Tim makes things

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.

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.

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.
Contrast

I wanted to practice drawing portraits with strong or interesting lighting, so I looked up some Anton Corbijn-like noir-ish stuff, and it went pretty well from there. Also, why has David Bowie never been cast as The Joker?

If anyone has tips for where I can find more photos like this, preferably something in color with strong sunlight or back lit, let me know in the comments!
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.
Calendar doodles

I came across an open call for calendar illustrations here in Holland, and I submitted a few simple drawings to be included, along with some from my girlfriend. It’s pretty cool to have them hanging on the bathroom wall now, and there are tons of other cool submissions in it as well.

“Today is a great day for adventure!”

“We all have our ups and downs.”

“Learn something new today.”

If you want to order one too, head over here.
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.

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.

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 69

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.

The week started off with the classic inking of a new Off-Stage page. It took a little longer than I anticipated so I had to finish up on tuesday. Time to get a buffer reinstated again! I’m starting on the next one as soon as I finish this post.

On tuesday I did a lot of holiday shopping with the girlfriend. Being away from the internet for a day feels quite regenerative. All the energy spent fussing over this or that on social media can be put to much better use. Interestingly, similar thoughts were also explored on the latest Surviving Creativity, a podcast I recommend you listen to if you’re a creator, and the season 3 pilot episode of The Newsroom.

On wednesday I ported some bits of code from the old version of Trusted Soil we made in college to the new version currently in development. Progress has mostly been going on outside of my purview, the artists and designer setting up the new project and determining the art style. I’m waiting in the wings for tech support on the more difficult features. I quite like being on this end of the gamedev spectrum for this project.

Last week also saw the version 2.0 update for Mischief, a vector drawing program I really like. No real new features yet, but the interface is much cleaner, and interestingly, there is now also a free version! If you’ve ever had to do something in print or with varying resolutions, you’ll understand how magnificent this tool is.

The only thing I’m not crazy about is the new icon. I have a dock on my desktop with flat Windows 8 icons, so it didn’t really fit. So I decided to make my own. If you want to use it too, grab it below!

And finally, I woke up this past Saturday and read through the week’s webcomic updates in Comic Chameleon when I was struck with the idea “what if I get Off-Stage into this app?!”. You may have seen me post about it, and if you’re interested in helping me achieve this, read about it here (only takes a minute).

Next week: I expect more flailing in search of new opportunities.
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 66

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 bit disappointing. I did get the BlaFF storyline plotted out fully in Twine, which was great because it gave me an instant visual overview of which parts were too linear and which had too much going on at once. I added one location and everything feels better balanced now. The added bonus is that I now have an accurate count of all the clues you can collect during the game and where they are referenced. I was afraid I had planned for too many, but the total number came up short of the space I had reserved for it, so that’s good, I can pad some things out and add more info to find.

But then, bad news. Indie Fund reviewed my submission and decided that it didn’t quite fit with what they were looking for in their portfolio. I hadn’t expected much but it was still disappointing. The next day I heard back from Double Fine too – they really liked the game, but with two guys manning their publishing department part-time and three projects on their hands already they didn’t have space on their docket, but it was still nice to hear. I’ve got a few more emails out, so we’ll see how that goes in the coming weeks.

Mostly it shook me awake to the fact that the core game needs work. I’ve been caught up in polishing what I essentially made in one month, but it needs new features. I’ve just been afraid to break the whole thing open again. But it has to be done. I got some good tips from people that played the demo, some of which I had already thought of myself, so it’s time to put stuff like that in and make the game match up with the promise.

The only problem is I don’t have much leeway to spend time on it right now. I’d love to, but life costs money, and making games is not exactly a quick return-of-investment. So I decided to pivot back to illustration for a while. I could do a Kickstarter for BlaFF, but setting that up would take me another month, and there’s no guarantee that it will work out, especially in the current sour climate in the games industry. I needed to step away from all that anxiety and get back to what I know I can do well: drawing. (I have more thoughts on this that I’ll put in a seperate blogpost.)

But for now I’m good doing illustration. I got two emails recently for interesting and substantial projects. They’re both international, so it’s also a new challenge in figuring out how to process that in my administration. And if you’re reading this and have a nice assignment for me: I’m available for hire!

next week: drawing drawing drawing.
Week 65

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.

Another week of battling the flu, though by the end of the week I conquered it and got back to work.

On wednesday I dragged myself out the door to have lunch with Richard Ram about him possibly doing the audio for Black Feather Forest. Richard is a cool guy and I think we were on the same page regarding what the soundtrack should be, and we were even wearing the same shirt, so clearly he is a man of taste. So I think we could work together well when the time comes to get started on the audio, somewhere around the end of the year. Richard is currently still working on the audio for Penarium, made by my friends over at Self Made Miracle.

