Tim makes things

The ramblings of a dutch illustrator and game developer

Tag: hedgefield

  • Hedgefield Quarterly Review 2021.2

    Hedgefield Quarterly Review 2021.2

    Hey there! In the Hedgefield Quarterly Review I look back at the work I did in the past three months, both as a diary for myself and a way to consistently update you on what I’m up to. I talk project details, achievements, and the highs and lows of self-employment. Come follow along!

    You can find older entries here.

    At the start of the month I wrapped up work on the second book from The Recharge Company. They’ve been a longtime client, and this time they bundled all their wisdom to help you get the most out of life. I drew a series of more abstract illustrations and mental models to make the book more visually pleasing to read through.

    https://worksmartplaysmart.nl

    I was also asked to make another animation for Contronics Dry Misting, which you may remember I created an elaborate animation for last year. This year was their 40th anniversary, and this time they commissioned a motion-graphics-esque video to celebrate their accomplishments.

    It wasn’t a style I had worked a lot in before, and the deadline was tight, so I was a little worried, but in the end I managed to bang this thing out in about three or four days, surprising even myself. Pretty pleased with the result!

    And for the final project in the work-for-hire category, a local marketing agency asked me to create some comic pages to promote a shoe brand. The scripts were prepared for me, so I could do what I do best and create some cool page layouts and linework. At least, I thought so, turns out the client was too smitten with the tight vector style of the concept mockup made by the agency, and that’s not a style that suits me particularly well. So unfortunately after trying a bunch of designs I had to pass on that one, but hey, that also happens sometimes. I knew drawing honest-to-god comic pages for an ad agency was too good to be true 😉

    And of course work for app startup Immer continued as well. We shipped an update that adds reminders, and next quarter there will be a long-awaited update that adds discovery and search, along with a bunch more books, something I’m personally very excited about.

    So I think it’s safe to say business is good. And while all of that is fantastic, it was also eating time away from the further development of my game idea that I mentioned last time. And from what time I could put in, I started to get the idea that this was going to be a big undertaking. Like applying-for-funding-and-assembling-a-team big. And then there’s my part-time day job too! So I had to make a decision that I’ve been considering, pondering, and putting off for quite some time now.

    I quit my job.

    I’ve spent more than five great years doing UX design and branding for Yoast, and it’s been a wonderful safe haven, but faced with all the possibilities in front of me currently, I had to admit that SEO just isn’t where my passion lies. I enjoyed solving the design puzzles it threw at me, and it taught me a ton, but I have no ambition to dive further into that world and master that product or domain. So it was time to move on.

    That was a scary decision! And I’m going to miss having my co-designers to bounce around ideas with, but getting to spend more time with the projects I love is already giving me much renewed energy. I look forward to the months to come, getting settled into this crazy new routine, and I’ll take you along for the ride!

  • Hedgefield Quarterly Review 2021.1

    Hedgefield Quarterly Review 2021.1

    Hey there! In the Hedgefield Quarterly Review I look back at the work I did in the past three months, both as a diary for myself and a way to consistently update you on what I’m up to. I talk project details, achievements, and the highs and lows of self-employment. Come follow along!

    You can find older entries here.

    The first quarter of 2021 sure was a wild one! I started off by releasing a small game called WanderWoods….

    It’s a celebration of all the chill forest walks I’ve been on since the pandemic started. And in turn it made the walks more fun, because each time I’d spot something new that I wanted to add to the game.

    I used procedural generation with a few rulesets to generate the forest, but it’s real difficult to fully approximate the wild and random growth of nature with just that. So I’m looking forward to using an upcoming plugin that lets me hand paint details into the procedural environment. Until then I think I have to call this thing finished.

    Wireframing a new Immer experience

    This year I’m also continuing work on the Immer app. The first version of this reading app my friends are making is live in the dutch App Store, and now we’re looking to the future. I’ve been prototyping some new features and a bunch of UI interactions while the others focus on the next round of investments, so that hopefully next quarter we can go full steam on the next update.

    In the meantime I was also asked to be a WordPress release lead for version 5.7. This meant I had to wrangle all the design issues planned for this release and make sure they all got the attention they needed in a timely manner. I’ve been part of the WordPress design team for a few years now but I’d never been actively involved in a release cycle. Luckily 5.7 was a relatively small release so it was a nice opportunity to dip my toe in. I wrote about my experiences on the Yoast blog and I wrote a guide in the WordPress Handbook for others wanting to try the same thing.

    Then something started happening. Different ideas and plans and opportunities came together in a way that I had to take notice.

    It started with something completely unrelated. I was walking my dogs in the town I grew up in when I ran into an older man. He also had a dog, which usually means: make some awkward smalltalk while our dogs sniff eachother. But his first question caught me off-guard:

    “Are you from around here?”, he asked with earnest interest. Probably because he seemed to know just about everybody in the town center, which I noticed during the next half hour that we stood there talking. I explained that I was originally from here but had moved away long ago. He, on the other hand, had just moved back here after ten years in Spain, and now runs his own translation company from his monumental house in the town center. We proceeded to discuss travel, careers, and our life stories.

    He asked me “would you ever want to go back to doing your own thing?” “Sure,” I replied, “I mean I make a good living now with decent assignments, but…” and he nodded in agreement, getting what I was referring to; “Yeah, that desire never leaves you, huh.” I felt understood.

    Some weeks later I came across an online course about gamedev that wasn’t only about making a game – I feel like I’ve got a pretty good handle on that now – but also about the business and marketing aspects, things I generally shy away from. I do fine releasing small games on itch, but I came up with several projects over the years that got too big for me to execute alone, or in my free time only. And of course the prestige of having a game up on Steam sounds pretty good.

    Anyway, I dug into that course and found myself getting excited again about the possibilities. I drafted a list of the prototypes I have worked on in the last few years and together with some dev friends judged which one was the most viable. Out of that came a pretty cool and wild idea that I want to seriously develop and think could be a hit. Everyone I talk to about it gets excited too, so I feel like this is the time to act on it.

    As a sort of self-affirmation I finally added my company to the Dutch Game Industry Directory, and registered a Steam developer account. That felt pretty good.

    Now to work on the project pitch… more on that next time.

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

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

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

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

    Still, I did things:

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  • Hedgefield Quarterly Review 2020.1

    Hedgefield Quarterly Review 2020.1

    Hello and welcome, to the first Hedgefield Quarterly Review.

    As the name implies, this will be a place for me to take stock of what I’ve accomplished in the past three months, and share it with you. It’s a nice middle road between a handful of tweets, and a yearly review, which I tried to do last year but resulted in an OVERWHELMING Google Doc that I haven’t dared look at since. The plan is to write these as a bookend to the close of each financial quarter, a good a time as any to look back and see whether I made any duckets (or not).

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