Tim makes art

The ramblings of an illustrator and game developer

Category: Freelancing

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

  • 2018 recap

    2018 has been a funny one. Even though it’s technically been a quiet year for Hedgefield lots has happened still.

    Intern

    For starters, I had my first intern! Kim Leunen from the HKU asked if she could intern with me for a few months, so every week we sat down and spent the day making games.

    It was really refreshing to work with someone from the game world again. And like me, Kim started from illustration and now wanted to tell interactive stories, so our design vision was very similar.

    We wrote a new concept from the ashes of Black Feather Forest, and built a prototype for her girlscout forest adventure game (a recurring theme in my career by now). I look forward to seeing what she creates.

    Read the rest »

  • 2016 look-ahead

    We looked back at 2015 earlier this month, now it’s time to look ahead at all the things coming for Hedgefield in 2016.

    Finish developing Last Voyage Of The Orlova

    I started this project last summer with the intention to finish it up in a month or two, but then I got caught up in other things eventually leading me to my current job at Yoast, so the development timetable for this project has been stretched out somewhat. But this year I’m definitely finishing it and putting it out in itch.io.

    Work with some cool people on 7 Days Of Klement

    I can’t tell you what it is yet, but this year I’m working on a game spearheaded by Sytze Schalk, though I’m keeping my role in it limited to some design and prototyping work, leaving the heavy lifting to contractors. But that’s a great opportunity to involve some people I’ve wanted to work with.

    Write a new draft for Black Feather Forest

    This again? Yes. I’ve done a lot of thinking about this game since I completed the vertical slice in 2014. It was way too ambitious, while still missing some crucial mechanics. So I’m slowly writing a new draft, and so far it’s looking pretty solid. 2017 here I come.

    Draw more

    It sounds weird considering my day job IS drawing, but I want to make more quick little drawings in my free time and learn new techniques. Just get better at it, basically.

    –

    I’ll be talking more in-depth about these things in my newsletter, so sign up for that.

     

  • 2015 review

    2015 was a great year. I moved to a new apartment, got a sweet job as an illustrator and celebrated being together for two years with my girlfriend.

    Professionally it was also a great year, and I hit nearly all of the goals I had set for 2015.

    [X] Earn more revenue than in 2014

    I more than doubled my income from freelance activities last year compared to the year before, and had a good spread of work throughout the year.

    [x] Diversify client base

    I also succeeded in doing business with more new clients, some of which have become friends, and I had a great time working with them. I’m sad to see my main squeeze of 2015 Hubbub going into hibernation, but there is something poetic about it coinciding with me scaling back my own operation too now that I work for Yoast as an illustrator.

    [x] Draw daily comics

    I didn’t last all year, but I wanted to start doing dailies again in 2015 and I did. They were a fun extention of my weekly blog posts (which have now evolved into a newsletter).

    I also intended to start up Off-Stage again and draw a page a week there, but I just couldn’t fit it into my schedule.

    [x] Make a small (adventure) game and publish it on Itch.io

    Reconquista was a small game idea I got from a dream, and it was my first 3D game and my first commercial game. I’ve always given away my games for free, but it’s a great feeling to earn money from one. It wasn’t much but it was a nice shot in the arm. I made another small (free) game too for the Idle Thumbs Wizard Jam, so technically this was a two-hit combo!

    Itch.io is fast becoming my favorite indie game marketplace, and I contributed to the dutch translation of the desktop client that was just released.

    And one of my definite highlights that I could not have foreseen at the start of 2015 was spending a week in the Torenkamer for a dutch radio show, making a game.

    –

    More exciting things happened in 2015 that will also carry over into 2016, so sign up for my newsletter to hear about that.

    And 2016 is starting off well – I’m enjoying my new job, there’s a cool freelance gamedev project starting this month and lasting all throughout the year (more on that once the embargo is lifted) and it was just announced that Adriaan de Jongh is in Forbes’ 30 under 30 list of game designers. I’m proud to have worked with him on Fingle and Bounden, the innovative games that kicked off our careers.

    So a happy new year to you all!

  • Week 120 – Change

    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.

    This is the last weeknotes blogpost.

    Because I am changing the format. Like Ive said in previous posts, now that I have a fulltime job I won’t have something to write about my own projects every week.

    So instead, like I mentioned before, I’m launching a newsletter.

