maybe that means that I don’t want to make what is traditionally considered a ‘videogame’. I like those just fine (my Steam library has 230 of ’em) but I don’t think I want to make something that has scores or in-app purchases etc. I want to tell stories. And games like Kentucky Route Zero, Papo & Yo and Gone Home prove this is as good a time as any to try.

    So to track my progress I’ve decided to steal copy a blogging idea from colleague Niels ‘t Hooft, who has been doing weekly recaps of his independent adventures for 757 weeks. Woof.

    Week zero has mostly been about slowing down to a pace where I can think at again. I was in an office for the last 1,5 years and had to travel quite a distance to get there, so everything was very… timeboxed. It left little room to wander and contemplate. I noticed my well of story ideas evaporated. So I’ve been nurturing it back to health by spending time outside, catching up with friends and family and absorbing media. There are about 6 uncompleted games on my desktop and double that amount in my movies to watch folder, so finally working through that has been nice. I’m starting to feel some ideas well up again. And I also completely lost track of time, holy shit. I think it’s monday today, right?

    Anyway, tune in again next week to follow me along on this adventure and see if I’ve lost my mind yet!

    ~Tim