Tim makes things

The ramblings of dutch illustrator and game developer Hedgefield

Category: Freelancing

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

  • Week 55

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.

    Last week I took some time to decompress after the deadline. I pulled up my Steam backlog and finished The Wolf Among Us (so good), caught up with Team Fortress 2 and played the shit out of State of Decay Breakdown. I loved State of Decay but the story in the main campaign had me beat at some point. My main dude kept dying and critical missions failed. Breakdown lets go of all that and just lets you build a home base somewhere and then survive infinitely. Unlike for instance DayZ, they’re very good at creating narrative around these random characters, by generating missions where they get lost or spot a special zombie. It’s really fun to play, even though the AI is sometimes absurd.

    I also binged on The Killing’s final season. That show has also been an inspiration in how Black Feather Forest came to be, and I’m glad to have more of it, even if it is just 6 more episodes.

    Somewhere along the week I took a look at the intro of my game, where you are introduced to the main characters, and went to rewrite it. I realized it was the only conversation free of player choices, so I made it a bit more engaging and flavorful.

    On twitter I saw Fork Parker tweet an image of someone who had reimagined a scene from True Detective as a Lucasarts adventure game. It looked awesome, and I hope the people who crave that to be real can find some satisfaction in my game when it comes out. The creator, Lazerhorse aka Arthur Doyle, was even Canadian himself, a nice coincidence.

    Next week: some actual work???

  • Week 54

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.

    Last week was the final week of the second development period for Black Feather Forest, its goal being to polish up the demo to submit to an event here in Holland. I’m glad to report it was succesful, which means you can play the new version right here!

    Content-wise not a lot has changed; I’ve mostly fixed bugs, edited dialogue here and there and added a few of the planned features to the GUI. Notably the Dossier is nicer to look at, and the dialogue UI should play nicely on all resolutions now. Initally I wanted to also add some new locations, but with the time I had I decided it was better to make the existing content solid before moving on to new challenges. And the past week left me no other option when a handful of game-breaking bugs came to light!

    being a game developer is sometimes a bit like being an explorer, because you often see really weird things that nobody has ever seen before. Especially when there are several plugins working together in ways you have no idea about.

    Things like a conversation with an NPC only triggering if it was the first location you visited in the game. Or menus that you explicitely disabled popping up again if you press the skip button at the wrong time. Colliders rotating on the X-axis when a character turned on the Y-axis. Cutscenes that only run half of their actions. Z-buffers that sort differently between engine and build. Every day is a new adventure.

    Luckily both of these plugins are made by devs that really understand how to run good and swift tech support. So thanks Chris and Tony.

    So now that the demo is ‘done’ I can comfortably start adding new content. Basically starting the production towards the final product.

    And finally, there is also a matching url now: www.blackfeatherforest.com

    Next week: the tale of how I’m probably going to break all of the things by upgrading the software.

    If you have other topics you’d like to hear about in a future blogpost, let me know in the comments.

  • Week 53

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.

    Last week I got some great feedback on the Black Feather Forest demo. Articles ended up on warpdoor,  indiegames.com, rockpapershotgun, badogames, indiegamemag, and I even got a call from Canadian radio! I’ll be on their morning show later today.

    When you’re working on a thing in isolation for a while you start to lose sight of whether it’s any good or not. I hadn’t expected people to get so excited about it yet, so this definitely cements that I’m going to finish this game. Working on it is so satisfying that sometimes I forget I’m not earning any money this way. That will have to be stage two of this campaign.

    Sadly there was a problem with my new internet connection at the new house so I’ve had to subsist off of the wifi of parents, friends, cafe’s the past week. Not having reliable internet is such a burden, and when emails pour in and you have to participate in heated discussions in comment threads that’s a bad position to be in.

    There was a bit of discussion about the influences in the game that led me to de-emphasize some mentions in the script. The people I spoke with were very accomodating and I think we came to a good solution.