    I’ll be sending the first one soon, which has updates on all my current projects with some exclusive images. Sign up for it now so you don’t miss it! Follow this link and leave your email adress.

    —

    It’s been fun writing these posts for the past two years, and I look forward to browsing through some random ones to see what I was up to back then. I’ll miss having this moment with you guys every monday though, but instead I’ll use that time to draw off-stage again and work on some backburner game projects, and fill this blog with art again, like it was intended. And then I’ll let you know how things are going about once a month via the above newsletter. It’s better that way. And I can’t wait to talk to you guys over there. It’s gonna be fun.

    Catch you on the flip side.

  • Week 119 – penultimate

    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 drew more artwork for Yoast. It’s a change of pace from game development where you’re focused on one project and draw lots of assets for it, while here each blogpost is a little project and has a turnaround time of a few days, so there’s lots of small moments of completion and release, which is nice.

    I also drew some assets for Embodied Games and made a few mockups for some new interface elements in Vrije Vogels, the Hubbub museum game. It should be appearing in the App Store in the coming months so I can finally show you what we’ve been working on.

    Doing the work was hampered by the fact that I don’t yet have internet in our new apartment, so I went down to the restaurant around the corner to mooch off of their free wifi. Staying connected proved to be a real challenge though, and when it was finally stable and I was doing a pull from a Git repo my laptop crashed with a BSOD. Sigh. Getting a photoshop file from the Creative Cloud account I use at Yoast proved to be an equally cumbersome process. But eventually I got everything done.

    Then came Moving Day at the end of the week. It took the better part of the day but we managed to squeeze everything into our new apartment. Incredible how much stuff we had amassed. Now one more week until the girlfriend is done with her job and we can start putting everything together again.

    Next week: home improvement and the launch of the newsletter.

  • Week 118 – orchestrated chaos

    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.

    As M-Day (moving day) draws nearer, it occupies more and more of my thoughtspace. I didn’t really accomplish much between working my last two days at my side job (hooray!) working two days at my new job, and cleaning the new apartment. We received the key on thursday and I slept there overnight. Going to work and especially coming back from work to this new place definitely feels good. All the shops are closeby, so it’s easy to grab whatever I need and forgot at home (which is a lot, turns out).

    I completed my first illustration at my new job this week, which was published over here. Hooray!

    As for the poll from last week, the results so far are unanimously telling me I should go for the newsletter idea, so I will. More on that soon.

    Next week: Free birds, alien foods and wifi woes.

  • 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.

  • Week 115 & 116 – Track of time

    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.

    So I see I forgot to blog in week 115, oops. That week contained my first workday at Yoast, where I settled in quickly and mostly just spent the time setting up my workstation, adobe creative cloud, checking out the publications backlog and getting a feel for the style I’ll be working in. Compared to getting up at 5:45 for my side job, walking into the office at 9 felt very comfortable (even though it takes me 1h45 to get there), and I had one of those moments where you really feel like an adult.

    At the end of the week I looked at a place that was a 5-minute walk away from the office (we’ll be moving too, see aforementioned commute time), but it didn’t really meet our standards so unfortunately I had to pass on it.

    This past week was more of the same for that matter. Though on tuesday night I went to INDIGO, the annual dutch games industry expo. I had a great time there, if mostly because of catching up with friends and setting appointments to have drinks with them. It was weird to think that last year I had a booth there myself, but I didn’t envy the exhibitors’ aching feet.

    indigo2015

    On friday I stopped by the Vechtclub here in Utrecht to have a quick drink with Kars from Hubbub, to kind of cap off our project together. Though it seems it will get a small tail this week. It feels like a weird moment in time, because the project ended perfectly timed with me moving away and starting a new job, and he is moving all the way to Asia! (for half a year). We only worked together on a freelance basis, but I feel more of a connection with Hubbub than any of my other freelance clients. I’ll miss this point in time.

    https://instagram.com/p/8WMzfLrZkj

    Inbetween it all I lit up Photoshop to finish drawing assets for the game I’m helping out with at Radboud. They were all food items, drawn in a fairly realistic way. I did it that way to match the style of the game without really thinking that much about it, but it was oddly satisfying, and the assets turned out real good.

    On saturday I stopped by the birthday party of John Gottschalk, designer on Westerado, and felt invigorated by our shared passion of narrative games. On sunday I saw The Martian, and it was everything I ever asked for in a sci-fi movie. I loved it.

