Hi all. As a short update: last weekend I participated in the Global Game Jam, a contest in which teams are to create a game within 48 hours. As everyone started brainstorming around this year’s theme (‘extinction’), me and my team worked out the idea of the extinct Scottish beaver who runs away for a wave (caused by his careless demolishing of dams). As the main character eventually always dies in the act, we titled the game ‘Beaver Damn’.

All in all, it was a helluvalot fun to be a part of this weekend of developing, discussing, stressing out, and very little sleeping.

You can download the game here. To play, unzip the package and run the .SWF (from your web browser) or open the .EXE file if you run Windows.

Now that I’m doing some catching up on updating this blog: one of the projects I worked on towards the end of last year was to build a weblog for an exchange program between The Netherlands and Colombia called ‘Build Your Image‘. In this course, teen girls from the two countries produce video content about certain socio-cultural topics.

I worked on this with Rhys Davelaar, who covered some programming, and Marc Stumpel, who managed the project. It was a nice and small project to work on alongside the usual work.

To continue on the subject of one of the last posts; the Hmtpng challenge ended a while ago. As a participant, and newbie music producer, I managed to upload a humble album. Or rather, an EP. Because I started about four days before the deadline, I assembled all of the instruments (from a harmonica to my Korg DS-10 emulator) I could find in the house to compose something.

Although I was unable to squeeze out 20 minutes of music within the weekend, I had some fun fooling around on my roommate’s MIDI-keyboard. What surprised me the most towards the ending was the enthusiasm and the richness of the community, I got to meet some nice people and liked a lot of different things that were posted within the extremely short production period.

All in all, if you like it or not, I might give this another try this year.

(*Drumroll*, and here’s the result:)

Hometaping 2 by Shoord

Hear hear. Good news y’all. About four weeks ago I started working as an interaction designer at Service2Media, a company which is well known for developing applications for mobile platforms. So far, it’s great to be a part of product development and its dynamics. And while I’ve designed interfaces before, mobile is a specific working field where I can still learn a lot.

That said. The second update is that I blogged for the Economies of the Commons 2 event on Saturday. The conference consisted of seminars, and intense theoretical as well as straight-forward practical presentations. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to follow the stream during for the entire conference (due to office occupations), but the third day I contributed to the blog with two articles, the first one being a report of the presentation by Harry Verwayen (about Europeana) and the second being about Dolf Veenvliet’s talk of ‘opening up’ as a 3d artist.

Participating in a group of enthusiastic bloggers has been a good experience, and it also helped that I enjoyed the conference (or at least, the few sessions I was able to join) in general quite much. I’d definitely look out for similar opportunities in the future!