    In terms of progress, I’ve been working on a new iteration of the ingame GUI. I’m still having problems hooking a few menus together the way I want to, but at least they look good now. A big issue I had before was that the dialogue GUI didn’t scale well on lower resolutions. I finally sat down and adjusted everything, so now the look is unified and works at any size.

    menu

    Aside from that I’ve been mostly doing polish on existing content, and adding new animations for all the characters to make the whole thing feel more alive.

    Next week: the premiere of the new demo build.

  • Week 52, or Year One

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.

    It’s hard to fathom that it’s been a year since I started working for myself.

    Said goodbye to my desk job designing games for someone else (honestly it was a sweet job, what was I thinking) and started my own thing.

    I got some assignments pretty quickly, thanks mainly to friends/colleagues putting in a good word, and thus I started incing my way up. I’ve been able to carve out a pretty okay living so far, struggling some months when the work dries up for a bit, but enough to move up to a nice studio apartment with my girlfriend and pay the bills (and jump into a Steam Sale every now and again).

    And now, 52 weeks later, I announced my first solo commercial title! Holy cow I hadn’t even thought of that. When people asked me around week 45 what I was going to do for my ‘anniversary’ I shrugged. Turns out week 52 was pretty special after all, thanks to the fellas at Warpdoor. More on that in next week’s update.

    But for now I want to thank the fine folks that offered their support, good conversations, and/or advice this past year. Some names that come to mind: Jens, Michiel, Adriaan, Bojan, Benjamin, Ilona, Lowen, Anke, Alwin, Niels, Esther, mom and dad, Ralph, Anne, Matt, Chris, and ofcourse you, dear reader.

    Then, presskit! I am perhaps disproportionately excited to have this bit of php code, but if you as a journalist or what have you ever needed any info on my company or my games, the presskit’s the place to be.

    So now, back to the daily grind.

    Before HoT started getting picked up by the media I found myself mostly doing small tasks – a subconcious way to avoid having to deal with the large and nebulous tasks still in the backlog. However it wasn’t without its merits, the demo segments are a lot more polished now. “But,” I thought on tuesday, “what actual new content was added to the game? None!” So I got to it and started doing animations, and made a start on a new scene. Then over the weekend I went on a small vacation with friends, during which the social media coverage really fired up.

    Next week: tales of exciting new improvements to the interface, and great feedback on the demo from cool people.

  • Week 51

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.

    Last week the heat had me beat a little bit, but I came back and did some animation for the opening of my game.

    menu

    This is the title card shot after the intro cinematic. I painted it on tuesday and animated it with all kinds of parallax effects on wednesday. A classic case of ‘make a plan before you do something’, because after I had finished making it in After Effects, it turns out Unity Free cannot play video files (without excessive hacking or plugins). But it was fun to do so I guess time wasn’t completely wasted. I’ll redo it in-engine this week, which should only take a fraction of the time.

    Inbetween on wednesday I jumped through the final hoops to hand off my old apartment, so now that chapter is closed. And thank heavens, all the stuff I had to arrange around that ‘project’ ended up tripling my phone bill this month. Let’s hope the next person enjoys it as much as I did.

    In the meantime I also continued my research into the background of the BFF narrative. Even though the story is completely fictional I still want to accurately represent the cultural and societal factors are that could lead to such events taking place. So I’ve read what is known as ‘the Forsaken Report’, in which the Commission of Inquiry describes real cases in great detail, which has been a fascinating read. I’ve also reached out to some community members and CBC reporters in Prince George, Prince Rupert, and Vancouver, and a cultural expert studying the Northwest to learn more about the heritage of the Haida people.

    At the end of the week I stayed at my parent’s house for two days (came to see them, stayed for the wifi ha), and got to spend some time sitting next to my dad at the kitchen table while we both drew. Check out his facebook page with space age art over here.

    father and son

  • Week 50

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.

    I know I said I would work on the Fawlty Towers game, but shortly after that I saw a call for submissions from INDIGO, a dutch games convention put on by the Dutch Game Garden, and it is in association with the Dutch Film Festival. So that put a revision on Black Feather Forest at number one on the todo list. Niels once described the script of BFF as being very filmic, so that makes this a good crossover venue to show the game.