    Next week: inktober and a new apartment.

  • Week 114 – A new job

    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.

    After finishing the crunch for Vrije Vogels last week, I spent the first few days of last week embroiled in Metal Gear Solid V. It’s a wonderful and weird game, I dig it.

    On wednesday I visited the Yoast offices again for my second interview, and I was practically hired on the spot! So starting soon I’ll be illustrating their blogposts and ebooks four days a week. It’s fun that I’ve been using their wordpress SEO plugin on the Off-Stage site for a while before I even knew they were dutch.

    The next day, after my (soon to be ex-)side job in the morning and a sprint retrospective at Hubbub, I went by Radboud again, where I spent most of the afternoon in a meeting to sort out the work I have to do. The deadline for it is the day I start working at Yoast, so that schedules together really nicely.

    Next week: First day on the job.

  • Week 113 – Snap back to reality

    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 I returned from vacation to find a bunch of things I had to do had accumulated. Eventually I spent most of my time on the final sprint for the Vrije Vogels game, culminating in me going to the Hubbub office at 5 pm on a friday to work out the last few bugs before the deadline. It was fun though, having everyone in the (virtual) office and punching out the last few things, improving things for a few hours and seeing it all come together. Especially marking off everything on the todo list was a satisfying way to start the weekend.

    Inbetween I did some logo sketches for a client in the UK I had worked with previously, and I added a few things to the lighthouse keeper game, with the intent of showing it off at friday night’s PlayDev meetup. Eventually I couldn’t attend due to the aforementioned crunchtime, but working on it was nice, it’s been on the backburner for too long.

    Over the weekend I finally finished The Witcher 3 with over 100 hours on the clock, and immediately moved on to MGS V, which I expect will eat my free time in a similar amount.

    Next week: more interviews and working at the university.

  • Week 110 – 112

    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.

    In week 110 I finished up the last things for the Vrije Vogels beta 3 sprint, then spent the rest of the week doing other things. I helped a friend move, we thought more about moving ourselves, and spent a day at the beach. Lots of things occupied my mind so I didn’t do much on personal projects.

    Week 111 started off with an interview for an illustration job in Nijmegen. I’m keen to get back into illustration proper, although the decision is bittersweet as I’ll have less time for personal projects. But then again some stability (and a pension) would be nice!

    On tuesday we did a retrospective at Hubbub to review our past few weeks of work. Everyone was very pleased and proud and compliments were passed around, that was nice. We also came up with a few points to improve on in the next sprint. It took some doing but the whole process there feels very streamlined now, and though it requires some active attention there’s a lot of flexibility and we really get things done. I like working with these guys a lot.

    I closed week 111 out by dropping by Embodied Games at Radboud again. We discussed the future and did some planning for the next upcoming project, which includes some fancy motion sensing tech that I’m excited to design for.

    And then I left for vacation with my girlfriend, which occupied all of week 112. It was great to get away from it all and we had a lot of fun on the island of Texel.

    Next week: Back at it with a full plate.

  • Week 105 & 106 – Downtime, wireframing and job prospecting

    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.

    Week 105 was mostly used to decompress after my adventure in De Torenkamer (see the week 104 blog). I caught up on sleep, saw my family, wrote some words, updated my portfolio and then re-aquainted myself with The Witcher 3.

    On thursday I met up with Niels ‘t Hooft and Saskia Freeke to discuss the next steps in Niels’ Geometry Girl / Hybrid Writer’s Toolkit project. The day after that I did something completely different and went into an abandoned hospital with some street art friends. I’m glad I went along; you see this kind of thing a lot in games and other stories, but to do it yourself is an exciting experience.

    Last week was more of the same. On Monday Niels stopped by to catch up and talk through the Geometry Girl wireframes. During the week I made a prototype with the Marvel app, and built the same thing in Invision to compare (Marvel still came out on top for me even though Invision has a bunch more cool features). It’s a great way to get a feel for your (app) design on the target device really quickly.

    I also started slowly looking around for a new job, something with more hours as my current side job, and where I’m actually doing something with my creative skills and mental capacity. So if you or someone you know could use a great 2D artist/animator/designer/writer/developer, I’m over here.

  • Week 104 – One man game jam

    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 a little different from my usual weeks, as I spent a week in a little room in the Vondelpark in Amsterdam to work on a new personal game project, courtesy of dutch radio. Come to think of it, it was also the two-year anniversary of me going independent, so I guess that was a fitting way to celebrate it!