Safely back in my quarantine zone I got to work on the proposal for the possible investor. Luckily I had a design document ready that I only needed to strip some irrelevant parts out of, and I had a solid demo, so all I needed was one bugfix and a rough estimation of the budget. I think I kept it pretty reasonable, so we’ll see how it goes once they get back to me.

Once I felt good enough to do some real work again I drew a few cartoons for dutch news site Fresh. They had an open call for illustrators and they liked my work so from now on I’ll be drawing some news-related spot illustration for them every week. You can check that out here (if you’re dutch).

I also tinkered with different materials for my sprites in BlaFF following a suggestion on the Adventure Creator forum. It allows me to tint my characters, which will be useful in later scenes where it’s dark or where there are hard shadows that the characters travel through. The effect is subtle but I like it. I might hit up SpriteLamp at a later stage to really make the lighting dynamic.

I’ve taken to the abbreviation BlaFF now, as BFF reminded me too much of, well, the term BFF, and having the ‘la’ in there makes it sound more like the full title – but maybe like you were slurring it ha. What do you think?

Inbetween I also made good progress in Alien Isolation, and I checked out A Golden Wake by Grundislav Games, a cool retro adventure game that pushes my 1920’s-loving button pretty hard.

Next week: plotting out the plot, one scene at a time, in Twine.
Dinerdate 2.0

Long ago I did a webcomic called Dinerdate, about a weird bunch of people hanging out in a diner. I ended it because it was sort of going nowhere, but I always liked the idea and for two years off and on I worked on a reboot. I wrote about 50 strips, a complete first chapter, but some things didn’t quite click yet (even though I think the arc is strong) so I shelved it indefinitely. A big focus of the new version was Amsterdam, which, along with some other elements and characters, I rolled into Off-Stage after that. But Dinerdate 2.0 continues to occupy a folder in my Dropbox, to maybe be revisited someday (I have some nice ideas to tie it into the Off-Stage universe).

Here are the first two strips.
A former drug addict, a priest and an investor walk into a games expo…

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

INDIGO, the games expo put on by the Dutch Game Garden, was pretty intense this year. 32 local devs gathered on the spaceous ninth floor of music palace TivoliVredenburg for two days to showcase their games in development. I was there too with Black Feather Forest.

I saw some familiar faces, some fresh new ones, and talked to a ton of people. Seeing visitors take the time to play through the entire demo and most of them raving about it afterwards was a really great experience, and a much needed refreshment after the past few weeks. Thank you to everyone who came out and stopped by! My parents, uncle and some good friends included. Also dinner with my Game Oven friends was a good time, and my booth neighbours from Wolfdog Interactive kept me going through the long hours. And a special shout-out to Benjamin who came to help me out on friday evening after work when my legs had turned to jelly. You rock dude!

It’s hard to describe all the moments and conversations from those two days, but I wanted to highlight a few that really stood out.

As a kid I used to read Power Unlimited, the biggest games magazine in the Netherlands. Of course like any publication it’s run by normal people, but having looked up at these guys in my teens it felt pretty special to have them stand in front of my booth checking out my game and following me on twitter now. Check that off my bucket list.

Speaking of nostalgia, the memories left behind by the game Broken Sword are what compelled me to start making my own games, and then all of a sudden I run into a programmer from Revolution Software, and a dutch one at that, on the show floor. It was really cool to meet Joost and exchange adventure gaming stories.

Near the end of the VIP night on thursday an older man came up to me. He started on the demo as I explained what the game was about, then he turned to me and asked me why I cared so much about this particular true story. From there we got caught up in a passionate exchange of ideas, where he revealed that he was a recovered stock-broker-turned-drug-addict who just started learning about computers three days ago. After getting clean he had set out on a quest to learn about himself, and had become a very joie-de-vivre carpe-diem kind of guy. He wasn’t even on the guest list that night, he had just wandered in and was having a blast talking to people. We spoke for about half an hour and at the end shook each other’s hand with a well-meaning I haven’t experienced in a long time. Like we were both genuinely excited to see the other enjoying life, and wishing eachother well.

The second day of the expo was also punctuated by an unexpected meeting. 5 minutes before the end of the show a man dressed in a priest’s garb came up to me. I recognized him as Roderick Vonhögen, also known as the podcast priest. He hadn’t played the demo yet but had read all about the project on my website before coming here and went on to tell me how incredibly cool he thought it was. He was even familiar with The Walking Dead games, which was perhaps even more of a surprise. It was super cool to have had a chance to talk with him before packing up and heading off, and I took his encouragement to do a Kickstarter and get on Steam to heart.

I’d been on the fence about Kickstarter for a while, but after I left the hubbub of INDIGO behind that night and checked my email on the bus home I saw that perhaps a Kickstarter was not even going to be necessary…knock on wood. More info on that very exciting email soon.