    Besides that I set up the new version of Trusted Soil, my graduation project with Anne Bras, in Adventure Game Studio. Having worked with Unity exclusively for a while now had made me forget how easy it is to get something basic up and running in AGS. With a bit of luck I can copy a lot of code from the original demo over to this version.

    Anne and I decided a while ago to make the full version of Trusted Soil (read more about it here) and try to sell it on Steam. We’re doing it in Lucasarts pixel-art style now, and I’m concerning myself full with the programming side. For that reason we attracted Misja van Laatum (artist on Indiana Jones and The Fountain Of Youth) for the backgrounds, and Molly Carroll (recent HKU graduate) to do the animations.

  • Week 49

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.

    Amidst calling plumbers and garages and landlords, I returned to porting my Fawlty Towers game to Unity. An update in the Adventure Creator package made it much easier to work with the built-in Unity 2D stuff – especially the Polygonal navmesh feature, which allows me to map out where the characters can walk by drawing a shape, a galactic improvement over using a bunch of rectangular to map out the area.

    Navmesh rectangles vs a polygonal navmesh:

    The sensible thing to do would be perhaps to work more on Black Feather Forest (which I did do some GUI design for), but seeing the Monty Python Ministry of Silly Walks game appear in the App Store, with narration by John Cleese (meaning he condones it) made me hopeful he might look kindly upon my Fawlty Towers game aswell, so I felt the breeze of my attention go in that direction presently. Also because the scope of that game is so compact that it could realistically be finished in a sprint or two.

    I also completed Wolfenstein The New Order which is rad.

  • Week 48

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.

    As I write from the keyboard of my iPhone in my new apartment (no internet yet), I’m finishing up some freelance work and doing a bit of painting, while my girlfriend does the same next to me at the kitchen table.

    Notes on week 47 were scarce, aside from my visit to the Dutch Game Garden networking lunch, where I saw some friends I hadn’t seen in a while and showed them the Black Feather Forest demo, aswell as hook up some potential new assignments. Otherwise I was ensorcelled by the explosions of news from the E3 games expo, then went on to do chores in the new place.

    This past week, while living out of boxes, I’ve been designing revisions on the major systems of the game to tighten up the demo with, and messed with some first-person stuff in Unity for a different project. Lighting alone is giving me headaches so I don’t know if I should stray into 3D territory too far.

    Inbetween I’ve been playing some games from my Steam backlog, including the excellent Wolfenstein and Watch Dogs, and Murdered Soul Suspect, which impressed me with its investigative gameplay and gave me new ideas for my own games.

    I also wrote a Dutch translation for Fullbright’s Gone Home and wrote a story for the Lowlands writing contest.

    Honestly there isn’t much more to fill this update with, but omitting two weeks in a row seemed lame. I’ve got enough earnings now to live comfortably for a while, and I feel no immediate need to do a ton of work, I just want to enjoy the good life right now so I’m thankful I am able to until the next assignment is set in stone and I can get to work on that.

    Sometimes that’s all you need.

    20140624-212024-76824531.jpg

  • Week 46

    <This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.

    This week I wanted to set a new goal to work towards and just generally figure out what to do next, but everything surrounding me moving to the new place took up all the space in my head, so I’ll defer that decision to the near future. I’ve got some money coming in so I can idle for a little while.

    I was thinking the other day about the ol’ saying ‘time is money’, but I realize for me, as a freelancer, it’s mostly the reverse – money equals more free time, the stretching out of my independance.

    The good people at Gamesys contacted me to do more illustrations for them, and I’m having fun with it. Their mascot is really turning into a fleshed out little character.

    I also tinkered with Unity a bit, trying out Ben Esposito’s first-person drifter package for a project I want to do, and considering whether it would be doable for me to make a 3D game. And I think it is. I would only need geometry, and even with my limited 3D skills I think I could pull that off for a short game. I just can’t shake the feeling that that particular story needs to be in a first-person perspective.