    You can read the details about the game here. The week was organised by dutch late-night radio show Opium op 4, which lets a creator use their office each week to build a passion project. This week was my turn, and I had a really good time.


    Also just realized I posed like the caricature on my businesscard here. Weird!

    I basically started from scratch on monday. I had an interesting backstory, and a vision in my mind of what the game would look like. So I started by researching the backstory: in 2013 the Lyubov Orlova, a decommissioned cruiseship, breaks off its towline in a storm and disappears onto the ocean. In 2014 its radio pings off the coast of the UK, but it is never found. I figured I’d make a game about that. The news articles about it have been in my Pocket for a while now, so this was a good opportunity to do something with it.

    p01qg79h

    I researched the timeline, all the owners and places it’s been, and more specific stuff like what the deck layout looks like and how cruise ship engines work.

    After that I started on the prototype. I had something working pretty quickly, courtesy of Unity and its many prefabs. After that I struggled for a while to get an interaction system working. I started off coding it all myself, but quickly realized I’d better use something pre-made. I fiddled with Pixelcrusher’s Dialogue System for a good while before deciding to just import Adventure Creator. At that point it felt like I changed from Tony Stark banging on some metal in a cave to Tony Stark jumping into the Mark 45 Iron Man armor. Everything was at my fingertips.

    To my surprise AC also integrated pretty well with Unity’s 2D Controller, which was essential, otherwise the character couldn’t walk up slopes anymore. Now I was ready to start on the narrative content. It was early thursday by then, and I was getting nervous, but I managed to put together a pretty cool vertical slice in the end, even though it sort of stops short of the actual gameplay, which is exploring the ship’s interior with your map and axe. But for a week of work it was pretty cool.

    On friday I presented the demo on the air, and everyone loved it. The main guest of the show called me a singer-songwriter gamedesigner, which is exactly how I like to think of myself, telling interactive stories and focusing on the delivery and the experience.

    At any rate, I had a great time, and you can read a more detailed (dutch) blog and listen to the show segments on their website.

  • Week 103 – Released a new game

    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 hard. Not because I had a lot to do but because it was so damn warm. We measured the highest temperature and the hottest night so far in the history of this country – even though compared to places like Italy or Indonesia it’s not that big a deal. But it makes sitting down and doing this hard enough.

    Regardless, I started the week off helping out at the warehouse of a friend. It ate up most of the day, and I liked it better than my side job, which by comparison is very monotone and boring. After that I had a Skype call with Hubbub to plan out the tasks we’d like to tackle in the last batch of work on the museum game.

    On tuesday I decided that if I was going to start on a new game (which I will next week in De Torenkamer), I should really finish one of my open projects. Finishing Black Feather Forest was impossible, and the astronaut game was nothing more than a tech demo yet, so of course the choice was clear: Reconquista.

    Reconquista had been in limbo for a few weeks because the last few tasks were too vague or I couldn’t decide on exactly how I wanted to tackle them, but I decided to just sit down and figure it out. In the end it was easier than I expected to fill in the blanks and deliver a game that felt fairly done. It had a good starting and ending point, and the stuff inbetween seemed bug-free and cool.

    So! You can download the game off itch.io for free right now!

    After that I mostly just surrendered to the heat and made a plan for my time in De Torenkamer next week. A plan that changed near the end of the week after the announcement of De Pont, an open call for game devs or filmmakers to make a short game/film set on the ferry that runs between Amsterdam Central Station and Amsterdam North. That could be a very interesting idea to run with.

    I also played through Her Story, which is an incredible game and I finished it in one sitting. On saturday I went to a concert and on sunday I helped out my girlfriend sell her illustrations at a local market, while the Tour De France ravaged the very same city we were in.

    Next week: gamedev in the Vondelpark in Amsterdam.

  • Week 100 – milestones for all

    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 marked the end of a few running tasks, which thankfully cleared the board a little bit.

    On monday we submitted the grant application for our literary game idea. Somewhere next month we’ll receive word on whether the judges think it’s cool enough (and thus receive the first batch of funding for a prototype), so for now we sit tight and await the result. It was weird to submit something based on an idea without any kind of prototype or concept art, but I think even in this form it already sounds pretty cool.

