Tim makes things

The ramblings of a dutch illustrator and game developer

Tag: off-stage

  • Hedgefield Quarterly Review 2020.the-rest-of-it

    Hedgefield Quarterly Review 2020.the-rest-of-it

    Hello there, nice to see you again. I was going to write one of these each quarter, wasn’t I? Well, it’s been a weird year. I hope you’re all doing okay out there.

    It’s been 9 months since I started working exclusively from home. In the beginning I loved it, then I hated it for a bit, now I generally enjoy it. I built a really nice home office, but, I don’t think it’s been my most productive period. Not because of working from home, but mostly I’m missing people. People to bounce ideas off of, laugh with, motivate me, and experience new things with. I’m super thankful I have a great wife here with me or I’d probably go a bit mental, but I definitely don’t feel as inspired as I normally would. I didn’t expect that to be such a thing, but here we are.

    Still, I did things:

    (more…)
  • Off-Stage is back on stage

    Off-Stage is back on stage

    Some of you may remember my webcomic about music and life in Amsterdam, Off-Stage. I worked on it during the twilight years of the traditional webcomics model, where you have a website and post pages each week and maybe earn something from merch and book sales (I never got to that point). It didn’t feel like the right format for that story anymore, but I wasn’t sure what was.

    Fast-forward a few years, and we’re in a new era. Comics exist on social media now, and in a way that makes sense for our mobile-first world. Pages get chopped up into panels that fit the portrait-orientation screen of a smartphone. Platforms like Tapas and Webtoons are bringing a whole new generation of comics to readers.

    So this week I re-launched Off-Stage on Webtoons! It’s a full remaster at a higher, crisper resolution, optimized for a vertical scroll.

    I was not looking forward to having to chop up all the existing pages, but I must say the process was fairly quick, and it is opening up so many possiblities to write more naturally, now that the length of an update doesn’t matter anymore. Once I get to the point where I can start making new material, I’m sure that will feel great. For now I’m busy reworking all the existing pages and posting them week by week.

    Head on over to Webtoons and subscribe to stay informed!

  • Week 117 – new apartment, newsletter?

    This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator. For illustrated depictions of these events, visit my daily comics page.

    Last week was quite eventful. We went to look at a new apartment on monday, claimed it, signed the lease on thursday, and rented out our old apartment to someone new on sunday! Finding a new place is kind of a pain, but sometimes you get lucky and things move really quickly. Now I get to focus on the slew of things to take care of for the move, like internet, parking permits, etc. Fun! It would be nice if moving became more like restoring an iCloud backup.

    Other things happened last week too. I did some tweaks to the food icons I made for the Radboud game last week, and I worked another two days at Yoast, getting around to doing some actual artwork. On thursday the staff went for drinks and I got to know them a bit more. They’re very diverse in terms of backgrounds and expertise, but somehow it all works well together.

    On a personal level I thought about the future of these weekly work updates. When I start working at Yoast four days a week there won’t be that much to report on probably, so I considered starting a newsletter to keep you guys in the loop on personal projects, once a month or so, whenever there is something to say. Would that be interesting, or should I keep doing round-ups like that on the blog here? Let me know.

    [polldaddy poll=9122467]

    I also did some groundwork on the Off-Stage website. I plan to (finally) continue updating that strip once I’ve settled into my new work routine.

    Next week: Last week at my old side job, finishing up my freelance projects, and moving my ass to a new city.

  • Suze in color

    suze

  • Week 78

    This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.

    Last week started off with the inevitable drawing off an off-stage comic. I tried something new by drawing two short comic instead of one long one. I’m planning to publish the shorter ones inbetween the big ones every week, but this time they replaced it completely.

    I also worked on one of my newyears resolutions: daily comics.

    dailies_20150114

    I had to think about where I was gonna put ’em – I don’t need ANOTHER site for you to check out – but then I learned about WordPress’ Portfolio feature, which basically lets me run two feeds on the same blog. So you may notice DAILIES has been added to the menu up there, (or click straight through here), where you can find a nice page with all the comics.
    There will be one for mostly every day, though they may not go up on the same day. So if you want to grab the rss feed to stay up-to date from your favorite feed reader app, use this one.