    In this lull of a week I decided to take the time to clean my server up a bit. I had originally started out with my first comic at dinerdate.net, and then over the years added on more domains using the same hosting account. As such, my portfolio site was a subfolder on that account, which didn’t make a lot of sense. Plus I hadn’t touched dinerdate in about 5 years? So it was time to drop that resource-hogging wordpress install and database, and reorganize the file tree. And everything seems to work still! It’s a miracle.

    As a send-off, here is a small selection of my favorite strips from dinerdate.

    2007-05-10
    2007-08-19
    2005-11-01

  • Week 44

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.

    A tumultuous week! On monday I got to view an apartment in Utrecht with my girlfriend, and we decided to pull the trigger on it right that morning. So that means moving soon! A lot to think about, but aside from the inherent boon of being together I’ll also be closer to the dutch games industry hotspot.

    On tuesday Bounden was released to much fanfare. It’s incredible that the game came together with no delays or major problems and became something really special. I’m glad to have been a part of it.

    The rest of the week I worked on some freelance drawing assignments, posted about Black Feather Forest in a number of places, and dug up some unused Bounden concept art for fans to gawk at.

    I also updated my portfolio, not so much in terms of new projects but mostly the infrastructure. I had “NEW!” ribbons on each fresh project, but those were still scattered across the various pages so it wasn’t real easy to see that stuff at a glimpse. So I added a rotating banners at the top, much like the iTunes Store. And in doing so I broke the lightbox for the images, so I replaced that with something much more lightweight, slick and fast. And you can link directly to certain projects now! I had put in those anchors long ago but they never worked until now. I figured it out!

    And the week closed out with some bad news: Black Feather Forest was not selected for the competition I entered it into. With 60 entries I can totally understand the high-quality and cool games they selected to showcase Dutch gamedev (Bounden is in there! And hooray for Westerado), but it’s still disappointing that the outcome of those weeks of hard work amounts to “Sorry, good luck hey.” But I’ll keep working on it and responses for other places are positive, so that’s motivating.

  • Week 43

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.

    At the start of this week I had a dream that I ran into an older woman working for a newspaper that had just lost their cartoonist, and I managed to entice her into paying me good money for two cartoons a month. That was a harsh dream to wake up from, ha.

    On monday I worked on the pitch document to accompany the demo of my game. Writing everything down properly and readable for others made things a lot clearer for me too. And it spawned a few new ideas at the same time. I also received some great feedback from Niels ‘t Hooft that made the story stronger with a few small tweaks.

    The rest of the week was basically polish, adding in some low priority things and fixing bugs. It’s funny how no matter if it’s a 3-year projects or a four-week sprint, the ‘last 20% drag’ always occurs, where you slow down on doing the last few minor things.

    When I sat across from Niels in a cafe four weeks ago and said “I want to have a demo ready by the 15th”, I had no idea if I was going to make that deadline. That thursday at noon, I proudly submitted my application. Time to sit back and twiddle my thumbs.

    So I can finally say that for the past month, I have been working on a game called Black Feather Forest. I’ll talk more about that in a following blog post.

    On friday I did some more painting in Mischief, and otherwise mostly decompressed from my gamedev sprint. On saturday I celebrated my birthday by petting some monkeys with my girlfriend.

  • Week 42

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.

    Development on my upcoming game continued this past week. When the demo is done by the end of this week I’ll be able to tell you more about just what the hell I’ve been making.

    On monday and tuesday I worked on the first two scenes of the game, writing the dialogue and setting everything up just right. Apart from a few minor things I was very happy with the outcome. The workflow I had established worked well and allowed for a pretty quick setup of a scene. I also iterated on the story and made it readable to people who knew nothing about the project in preparation for the pitch document I’ll be writing this week.

    On wednesday I set up the next big scene in the game, which went very smoothly. Because I had finished well on time I set aside work that night to play Kentucky Route Zero Act III. Apart from being impressed as always by the visuals and the tone of the narrative, it reminded me that it is okay to write a little more than bare minimum if it is interesting to read through.

    On thursday I applied this newfound insight to finishing the last of the in-game conversations, and it was a doozy.

    I’m very thankful for Dialogue System For Unity, a plugin that made the management of these long branching conversations a lot easier. And most importantly, it integrated with Adventure Creator, which made it top choice over things like Dialoguer or Playmaker.