    The rest of the week was mostly spent on the last bits of art for the current sprint of the Hubbub game. We had some trouble contacting the client because of changes in their management etc, so we didn’t quite end up where we wanted to be, but we still made huge progress and have a version you can play through from beginning to end. Next week we’ll probably kick off one more polishing sprint and then get ready to deploy it in the first museum. I’m looking forward to sharing what we’ve been working on.

    Halfway through the week I also got the input I needed to start working on a few illustrations for returning client Hoog+Diep. I only had until today to work on them, but the scope was exactly right for me to work on comfortably, and I delivered the final bits this morning pending any final feedback. Little assignments like that are great to fill up the empty space in your planning, easy and fun to work on and done quickly, allowing me to enjoy the great weather on friday.

    Over the weekend I did some work on Deck 5, a small scifi game I’ve had lying around for a while – you may remember it from weeknotes past. I went back and forth on its design a lot, going from 2D adventure game to firstperson exploration game to isometric 2.5D puzzle game. I think I finally hit the look and feel that I envisioned when I drew the first mockup back in 2010, and I’m excited to start making content for it once I finish Home Rule and Reconquista.

    Below you can see the progression of the game since 2010. I’m particularly excited by the billboarding-shadowcasting-sprites in the latest prototype.

    Bonus: the doors from the 2014 early early Unity prototype.
    https://vimeo.com/73655259

    Next week: Home Rule polish sprint kickoff.

  • Week 99 – clients coming out of the woodwork

    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 started off with a promising meeting with Sytze Schalk, a writer/designer who is working on a grant application for a multi-year transmedia experience including theatre, graphic novels and games. He was looking for someone to develop his adventure game idea and ended up on my portfolio, so we met to discuss ideas and possibilities and decided to go ahead with the application together. He wrote it during the week and I checked it from a game designer point of view. We’re submitting it today.

    Besides that I kept working on Home Rule for Hubbub, filling in the various placeholders with final artwork. It was a lot to slog through and it went slower than I anticipated, but the game is starting to look really good. On friday I was in the Hubbub studio to work on some things, but man it was hot. I hope we don’t get a tropical summer like that or productivity is going to suffer.

    Halfway through the week I also got a call from Hoog+Diep, for whom I did some artwork a while back. They had a new project that needed some illustrations. And a friend of mine wanted to schedule a meeting about some artwork for her new project, so all of a sudden assignments are coming in from all over the place. The question will be which ones actually end up going through, but I feel a lot better about the next few months now.

    Inbetween all that I spent a morning writing out the rest of the storyline for Offstage chapter 2, and I hope to start drawing it in a few weeks time.

    Over the weekend I enjoyed the sunny weather, meeting family and friends, and some Witcher 3.

    Next week: finishing up the third Home Rule sprint and more gamedev.

  • Week 97 + 98 – Keep on truckin’

    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.

    Week 97 was mostly spent truckin’ forward on the artwork for Home Rule. We tried coming up with a better name for the project but nothing really jumped out just yet. It was tough to have everyone scattered all over the place and working on the project at different times, but this week things are coming together.

    Over the weekend I saw some movies and spent time with friends, something I had been neglecting a bit due to all the work lately.

    Week 98 started off with me helping another creator, namely my girlfriend, in selling her artwork at a market on the second Pentecost day (yeah in holland we pretty much double down on every national holiday). She sold a ton and we had fun, the very direct contact with customers is always nice. The rest of that week was more of the same.

    Inbetween I sowed the seeds for some new projects in the latter half of this year and early next year. If even one of them goes through it’s going to be a good year. But they’re largely dependent on subsidies so we’ll see how it goes. Just the fact that I’m being asked for these things more and more is a calming thought in the black void of freelance work.

    At the end of the week I decided to make work of upgrading my legacy hosting account. I’ve been displeased with the speed of my websites for a while now and considered switching to a different provider, but then I decided to call Godaddy support and see what I could accomplish. And I came out with an upgrade to their latest server technology, locked in for 5 years for the price it would normally cost for 2 years, and a free file and database migration worth another 150 bucks. Plus a fun conversation about art with the tech support guy, an amateur artist living in Dublin.
    I was surprised that nothing broke in the process; the only thing I had to do over the weekend was re-hook-up the posts database to the off-stage wordpress. So now all my sites are back online and working spiffy.

    I’m going to stop doing dailies for a while, or at least discard the backlog when I pick it up again.

    Next week: Home Rule beta 2 wrapup.

