Hedgeblog

The ramblings of illustrator and game developer Hedgefield

Category: Freelancing

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

  • 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.

  • Week 85

    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. I realized at the end I didn’t make any notes for the daily comics, so I’ve decided to skip those and resume this week.

    On Monday I had a call with Kars at Hubbub to review the current prototype of the Museum game and plan the next steps. I spent the day exploring the art style a little further, and I checked in on the Unity 5 release.

    All throughout the week I was also chipping away at my own little game. I upgraded to Unity 5 on tuesday and spent some time playing around with the new features, and most importantly the previously-Pro-only features that are now free. The Profiler has been most useful to me, as it shows me in realtime exactly which things are causing a load on the CPU/GPU. Before, I had no way of knowing. But within minutes I could determine that it wasn’t the amount of trees and foliage I had placed down, but the ocean shader. I swapped it out for Unity’s own Water shader (now also free).

    This project is becoming almost entirely filled with stuff from the Unity Asset Store. It’s amazing what you can do when you have Unity skills and about 60 dollars worth of pre-made assets.

    On wednesday afternoon I went by the Hubbub studio again to work on things that were missing/lacking in the game flow, and we ended up with a pretty robust build at the end of the day. Then we marvelled at the swirling birds above the building.

    https://vine.co/v/O0TZY1tqWTu

    It was also my first day working behind a standing desk, and I quite liked it.

    On thursday I worked my part-time job, and then my girlfriend and I went in search of a cat. We found a nice one at a local pound, so get ready for cat pictures sometime next week. After that I worked some more on character designs for Niels ‘t Hooft’s novel/presentation.

    On friday I was recruited by the girlfriend to sit in a nerve-wracking virtual queueu for concert tickets while she was at work, and in the meantime I called with the Hubbub guys to review the prototype. Not a lot was needed to get it feature-complete, and this was promptly executed. Thus, work on my own game continued.

    Saturday was kind of a black hole of gaming, and on sunday, after finishing the drawings for Niels, I spent the day relaxing out in nature with the girlfriend.

    Next week: spit-and-polish on the Hubbub museum prototype and more.

  • Week 84

    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 busy one. It started off bad – on monday morning the power went out! Luckily by the time I was about to relocate to a cafe it got fixed.

    On tuesday I worked my part-time job and finished the second round of KLM mockups before doing tech support for my grandpa. In an instant I realized the depth of the knowledge I have accrued about spyware and what you shouldn’t click on on the internet.

    dailies_20150225

    On wednesday I went to the Hubbub office to kick off our new project. It’s an interactive experience on iOS for select museums in Holland. Aside from the art I’m also doing design work on this one. We had a productive day and built a working proof-of-concept.

    On thursday I went by the home of Niels ‘t Hooft to discuss his character design assignment and do some initial sketches, and ofcourse to catch up. Ran into Roderick Vonhögen‘s film crew there as well, whom you may remember as the geek priest that was excited for my game Black Feather Forest. Later in the week I also found out he mentioned me on the Gamecowboys podcast (~1h25m), and we made plans to brainstorm someday about making a ‘Bible Mysteries’ adventure game.

    dailies_20150227

    On friday I was back in the Hubbub office to continue on the museum project. Alper and I made good progress on the prototype, despite having to solve a bunch of nonsensical Github merge conflicts. We then decided to upgrade our Unity version to the latest, but this introduced a bug that blocked building to iOS for a bit. And then we found a huge bug in the location-based code, which was also fixed. It was a technically-challenged afternoon, but the prototype has improved greatly.

    We closed out the week with drinks at De Klub, and I went home with a warm feeling, only to realize I had to get up early the next morning to do the boring part-time job before my weekend would start. What a bummer. Back when the only work I did was at home, I relished having a job to go to three mornings a week, but compared to the satisfaction of working in your chosen industry with fun colleagues it suddenly seems quite bland.

    Luckily I was done quickly and could get back to working on my own game the rest of saturday afternoon. I finally fixed the occlusion culling code that I broke by adding a proper 3d model to my enemy prefab, and built a little pause menu with a brightness slider.

    incamenu

    I decided to upgrade to Github for version control and backup of my personal projects too, instead of zipping up the project folder each evening and uploading that to dropbox.

    Hours spent watching progress bars this week: 3

  • Week 83

    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.

    Working irregular schedule is fucked.

    On monday I went by the Hubbub offices bright and early to figure out the new storyboards for KLM. After that I went to lunch with Niels ‘t Hooft, which I hadn’t seen in a criminally long time. We talked productivity, planning as freelancers, cool apps and how to create new reading experiences in the digital world. I look forward to seeing what he comes up with.