    I spent the rest of the day customizing the UI and wiring up things like the fast-travel map and the clue system.

    On friday I took a break from development to work on a freelance assignment. I was faced with the challenge of drawing a character in vector, but I’m not good enough with vector tools that I could pull that off in two hours and have it look good too. So I decided to give Mischief another try. I sang its praises before but man it really came through for me this time. I could draw exactly like I would in Photoshop (without all the fancy tricks like clipping masks and blending modes though, so back to basics, time to be a real artist again ha!), but it took the form of infinitely scaleable vectors, ending up with the best of both worlds. I went to buy it right after.

    Saturday night I tinkered with the game’s code a bit and fixed a bunch of bugs. As it usually goes, I was ready to make a new build and then suddenly all kinds of things came to light. But I managed to fix a good few eyesores. On sunday I mostly worked on missing art and more bugfixes.

  • Week 41

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.

    Week 41 was a beacon of productivity. My body tried to slow me down on tuesday when I started feeling like I was getting sick, muscle pain and nausea. But I refused to give in and by the next morning after a nice fever dream I was fine again and ready to keep going.

    I worked through most of the graphics I need for the May 15th demo of my game; at least the essential gameplay stuff like characters and backgrounds. I plan to spend the final days of next week filling it up with extra stuff like menu graphics and animations. I got a little ambitious with the size of my textures which resulted in the display drive crashing when the game was running! I think it couldn’t handle all this HEAT. It’s fine now.

    This week will be all about the gameplay programming. I have the parts to make the whole, I just need to plug in a load of dialogue. I already did some inital work on that during last week to set up cameras and triggers and all that, so it helps to have the grunt work out of the way.

    Near the end of the week I also snagged a new freelance job, so at least once I’m done with the demo a little money will be coming in again, that’s a consoling thought.

    Maybe the most thankful job I did this week was planting a forest made up of prefab trees. I wanted the rees in the background to animate, so going with single trees was the best solution, which also reduces strain on the processor since it only needs to load in one tree and duplicate it. Then I wrote a script that offsets each animation so they don’t all sway at once, and voila, a beautiful forest ready to go!

  • Week 40

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.

    Things really started coming together on my game this week. I’d been living mostly in a test environment last week where every game element was thrown together in one space, so when I created a proper scene with some nice background art it felt like things were going somewhere.

    Early in the week I did some resolution tests, and uprezzed and tweaked the characters. I was pretty satisfied with the designs I had made but those were still considered placeholder so not nearly high enough resolution to use in the game, so I had to repaint the edges to tighten things up.

    On thursday I sketched out the rest of the locations, and finally got some dialogue in the game so it actually started to feel like a game. It was time to make build 0.2. I also wrote a post explaining deltaTime for some guys on the Idle Forums, an elusive and abstract concept in programming.

    On friday I had lunch with Niels ‘t Hooft to catch up and share our current projects. It’s great to chat with someone who shares your passion for a certain thing. After that I squashed some bugs and tightened up some UI elements then left everything be for the Kingsday holiday weekend.

  • Week 39

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.

    It’s strange how much you can disappear into a hole when you’re deep in gamedev. I’ve been working on it all week, but it doesn’t feel like work. I’m having fun.

    Even butting up against a problem that grinds things to a halt was fun because such a situation promises a mental exercise, pushing my problem-solving skills to the max. Each problem is a puzzle, and in an almost detective-like way, again, you have to put the pieces together.

    So that was thursday, when I spent about an hour lying on the carpet here trying to unite the design that I had with the tools that I had. The days before that I worked a lot on setting up the basic infrastructure of the gameplay mechanics. Talking to people is an important aspect of this game, and so that system needs a lot of thought and effort. It’s not all the way there yet but it’s taking shape.

    The final thing I did this week was work on some idle animations. It’s cool how a few blinks and a head-turn already do a lot to make a character seem alive. I’m looking a lot at Puzzle Agent, or Grickle’s style in general. I’m pretty good at animation but at some point it just becomes such a timesink that I’d rather do things as efficiently as possible. And this is not a case where I have time for tweaking the bounce in a walkcycle – in three weeks I need to have a solid demo to submit for an event. Let’s see if I can make it!