  • Week 96 – lights, camera, UX

    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.

    On tuesday we started the third Home Rule sprint at the Hubbub studio. New addition this sprint is Niels ‘t Hooft, who is taking care of the story content. On friday we had another meeting to discuss our progress. Alper and I mostly worked on designing new features this week and setting everything up so we can get going once the full storyline is ready this week.

    Inbetween I worked on Reconquista some more, getting it ready for release. I added some extra props to the level, optimized the performance a bit and experimented with gamma color space vs linear color space + tone mapping, and I’m still not sure I understand it exactly but the colors look much better now at least.

    RQ04

    I also spent an inordinate amount of time researching a new laptop powerful enough to play The Witcher 3 on, which comes out this week. Not since my days as a young gamer with a desktop PC had I compared graphics cards so thoroughly, or thought about clock speeds, teraflops and heatsinks. It was awful, but I found a good one that I might buy sometime soon.

    I closed the week out by celebrating my birthday in Amsterdam at a small festival. Seeing how happy and kind everyone there was, and the artists having fun, and supporting each other from the crowd, it felt like such a far cry from the worries and the vitriol in the games industry lately. It definitely lifted my spirits, and I hope we can all be a little more like those people.

  • Week 92 – Three deadlines and a playtest

    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.

    It’s been a busy week!

    Hubbub was finishing up the first beta for Home Rule on monday and tuesday, and at the same time I was drawing hard for the Suitkees project, as that soft deadline turned into a hard deadline for the end of the week. And in the meantime I had to finish up my #wizardjam entry. Luckily I had been smart and done most of the work on that over the weekend, so all I had to do was make some promo art and write a description for the itch.io page. I did that on wednesday morning and launched the game before heading to the war museum in Oosterbeek with the Hubbub guys to playtest Home Rule.

    Tim and Alper

    It’s been a while since I did an actual in-person live playtest on location. The target audience is kids 8-12, and they are always fun to work with. And to our surprise they really picked up on what we were trying to do and had fun playing the game. It was nice seeing them contemplate aloud the moral dilemmas people in a warzone have to face. We came away with a bunch of good feedback and happily dug into some pizza at the end of a succesful day.

    On thursday I finished up the Suitkees drawings, sent them out and then went to the housewarming for the Dutch Game Garden in their new home next to Central Station. I ran into some old friends and made a few new ones, and generally felt glad to be part of this industry. It was nice to be among peers again and I considered one day getting an office there when business gets good enough.

    Once that was all behind me it was time to unwind. I spent most of Friday making my portfolio website responsive and mobile-friendly, and I got pretty far with it. And over the weekend I fired up Shadow of Mordor with the intent of finally finishing it. When you’re purely interacting with its mechanics and ignoring the story, that game is so good.

    Next week: A late start after Kingsday and planning new ventures.

  • Week 91

    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.

    Being your own boss is no field trip. One week it feels like the business is on fire, the other like I’m living on borrowed time. Especially around tax time when I can hand 21% of what I’ve earned back to the government. But one of the big improvements to my business I’m instituting this year is time tracking. I used to track my time with just a txt file for client projects where I had billable hours, but I never tracked all the hours I spend on my own games, comics etc. And those are far and away most of the hours I put in. So I’ve started using Toggl. It’s free and perfect for what I need. I worked with it before at Paladin, and I saw Kars using it at Hubbub recently and thought oh yeah that’s smart.

    Speaking of Hubbub, we’ve been whittling away at the beta for Home Rule. It might have been kind of ambitious to try and recreate the iMessage interface in Unity, but Alper got pretty far with it. This week is more tweaking and improvements to get everything ship-shape for the playtest tomorrow.

    I figured I’d have more work of Home Rule this phase, with the concept redesign following the alpha and all that, but Kars did a great job doing the heavy lifting on the game design. This freed up some time to work on the Transavia illustrations for Hoog+Diep. I sent out a test illustration previously which was liked, so I sketched out all the illustrations in greater detail. On friday Transavia and Neckermann looked at it again and they were very positive.

    Inbetween I found some time to start on my #wizardjam entry, a gamejam held on the Idle Thumbs forums. I had wanted to participate in #adventurejam but the timing didn’t work out, so this was a nice way to still get jammin’, and the Idle Thumbs episode titles proved ripe ground for ideas. I’m working on a small topgun-jetfighter-switches-flipping game called MaydayMayday Cockpit Freakout, which I plan to be releasing tomorrow.