    One problem I had with doing the dailies again is that I had to update my caricature. The last time I did dailies was in 2009, when I wasn’t rocking a beard yet. Most attempts to add a beard to my avatar since then have not felt quite right yet. So I’ll keep at it! Let me know when you think I’ve hit the mark.

    If you’re looking for more daily comics from illustrators, check out Kevin Days A Week, Inkdick or Johhny Wander.

    Other than that I’ve just been enjoying my part-time job and staying away from twitter and gamesindustry newssites for the most part. It feels good to not have to care about all the drama that comes in through those channels every day. I found myself having more free time, which I used to finish Watch_Dogs (hella good) and work through my movie backlog; if you’re into time-travel mindfucks, I recommend Predestination.

    Next week: business projects.

  • Week 76

    This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.

    Hey there, welcome to 2015. A new year, and a new coat of paint for the blog.

    In the last week of 2014 I translated my site into dutch as part of my 2015 resolution of focusing more on the dutch market (more on that later). I’m still doing the same for the presskit content – thanks to the just-released presskit() 2.5 update!

    To start off 2015 I wrote down some of my goals, business/art-wise. I wasn’t going to do it at first, but when I thought of one thing I was already doing – learning Illustrator – the rest came naturally.

    So here they are in no particular order:

    learn illustrator
    I never really ‘got’ what it was for, but with more and more art moving into vector I felt like I had to sit down and learn it front to back.

    translate my portfolio into dutch
    The past few months I’ve realised that I never really put much thought into the dutch market. I do work for dutch clients (and with this VATMOSS business I’m happy sticking to that), but my portfolio never reflected that, nor did my own projects. I always focused on the international, but I can see now there is merit in romancing the dutch side of things as well.

    start doing daily comics again
    Back in my third year of art school I drew daily comics every now and then, just as a sort of diary. Nowadays a lot of people do a vlog – it’s basically the same idea. It helps me remember the small moments and find a punchline in ordinary situations. I want to start doing those again, and combining them with these weeknotes maybe.

    get my art/cartoons into a (dutch) (comic) magazine
    Magazines are a largely unexplored area for me, and I think I can expand the sort of semi-weekly cartoons I do for The Post Online into that realm.

    off-stage
    I have a couple of ambitions for Off-Stage – increase the readership through targeted advertising, finish chapter 2, and start doing smaller updates more than once a week. I like the full-page format I’m drawing in now, but I’d like to start doing two-or-three-panel gags inbetween those.

    And ofcourse I’ll be working on Black Feather Forest again in the future, plus a few other goals I’m keeping up my sleeve for now. It’s plenty to keep busy with, I’d say.

    Next week: keeping busy with it.

  • Week 72

    This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.

    Last week started off well with getting hired for a part-time job. It’s enough to cover the rent each month and it only takes three mornings a week, so by noon I can be back behind Photoshop. I’d like to do more but for now this is okay, it’s not a well-off market out there it seems.

    The rest of the day and into tuesday I worked on a new Off-Stage page as usual.

    In the meantime I emailed another potential Black Feather Forest publisher on the recommendation of a friend, and this at least was the first one that wasn’t full/unavailable yet. I’ve been brainstorming story ideas for them and I managed to come up with five or six alternate angles to the second half of the game that are exciting me more than the original story draft, so I’m looking forward to writing those out.

    On wednesday I went by the Dutch Game Garden networking lunch and caught up with some industry friend. I should really hang out with them more.

    Thursday was filled up with Sinterklaas crafts, making cardboard constructions, a nice change of pace from the digital world.

    On friday I booted up the Trusted Soil adventure game project again and implemented and linked up all the rooms that we had in the previous version, so you can walk around all the locations again. It’s a bit of a mechanical task, porting old code and going through the same motions again and again, but the result is fun to click around in.