    I realize this post does little to clarify what the actual game is, and I’m keeping it that way for a little while, so in the meantime have a moodboard.

  • Week 38

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.

    Woops, almost forgot to write a blogpost about last week, that’s how absorbed I’ve been in my work. That must be a good sign, right?

    Since I’ve gone indie I’ve been looking for a project that could get me genuinely excited to work on it every day, and I think I finally found it. Not that I disliked what I did inbetween but I had to pass through a Valley Of The Shadows type deal I think where everything felt derivative or lacking zest. Sometimes I still feel a pang of worry about that but then I remind myself I don’t have time for that nonsense because game needs to be made, and I get back to work.

    And so far I’m running on schedule very nicely. Instead of planning out the entire project in advance and potentially overwhelming myself I’ve taken to planning out just the month up ahead, setting milestones every friday and generally living from day to day, and it’s working out well. I have a folder with a fuckton of research into style, history, context, culture, mythology and whatnot, a bunch of concept art and an almost entirely fleshed-out story. And even a fancy parallax scrolling prototype. Once I’m done typing this I’m moving on to prototypting the dialogue system.

    I’m not ready to share too much info about this project yet, that will happen soon, and I plan to blog more about the development here in the future, but if you run into me in real life feel free to ask and I’ll talk your ear off about it.

  • Week 37

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.

    When taking stock of my projects this past week I concluded that everything was trucking along nicely, but nothing was really getting done. It’s nice to have different stuff to turn to when you crave some work diversity, but focusing on one thing is ultimately better for productivity, so I decided to leave fawlty towers and off-stage and whatnot be for now and bear down on my detective game.

    Preproduction on a detective story feels a bit like being a detective yourself. You start with a vague conception of the events and then you start to unravel all the clues until you have a sound theory. And much like an investigation, you start at the end and work backwards.

    I’ve been writing the past few days, just a straight-up text file, hashing out the game flow from end to end, and I’m excited about what it’s becoming. This week will mostly be about scoping it appropriately and determining the mechanics and features.

    I like to always incorporate something from the real world in my games, be it an event or a place or a folklore tale. And so during my research I found myself reading through an official Board of Inquiry report from a real murder investigation at one point. That’s about as close to feeling like a true detective as I think I’ll ever get.

  • Week 36

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.

    Week 35 was pretty quiet since I was mostly occupied with doing other stuff and hanging out with people.

    Week 36 I spent working on my own project in Adventure Creator. It’s pretty cool to see that plugin taking shape and a community forming around it. A dedicated forum was finally opened to post bugs and feature requests and showcase projects. I have high hopes for this software turning into the perfect suite for me to make narrative-driven games in.

    Initially I was on the fence about switching my project over, but I decided this week to leave practicalities aside and just dive into the software and get to know it, so I set up a local SVN repo and went to town. Some things are the same, some things are better, and some things are a bit more cumbersome, but overall I almost feel like this is the way to go. For years I’ve fantasized about having all of these pixels and cameras that I could zoom and pan on the fly, plus cross-platform compatibility makes this a shoe-in for my affection.

    On tuesday I had dinner with old classmates and colleagues Bas (Sophisti), Tim (Ronimo) and Bojan (Game Oven) to catch up and to discuss some secret heat brewin in the Game Oven kitchen. On thursday I had dinner with fellow illustrator Ming to catch up and dive into Unity. If Ming would apply his unique art style to games I have no doubt something cool would come out of it. Something to think about. In the meantime go check out his work.

  • Week 34

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independant creative.

    This last week has been mostly been about flipping out.

    Inherent to the life of the freelancer is not having a steady income, but I haven’t really been in that situation yet since I started to pick up steam a few months back. And so after a few days where I had to both pay some hefty incidental costs aswell as suffer cuts on income that was taken for granted, I saw the fictional line in my head where I feel comfortable with my bank balance approach. Which is nonsense because I have several thousands left in my buffer and a payday coming soon, but that immediate feedback of dipping below what I’ve marked as ‘doing well’, together with winding down some assignments caused me to get nervous.