    On tuesday I got asked for another short illustration assignment, and I again struggled with what I should set my hourly rate at. Or rather I have one but I tend to scale it down for friends and longer assignments. It’s hard putting a value on yourself.

    dailies_20150217

    I knocked out the new storyboard sketches and then on thursday Skyped with Kars to review KLM’s feedback and set up the final tasks.

    dailies_20150219

    The next morning I was back at the Hubbub office again to kick off the next project I’m doing with Hubbub, this time one that runs for several months where I’ll be involved in a more intensive manner, doing design and prototyping as well as art. It’s a cool project and I’m excite to get started on it.

    dailies_20150220

    On saturday I spent all day in Amsterdam to watch Oscar-nominated movies with friends, and spent a quiet sunday with my parents and girlfriend.

    Next week: new project kick-off.

  • Week 82

    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.

    After the Hackathon last weekend we got some nice press about our concept. I took a day to recover and went to help a friend in their warehouse, unloading new merchandise. It’s nice to do something physically intensive every now and then to break up the monotony of sitting at a desk.

    dailies_20150209

    On tuesday I started working on a small game based on the dream I had the friday before. I never made a fully 3D game by myself, always some kind of 2D because I’m not that good at modelling and rigging (pretty bad actually). But this idea needed 3D, and it was small enough that I figured I could manage – it didn’t need complicated systems or GUI, just a character walking around an island. So I pulled open the bag of Unity resources and assets I amassed over the years, and putting all those together actually made something cool pretty quickly.

    dailies_20150210

    I started thinking about whether anybody had attempted full body awareness for the player character, and how cool that would be, and before I knew it I had a mecanim-ready character that I pulled off the asset store walking around with a camera in his head; it worked really well!

    https://vine.co/v/OUFV6pOZbWg

    I continued by building terrain using the Unity Terrain engine, populating it with foliage, and I grabbed Prototype (a plugin by the ProBuilder guys) to make some basic geometry right in Unity. The buildings don’t need a lot of complex shapes so for that purpose it is ideal for me. I continued tinkering with it during the week until I fell down a hole of performance optimization. You could spend hours tweaking the run speed and grass density and draw distance into perfection…

    Luckily I managed to climb out of it to build the enemies. All week I had been wandering around the island by myself, shaping it bit by bit, getting to know every corner of it. And now suddenly there was this awkwardly textured sphere, hovering a little above the ground, and ominously following me where ever I went. It was bizarre to me that even adding this abstract shape immediately created tension, and a feeling of dread, like I wanted to get away from it. I can’t wait to replace the sphere with the actual enemy character as I start building out its behaviour this week.

    In between I continued work on KLM where we had to change gears to process some new feedback, worked at my part-time job, drew more daily comics, and dug up a few threads that might lead me to new assignments. And I closed the week out nicely by going stargazing at the observatory with my girlfriend.

    Next week: new assignments and old friends.

  • Week 81

    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 a busy one. It started off rough with some anxiety about money after the topic of moving to a new place came up. It’s not exactly dire, but when you’re in this sort of vunerable position where there’s no automatic paycheck every month it’s easy to get swept up in a bit of hysteria. I was hoping the part-time position in Amsterdam would solve that, but that fell through unfortunately. Still, I’m already doing much better this year than the latter half of last year, so things are looking up. And I shouldn’t forget that my job at the post brings in enough to pay the rent. (I’m talking to myself now through this blogpost, can you tell?)

    Once the worry abated, I returned to doing the mockups for the KLM project. I finished them all by tuesday and sent them off to Kars to show to KLM. Then I caught up on daily comics, and went for a swim with my pal Lowen.

    dailies_20150202

    Wednesday evening I went to a concert at Paradiso, and after that I honestly can’t remember what I did until friday, when I went to Amsterdam for the Hackastory hackathon.

    I was well-aquainted with the concept of gamejams and hackathons, but what would happen when the goal was to create an interesting form of storytelling, and there were journalists and such participating, I didn’t know what to expect. But things turned out great. There were some concepts floating around to get started, and you could form your own team based on common interest for a particular idea, so pretty quickly I ended up in a team with Lotte Belice from Beeld&Geluid, architect/designer Bart van Lieshout and Andre Goncalves, a programmer who also works in the Dutch Game Garden at INTK.

    dailies_20150206

    Our idea was to create a website/webapp that would let you explore news stories in a non-linear way. Our shared frustration came from having to scan through entire articles to get to the bits you were interested in, and a lack of context to the stories.