All in all INDIGO was a great succes and I want to thank the Dutch Game Garden for letting me be a part of it.
Week 64

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.

Heyy! It’s been a while. Doing something is kinda hard when you’re in bed with the flu.

But two weeks ago I did do something! Mostly recovering from INDIGO. Interviews I had given popped up here and there and there were some emails to answer.
The Gamebites podcast dicussed Black Feather Forest in episode 302, Youtuber Julie Sunfield has an INDIGO compilation video up, and both Gamer.nl and Gamecloud wrote a bit about the game. I’m pretty happy with the coverage.

I also worked on a pitch for a serious game project (finally received the RFP though it didn’t give me much more info than I already had). It had been a while since I flexed my pitch writing muscles, and with the limited info available I think I did alright.

Inbetween I played The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter, which is a great and gorgeous little interactive story. And I read The book Dead Mountain about the Dyatlov Pass incident, a mystery I could easily see an adventure game being made about.

Then, last week, I was sick as a dog. And I heard the pitch had been awarded to another company. I couldn’t be too bummed about it though. Plus I had more pressing issues to worry about – like my pharyngitis and waking up in cold sweats every three hours.

Next week: feeling better! and dipping into political cartooning.
NOPE

Doing concept art and color thumbnails for new Black Feather Forest locations this week. Looking forward to building this scene.
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.

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 59

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 right: I got a job offer the friday before (for a freelance project), and we went to have lunch and talk it over. It went well I think, we’ll see what comes of it when everything is sorted out.

On wednesday I showed Black Feather Forest at the Dutch Game Garden networking lunch, to positive reactions. The people that played loved how it looked and played the demo to the end, so that’s good. I also met the good people from Wispfire who are working on a cool narrative adventure game too.

Following the lunch I fixed a few bugs I noticed (a restart button isn’t very useful if it doesn’t reset your progress on the map), and refined the cursor system based on an interesting observation made by Game Oven‘s Adriaan. Now I just need to hack Adventure Creator a bit so it actually works too.

On thursday I pulled out my ol’ Yeti mic to do a voiceacting test for the game a friend of mine on the AC forums is making. It was fun to do, especially because it’s a kind of Monkey Island comedy game so the voices can be very expressive.

I am planning to make a trailer for Black Feather Forest soon so this was a nice reminder that I could probably do the voiceover for that myself. Besides that I also did some illustrations for a calendar that’s coming out in a few months.

Then the week closed out with some good news: Black Feather Forest was selected to be part of the INDIGO showcase put on by the Dutch Game Garden during the Dutch Film Festival. It sounds like a complicated construction, but what it boils down to is that I’ll be showing the demo at the top floor of the new TivoliVredenburg music venue in the center of Utrecht at the end of this month. Exciting times! Another things I can cross off my bucket list. I’ve exhibited at game shows before but never with my own game.

Next week: how to cut a trailer for a game that’s only about 15% done.
Week 58

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.

Not a lot happened in week 57. I think we were mostly recovering from the weird badness the week before. Waking up to a twitter stream filled with #welovegamedevs tweets was very nice. I set up a Patreon and sent out some emails for research and new business opportunities, but other than that it wasn’t super productive.

On Saturday Swordfish and Friend, a record store and art shop started by some friends of mine, opened its doors in downtown Utrecht. My girlfriend has some of her paintings up for sale there, I am super proud.

Last week I was a bit of a mix of all kinds of things. I redesigned the menus in Black Feather Forest, upgraded Adventure Creator to version 1.38 and dealt with the bugs resulting from that, wrote a bit about a very old adventure game I used to work on, set up an itch.io storefront and uploaded 15 Minutes to it, got some Kickstarter advice from Sam Farmer and continued to get worked up over #GamerGate.

On saturday I spent all day in town with my girlfriend, away from the internet. That was very nice.

Next week: a high-profile business offer!?
From the vault: The Majestic Conspiracy

One morning in 2004 or so, I got up and decided I wanted to make a video game.

I was about 15 or 16, I had just finished Broken Sword, and went in search of a program that could let me make an adventure game myself. I tried a few different ones, and eventually settled on Adventure Game Studio. With it I started my first game, based on a 44-page comic I had drawn the years before. It was called The Majestic Conspiracy.

For the next ten years I worked on it off and on, through several iterations of the script and the art style, through multiple versions of AGS, four years of game design college and an internship. It was the classic too-ambitious-to-finish first project. So today I thought I’d write about it, to honor its demise.

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Gotta get back in time

Rewatched Back To The Future last weekend, still a fantastic movie. I had forgotten most of the specifics since watching it last. Then Huey Lewis and The News came on iTunes shuffle, and I had to open Photoshop and crank this one out.

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