    What helped me was remembering the independant’s motto someone once imparted on me: ‘If these are my problems, I will take em’. Which is to say that worrying about getting paid for drawing, something I already like to do, and I think was made to do, is still infinitely better than worrying about long meetings, getting up at 7 AM, and deadlines on projects I don’t nescessarily like. It’s easy to forget that sometimes.

    It also jolted me into looking for new opportunities. In my quest to ‘add legs under this table’ I started a webshop, wrote to a few potential clients, explored other avenues where I could use my talents, found that I could cut my healthcare costs considerably etcetera. And that, mostly, the feeling that things are happening, is what got me comfortable again.

    So don’t be scared of being scared!

    Anyway, that was like a day or two. The rest of the week I was working on the final designs for the second mascotte I was commissioned to draw, and got Unity to the point where it does all the things I want from it. Having my character walk around in the same space – properly scaled and interacting with the environment – in both engines was good to see. ‘Advanced scripting’ is the only thing left on my test checklist before I can seriously consider porting the whole project over to Unity. In the meantime there is a lot of background art and animation left to do which helps keep the project going outside of this engine stalemate.

  • Week 33

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independant creative.

    Week 32 and 33 were quietly productive, not that much to write about.

    I launched a webshop with Society6! Selling prints of my artwork is something I’ve wanted to do for a while and it was surprisingly easy to set up actually. Though not all of my artwork is nescessarily useful to serve as a print, because when I paint freely I usually don’t think about the resolution. So maybe I’ll make artwork specifically designed for print now. If you have any suggestions or requests let me know in the comments!

    Other than that I continued work on the site mascots – finished one and iterated on the other. Fawlty Towers was also in the mix the past two weeks, with more and more graphics slotting into place. Last week it was mostly deferred in favor of working on an update to the Putin dressup game. I made a bunch of new items that should show up sometime soon. Going back to an old project is often somehow soothing, like “I know how to do this” – the process is fleshed out, the idea is fully formed, so it’s comfortable to produce extra content.

    I also did more writing on my detective concept. I’ve played most of the games that speak to the same aesthetic but it feels like there ought to be more out there. If you know any good obscure detective games, let me know in the comments.

    One great game I played during the writing phase was Detective Grimoire, available on just about everything. It’s a small game but it has a great story and it knows exactly how it wants to tell it. There are no excess features or distracting things, and that makes it one of the best mystery-solving games I’ve played in a while. Very cool to collect all the clues and eventually form the theory yourself. Highly recommended.

  • Week 31

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independant creative.

    Week 31 wasn’t too much of a whirlwind. I kept truckin’ on the Fawlty Towers game and got to upgrade the engine to a new release that solved a few annoyances on the technical side. It’s easy to keep fidgeting with technical stuff that doesn’t make the game noticably better for the end user, so the next step is to get more fully drawn backgrounds in.

    I also got started on some commisioned character designs for a site mascotte. Two actually; one of the cuddly monster kind and one of the spiffy racecar driver kind. It’s always fun to design characters and explore all the different variations on their size, outfits, colors. I always impress myself by the end with what ended up on paper. Work on that bled over into this week, which I’ll write about next time.

    On wednesday I bought a new iPhone, so the rest of that day was lost.
    I wrote a post about jailbreaking a long time ago and I might do another just to update on what I’ve got on there and why I did it.

    Spurred on by True Detective, I started writing a detective game again on thursday. I had worked on one rooted in 90’s buddy cop movies years ago, but it got a little out of hand. This new idea ticks a lot of the boxes of what I wanted to change from that game. It’s been a nebulous idea in my head for a while but I started looking into a real case and that brought it all together. More on that soon.

    During the weekend I went to look at some proper art in the Groningen museum, and met up with fellow gamedev and DayZ partner-in-crime Ralph, who I hadn’t seen in too many years.

  • Week 30

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.