    It feels like I’m jumping from project to project, but since MaydayMayday is tiny and has a definite deadline it takes precedence over Reconquista, which I’ll also be releasing soon. Reconquista just has a few loose ends in the design which make it hard to finish.

    On top of that I also got an interesting call from Menno at Mindbreaker Games. They’re working on a P&C adventure game and are crunching out a demo for a grant proposal, and if that goes through they might want to work together, as our interests and goals are similar. So more on that in the future perhaps.

    Next week: bustin’ to get all these projects done on time.

  • Week 90

    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.

    This workweek had a late start because I only got back from my much-needed Easter break on tuesday. With a fresh mind I jumped back into it on wednesday with a status update call with the guys at Hubbub, and after that a call with Pieter at Hoog+Diep, a design agency that contacted me to do the promotional art for their new app. They found me through the work I did for KLM and their app also has to do with air travel. That afternoon I finally caught up with my backlog of daily comics.

    On thursday I worked my side job and stopped by the Hubbub studio afterwards. Kars presented me his new ideas for the flow of the home rule beta, and I went home to mull them over. Then I made an art test for Hoog+Diep, and I’ll hear more about that next week.

    On friday I made the last few missing daily comics and made some mockups to go with Kars’ new ideas. Afterwards I went for a bbq at the park with friends, which knocked me (but mostly my stomach) out for most of the weekend. Woof.

    Next week: Like I didn’t have enough to do, I dabble in the Idle Thumbs game jam.

  • Week 89

    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.

    On monday I started out helping my friends unload containers at their warehouse again. It was a nice way to start off the week with some physical activity. Then I ran errands and updated the blog and such. There was a terrible storm that evening and I was glad to be inside.

    On tuesday I worked my side job and then stopped by the Hubbub studio in the afternoon to kick off the new beta phase of Home Rule, the game for war museums. We came up with some rad ideas to start working on, and after that I stuck around to fiddle with my game a bit. I also thought of a concept for the Adventure game jam that starts next week.

    On wednesday I sketched out some designs for the Home Rule beta and pushed a few fixes and features down the pipeline for my own game, and sent a beta version out that evening. I didn’t receive any bug reports, which is also an interesting contrast to the sort of games I usually make. 2D (adventure) games are strung together by interdependent logic and a specific flow of events, something which is ripe for things to break or execute in the wrong order, while this game lets you roam free and really only has two spots where it forces some rigid code on you, so essentially there are no bugs. That feels weird.

    I think I’m going to call this game Reconquista, a suggestion by Alper. It communicates the theme and the setting nicely in one catchy word.

    This game poses a dilemma though, because on the one hand the experience that I wanted to communicate with the game is there and I want to release it, but on the other hand my game developer instinct wants to add more actual gameplay and make it a real ‘game’ that I could charge for. I think I’ll have to trawl itch.io a bit to see how other people are handling this. If you have sage advice feel free to share in the comments.

    On thursday I had a call with Kars and Alper to discuss the designs we had done for Home Rule so far, and on friday I called with Alper again to see what the next steps would be for the beta. He was going to work on that into next week while I went of a short Easter vacation with the girlfriend to the island of Texel, which turned out fun and relaxing. I tried to catch up on dailies before then but holy shit I was far behind. The backlog should go up today or tomorrow.

    Next week: a return to civilization and a new assignment.

  • Week 88

    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.

    This week I spent a good chunk of time filling out a grant application for Creative Europe Media, a European Commission that offers support for interesting video games. Though because it has to go through the European Commission there is a ton of procedure to follow – making accounts, registering my company, discovering that the registration system the dutch Chamber of Commerce used when I registered two years ago has been changed, googling to find the correct code for the new system, and then generating a fancy pdf form and filling that out. 21 pages of complicated questions, some of which I didn’t really have an answer to. One thing is that I got the feeling they are thinking in a waterfall schedule, where milestones and deadlines are set in stone. I’m doing this project by myself, so I can’t already estimate in hours how long I am working on each phase. The budget was a monster to wrangle as well, but I managed to fill everything out on time, and the guys at the Vechtclub were very supportive when I told them about it on wednesday.