    On saturday I returned to an old favorite of mine, audio production. I was overdue to do a voiceover for a friend’s game trailer, and while I was at it I recorded the first episode of a new podcast I’m thinking of starting. Due to the traffic noise outside my window (even when it is closed), I had to set up my recording studio in the bathroom (and leave the light off otherwise the air purification fan would kick in…)

    On sunday we celebrated the Sinterklaas holiday with my family. It was very gezellig. (check out my construction below)

    Next week: getting up at dawn to do a job!

  • Week 71

    This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.

    Last week was the week of advertising. I have Project Wonderful set up on the Off-Stage site, and now it was time to use the system in the opposite direction and advertise out. I chose two or three similar webcomics and put up a skyscraper ad running for a few days, and I got some decent traffic out of it. After a quiet period it was nice to see that spike in Google Analytics. Let’s see if some of that traffic sticks.

    spike

    And on tuesday I posted a new comic page as usual. I also got word that an assignment I was counting on fell through, which put me in a bit of a tough spot. So I decided to send some emails out for some part-time work on the side. And for the heck of it I decided to send Off-Stage to Paradiso aswell.

    The next day I got an email from Paradiso’s publicist that he liked the comic, and wondered if I could do a last-minute logo for the Paradiso Christmas gifts, and possibly more work in the future. And so I spent the afternoon designing a simple Paradiso logo.

    I drew some more drawings that week, and spent a fair chunk of friday evening marvelling over the new Star Wars trailer. To have a new Star Wars in my lifetime, what a joy. And it looks great.

    Next week: job market success.

  • Week 70

    This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.

    I started last week off feeling kind of drained, a condition that’s been developing for the past few weeks. Rather than write it off on fatigue, I had it looked at, and turns out it was the most freelance-creative thing it could be – a vitamin D deficiency. So hopefully the doc has me back at 100% soon.

    I spent the day prior to the diagnosis playing catch-up with all my favorite shows. And sadly most of them are entering their final season. I’m gonna miss The Newsroom and White Collar. But Constantine has captured my attention, and Agents of SHIELD and Bob’s Burgers continue to be fun. They’re also recharging my creative vocabulary with situations, characters, shots and poses I can draw from in my own work.

    On thursday I went by the new Paladin Studios office to catch up with my old colleagues. It was fun as always and it’s great to see them doing well now. I miss having them in the same room to sparr with, but I don’t miss the travel time, woof.

    2014-11-20 16.23.34

    Inbetween I’ve also finally started reading The Webcomics Handbook by Brad Guigar, which I backed (and received) ages ago, to polish up my webcomic skills. Most of it sounds like a familiar tune, but there were some useful morsels in there.

    Then I got to the chapter on Google PageSpeed and I fell down a WordPress optimization rathole for an evening. In the end the site is running leaner and nicer though, I think it was worth it.

    Over the weekend we celebrated my grandparents being married for 60 years. What a feat, wow.

    Next week: searching for ad revenue and trespassing mice

  • Week 68

    This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.

    Last week I booted up Off-Stage again. It was on hiatus for a while because my other projects took up too much time, it was becoming a drag to fit in the drawing and it didn’t improve the quality of the strip. Coming back to it is always fun, drawing the characters again and playing with page layout.

    But returning to WordPress also meant dealing with WordPress, something I despise and enjoy in equal measure. This time around I spent some time tweaking the site design before going live. There were some little quirks in the design like miniscule empty spaces between the main content area and the sidebar/header, inconsistent line spacing and conflicts between plugins and ad boxes. I also took the opportunity to add a Patreon link to the sidebar. Finally I feel like the layout is solid and how I wanted it. It’s not a big change but those little things annoyed me every time I opened the site. It should also be a bit faster now thanks to a new caching method. Oh and I built a rad Cast page!

    On wednesday I stopped by the Dutch Game Garden networking lunch again to catch up with some colleagues. I was also meeting an old client there who may have some new assignments for me.