    Last week I branched out a bit and did some video editing for a friend’s relative. She breeds show dogs and wanted a showreel for a new dog she got. I wasn’t initially keen to do it but it paid and upon further inspection didn’t seem like too much work, and I’m glad I accepted, because it was a nice example of how you can make someone really happy with something you made. With two hours of work that were in equal parts productive for me learning how to use Premiere Pro and the video getting made the woman was almost moved to tears. It reminds you that your work doesn’t always have to be high art in order to have people enjoy it. It’s something that you forget sometimes.

    On tuesday we launched the webgame I’ve been making assets for the past few weeks. It took a while to sink in that it was really done now but it seems to be doing well, with the creations in the gallery blowing up exponentially every day.
    You can check it out at putingaydressup.com.

    Strengthened by the boost of energy from completing things, I worked on my Fawlty Towers project the rest of the week. Working on games creates its own motivation because you engage your brain on so many fronts – visual, logical, problem solving. At some points I felt my mental capacity stretched to its maximum by trying to remember the structure between five open scripts and what I was trying to achieve across all of them; it’s a feeling I haven’t felt in a while.

    On thursday I tagged along with my girlfriend to her admittance exam for an art school in Utrecht. It felt nice to be back in that kind of atmosphere. Even the wi-fi connected automatically because the password was still somewhere deep in my iPhone from my own time there. There was a sense of solidarity that you don’t soon find outside of an art school setting. But at the same time I was glad I could walk out of there at the end of the day and get back to doing my own thing.

    At the same time as working on the Fawlty Towers game I’m trying to build the same thing in Unity using Adventure Creator. I can’t give enough props to Chris who works tirelessly on making it an awesome plugin, and I finally got things to the point where I feel I can do the same things with it as I can in Adventure Game Studio (although not as fast). It’s an exciting prospect to be working resolution-independently and cross-platform soon.

  • Week 29

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.

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

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

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

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

  • Week 27

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independant creative.

    It’s been a pretty productive week, finished up my to-do list for the webgame I’ve been making assets for, did some logo design and mockups for two other projects, and spent thursday working at Game Oven again on Bounden. We looked at some new interface shapes and button layouts for various menus, and managed to push a Testflight build out the door so I can finally check it out on my own phone, which is quite useful when I’m designing at home.

    I did some writing on friday based on a dream I had the day before, and the satisfaction I got from it was quite intense in comparison to the bigger tasks I’ve been doing the past few weeks. I forget what an instant high writing a short story can give you. It was a welcome feeling.

    Your ‘job’ as an independant creator doesn’t just stop at doing the work and nmanaging your clients and finances, you also have to manage yourself and your own contentment in doing the work in the first place. It’s an aspect that often gets overlooked, and I read some good articles about it this week that made me realise again that we as humans are inclined to focus on everything that can be improved and all the uncertainty we face, and with that forget all the good parts.

    http://zenhabits.net/down/
    http://www.artfulgamer.com/the-albatross-of-incompletion/
    http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JamieFristrom/20131212/206951/How_To_Be_A_Happy_Indie_Game_Developer.php

    It’s good sometimes to stop and take a moment to appreciate all that you have, even if it is an uncertain whirlwind. Getting up early to go to the office on thursday through the cold and the dark was one of those moments for me. Check out those articles, they’re a good read.

  • Week 26

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independant creative.

    I had hoped my sickness to be vanquished by monday morning, and it seemed so for an instant, but a second wave crashed into me by tuesday so I didn’t really get anything done until thursday, when I managed to drag myself to Utrecht to meet up with Niels ‘t Hooft to talk about games and our next steps in the Ninja Gimmick Girl 2.0 process. So no Off-stage this week either, sadly.

    When I had recovered from that outing the next day, I did some final UI polish on a project I hope to wrap up by the end of the month. Most of this week will be spent on that project too, now that I feel alright again. I also got an offer to design a logo for someone I had previously worked with. It made me realize that the word-of-mouth thing is actually a real thing and I felt glad to see a satisfied customer return.

    I also did some beta-testing for Paladin Studios’ new game, which is looking hot, and I spent the rest of the weekend with friends.