    So we created Storyweb, a network of nodes with nuggets not much bigger than a tweet, which together form a complete picture of a story, and you can explore them in any direction you like. The nodes are connected by questions, kind of in a choose-your-own-adventure kind of way. You can follow the thread that you find most interesting. It’s not unlike a wikipedia binge in that way.

    We came up with a fictional story to demonstrate the concept, and you can try the webapp for yourself over here.

    I mostly worked to hash out the interaction design and then helped Andre put it together. We were pretty proud of what we managed to do in two days, and the other teams had great ideas to that you can check on via the Hackastory blog. It was an inspiring weekend and I met a bunch of cool people. A+ would hack again. Well done Albertine, Nienke and Emiel.

  • Week 80

    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 is a bit of a haze. I can feel that I’m doing too many things at once, and stuff is starting to fall through the cracks. Working on saturday has effectively wrecked any idea of what part of the week I am in, and so the plan in my head for what I’ve done and what I will be doing is a little jumbled. I don’t like it. Thankfully I draw daily comics! There’s a memory aid for ya.

    On monday I finished the sketches for Kars. It was fun storyboarding again, I like to do it and I’m glad that people are starting to find me for jobs like that.

    On tuesday I rushed to finish an Off-Stage comic. I wanted to do a full page but I just didn’t have the time, so I pushed it to next week (tomorrow – hopefully!). The new countdown widget on the site is definitely helpful in these case.

    On thursday I visited Kars after work again to discuss the feedback KLM had given on the storyboards the day before. I was pleased to hear they pretty much liked everything, and Kars and I brainstormed some cool design ideas for a few instances. Now I was ready to move on to ‘production’. These won’t be the final assets, but rather more elaborate mockups of how the game could look. I’ve worked out a few so far, of which you can see a WIP version below.

    I don’t often use such detailed rendering, and I’ve noticed that I quickly put too much effort into it. The idea was to paint fairly realistic scenes (just a bit of a Pixar slant) in quick brushstrokes. I find that I blend too much; still gotta practice throwing down gradients with just sharp opaque strokes, like the style reference I used:

    I closed the day out with a concert and continued working on the mockups on friday and saturday. Then I spent some time with friends together with the girlfriend.

    Next week: anxiety and deadlines.

  • Week 79

    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 largely uneventful in terms of business. I drew Off-Stage and added a timer to the website so you can see when the next update is due. Then I caught up with the daily comics, and on friday I visited the Hubbub offices to talk with Kars Alfrink about a new collaboration.

    dailies_20150123

    I was inducted into their Slack team chat and saw some familiar faces there. It was really nice to suddenly have a new little community to talk about anything related to our industry.

    Over the weekend we spent time with friends that are leaving for a year in Australia next week.

    Next week: More of the same thing I bet.

  • 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 77

    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 spent some time looking into the new VAT MOSS regulations. Luckily I could conclude from this flowchart that freelance work is not impacted by these changes, only direct (automated) sales from webshops. SO for now I don’t have to worry about it, but it will probably become relevant once I start selling my own games.

    On wednesday I went up to Amsterdam North to talk business with a new potential client. They are housed in a really big factory building that holds many creative companies; it reminded me a lot of the Caballero factory in The Hague in that way. I’ll have to wait a bit to hear back from them, but if it goes through it would be a pretty big assignment.

    I also closed a deal with Kars from Hubbub about a new project they’re doing that I can help them with.

    So 2015 is off to a cautiously good start!

    And then Charlie Hebdo happened. It was weird to draw with the news on, and it took a while to sink in, but all the positive responses around the world were a welcome sight in the wake of all the recent hateful outrage about basically everything.

    Freshpost asked me to draw a cartoon in response, and I was reminded of Holland’s motto.

    Next week: making a start on a 2015 resolutions project.

  • 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 74

    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.

    Week 73 wasn’t that notheworthy. I mostly worked at my parttime job and caught up on games and tv shows.

    Last week I drew a new Off-Stage page of course, and I spent some time re-wwriting the plot for Black Feather Forest. I believe I’ve told you that I came up with s handful of new angles, and I’ve been trying to write those out into full summaries. Coincidentally the podcast Stuff You Should Know did an episode on the phenomenon one of the new storylines is based on, so that added some motivation to the process.

    Other than that I’ve been emailing some more, trying to score new leads. And I engaged in a game of Subterfuge with the guys at Game Oven. It’s a really nice take on Neptune’s Pride.

    Next week: Christmas.