    I also got to send my first international invoice this week, for an assignment in the UK. A joyous fact, but it meant I had to dive into the tax database to figure out how to do the VAT charge. It’s a bit dense, and it depends on what kind of person you’re selling to, but I think I got it right.

    Over the weekend I went on a weekend getaway with my girlfriend and some friends, hanging out in a cabin on the German border. It was very relaxing and ‘gezellig’.

    Next week: ???

  • Week 67

    This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.

    I got started on some sketches for the new illustration project I was contacted for. First up was logo design, and the goal was something iconic without it being a flat icon per sé. I like that, it’s more fun giving the logo some depth and styling it according to the feel of the game, like it could be part of the world. Here are some designs that were not chosen (I’ve blurred out the name for obvious reasons).

    As you can see it is Roman themed, which is cool because I’ve never worked on something in that time period. Obviously I can’t tell you anything more until the game is announced. All I can say is I’m very happy with the final result. Here is a snippet:

    I also worked on new Off-Stage comics, the first of which will debut… today actually! It’s been a long time, but you can check out the new page here. I’ve missed you buddy. More about that in next week’s notes.

    Part of my new focus on illustration also includes connecting more with the local illustration communities. I’ve been talking with my drawing and sushi buddies Lowen and Ming about creating a sort of hub for dutch illustrators to come together and share knowledge. And seeing my girlfriend use social media to promote her artwork made me realize my twitter presence is mainly focused on games and international folk. Maybe it’s time to change that.

    It remains weird to me how I’m just turned off to gamedev currently. I love all the devs and creativity in the community, but I feel like I just need some time away right now. Like I said last week, I’ll write more about that soon.

    And near the end of the week I got an email from an old and appreciated client to work together again. This pleased me much. More on that soon too.

    Next week: sticking my hands in the guts of wordpress, and social (media) strategizing.

  • Week 60

    This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.

    I hit a bit of a funk last week, which made me realize I haven’t quite gotten past the GamerGate thing yet. I was simply curating my game’s existing content like some kind of digital janitor instead of making new content. It somehow had me scared a little, which I realize is bullshit and I should get started on it again, but my mind was not ready yet. In fact it was actively distracting me whenever I tried to focus. To help ease myself back in I unfollowed a bunch of people on twitter who keep discussing it, and followed some new people who just talk about the cool things they are making. My feed is a safe place again.

    Discontent with my malaise I decided to go work at Seats2Meet at Utrecht CS the next day, on everything that was not related to The Game. It was pretty amazing. I fired up Photoshop and worked on a new page of Off-Stage, which has been in limbo for far too long. Great designs flowed right out of my pen and I got excited. Expect that soon.

    sdg

    I also played through Lili Child of Geos. It is out now on PC, and is vastly improved over the iOS version which I never got into. It looks absolutely amazing and is a joy to play with lots of fun characters and things to collect and discover. Really looking forward to Bitmonster’s next game.

    Over the weekend I helped my girlfriend sell some of her art on a market in Den Bosch. It reminded me that illustration is cool and I should do more of it.

    Next week: who even knows.

  • Week 29

    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 independent creative.

    Week 28 was a short week in which not a whole lot of interesting work stuff happened. I basically continued working on what I had worked on the week before, and visited Game Oven again on thursday. I also started playing Broken Age which I was initially not raring to try until talking to Niels ‘t Hooft enthused me about it, and I finished Shay’s story in one sitting and loved it.

    That weekend I spent on the island of Texel with my girlfriend. I turned off my phone and it’s funny how you don’t realize how much email you get until you come back to a whole stack of it after a few disconnected days.

    This past week has basically been more of the same. Off-stage has sadly slipped between the cracks so I’m letting that be for a bit while I figure out how to wrap up its second chapter. I finished the mockups for the grant application for Niels’ Ninja Gimmick Girl 2.0. It was fun to take a dive back into old E3 culture and where I came from as a games enthusiast, and I learned a lot about interface design and working with Apple’s design vision of iOS 7.

    Unity continues to work against me but making a full game with it feels ever closer.

  • 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 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 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.