    The reason I was at the Hubbub studio on wednesday was to brainstorm about the direction of the museum game project (I’ll start using the official codename SHACHI from now on because I’m getting tired of typing ‘museum game project’). We had a cool prototype, but it kind of existed outside of the targeted museums, instead of being integrated in the exhibit. It was a tough nut to crack but we came up with something really interesting. More on that soon as we start the beta phase.

    On thursday I sketched up some mockups for the new idea so that Kars could use them in the client meeting, and then I went to Amsterdam to have dinner with my old couchsurfing buddy Troy. This was the first time we were both back in Amsterdam again after I had moved away from there, so for both of us it was a welcome reunion with a lovely city, I thought that was interesting.

    Friday I was spent, so I passed the time catching up on my backlog of games. I finished the Spiderman and Guardians of the Galaxy playsets in Dinsey Infinity, and reflected on how brilliantly simple their game design is. They get the core of the characters right, give you a playground to exercise their abilities until you have mastered them, and it’s exactly long enough that you don’t tire of it too much. Then I played some MGS Ground Zeroes (big fan also) and upgraded some of my other game projects to Unity 5.

    Next week: Getting my short game into beta state for real and deciding whether I’m going to participate in the upcoming AdventureJam.

  • Week 87

    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.

    Having finished the first phase of the Museum Game project, this week was a bit of a breather, and an opportunity to get into gamedev on my short game whole-hog.

    I started by drawing some dailies, but the antics of the cat that night had left me with a bit of sleep deprivation so it didn’t go so fast. On tuesday we ran errands and enjoyed the spring weather, and wednesday I got into knocking out some features. I’m really enjoying working on a 3D game, but the danger in that is that you can endlessly tweak little details and move them around, whereas in 2D you generally want to sketch that all out in advance and then Just Make It™. So I did at least one big feature still on the to-do list a day, from a win / lose condition to building geometry and constructing the general game flow. It’s mostly an exploration game and it’s quite short, but it does need some structure.

    This is a moodboard I made to illustrate the tone and look I want to go for. It’s a challenge to figure out exactly how to replicate the different aspects like lighting and contrast, and getting that dense foliage feeling without sacrificing visibility or performance.

    moodboard

    And a look at a WIP area.

    Next week: Hopefully beta-testing, and writing a Black Feather Forest proposal for the Creative Europe open call for game funding.

  • Week 86

    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 pretty productive. I finished a final drawing for Niels on monday morning in time for his presentation on tuesday (which went well). After that I spent some time tinkering with my own game until Kars was back in the studio late in the afternoon, and I went by to dicuss the progress of the museum game and determine what we would polish in the final sprint week.

    Tuesday after work the girlfriend and I went to look at a new apartment here in the area, but size-wise it wasn’t exactly an upgrade while it costed more than we pay in rent right now, so we returned home unanimously convinced that we were doing pretty good right now actually. And we were hoping to pick up our new cat that afternoon, but his final checkup was proving to be a bit of an ordeal, so instead I tinkered away at my own game.

    I started wednesday by knocking out some of the new tasks in the Hubbub sprint backlog. I like having small tasks with clear courses of action, like fixing bugs or implementing a design into the game, because you can sort of chain those together in a burst of productivity. Designing things or drawing always takes a little more time and thought, which isn’t to say I don’t enjoy that as well, but I’d rather have a huge to-do list filled with those small tasks you can do quickly than spend a day conceptualizing over three ethereal design tasks.

    On thursday after work I stopped by the Hubbub studio to implement some of the final tasks in the museum game sprint. Inbetween I went to finally pick up the cat with my girlfriend, and we spent some time on an adventure in the forest of Zeist looking for an ATM. That area is pretty insane, nature-wise. We brought the cat home and watched him explore his new surroundings, then I went back to the studio and finished up most of my open tasks. The museum game prototype is looking pretty solid. More on that in Hubbub’s weeknotes.

    I also got an offer to do illustrations for a design agency working with another dutch airline. They had seen my work for KLM and wanted to know if I was available.

    On friday I did a few remaining non-essential tasks and got aquainted with our cat Poekie.

    2015-03-12 19.45.50

    He is pretty mellow, which I am thankful for because that means I can continue working from home in peace. Although at night he tends to get up and around, so I guess I’d rather see that reversed.

    Saturdaymorning I went in to work again, then ran some errands and eventually visited my girlfriend’s mother for her birthday. And on sunday we ran more errands, looked for new apartments and generally took a break from an eventful week.

    Next week: an attempt to get my own game into a beta-testing state.