It is a long day since the last update. Something bad happened to the ‘Digital Escape’ project that needed all my attention.

But first, the good stuff.

Father’s day

I got a sweet present for father’s day. My in-house office is upgraded with a very nice looking name tag:

Back on track with Bart

Bart and I were working on something I came to call ‘Animal Winter’. But during the early outbreaks of the COVID-19 crisis we both got motivational problems. We didn’t decide on what to do, but cut each other some slack due to the circumstances.

Last week we caught up again on this game. We tuned down our expectations. We are currently in the prototype phase and are creating some hastily-put-together scenes to decide on what works and what not.

Currently it looks like an endless runner. It resembles a peep box with paper figurines, and you are a fox trying to acquire food while running this obstacle course.

Hoop master

I met a new client from America. He did find me through my ‘Digital Escape’ project reference on LinkedIn.

They have this Facebook game ‘Hoop Master’ they will release 1 Juli. For this game they need support on using Azure services and PlayFab to reach out to their audiences.

They want to launch a new game each month and for that purpose they build a back-end/server capable of doing so. They already have some engineers doing back-end stuff as a side job but they found out it is hard to utilize the vast platform Azure nowadays is. That is where I came into the picture as a Azure / PlayFab specialist.

This is a project that requires only a minor amount of hours a week. They pay a hourly fee, and the fee is sustainable for me. These characteristics aligns perfectly with my desire to have multiple work-for-hire clients, and still have spare time for my own game projects.

New game

Everyone has idea’s. But creating something real of an idea is hard, and it is even harder to create something worthwhile.

I don’t know if my current idea is a good one. But I have learned a lot from my previous attempts at creating a game. For instance, this new game has to be something I want to play myself. With ‘Find the Gnome’ I did build it for my son and that didn’t work out that well.

My new game is going to be a game around these themes

space, inception, sleeves, management, adventure, 3D pixel-art, replay-ability.

I really love these concepts, genres, environments and styles. I think this will enable me to be a better judging of my own game.

Digital escape

So… the ‘Digital Escape’ issue that I have at hand is a serous one: I had to break the contract.

Our expectations from ‘what is in the product and what not’ and ‘how the payments are made’ were problematic from day one. And this problem became worse over time. I tried to bring these issues up in the past a few times already, but to no avail. This became such a draw on my time, mental health, and my family life that I had to call the project off.

What will happen now? Time only will tell. What will become of this project and my contribution to it. The best outcome is that we both just acknowledge that this wasn’t a happy marriage from the get-go and just part ways.