Late; insane deadline month, week 2 and 3

As Douglas Adams once told: "I love deadlines, I like the whooshing sound they make when they go by." You few readers I have might have noticed that I haven't posted last week. This is typical to an insane deadline month: when you have multiple deadlines, you manage to get one and then miss the other. Luckily for me, the deadline that gets me paid is well on its way. Too bad that the blog had to suffer and on top of that, the posts are shorter this month.

"So Snake," I hear you not thinking ,"what is it that gets you paid?"
"Thanks for asking, Mr Tumbleweed," I reply to the empty void,"because these guys are awesome!"

People who don't read until they end will never
know what this picture is about ;)

The company I now do an assignment for is called GamingWorks and is based in the Netherlands, my home country. Their website is filled with a lot of professional talk, but I'll put down what they do in simple English. These people work out games to play in teams with employees from other companies to do a little team building. The idea is that these games, or simulations, mimic a kind of company or situation where people have to fulfil a certain role. If, for example, there are problems in a company getting the morale up, these games can be used to lay bare the problems in the company. The most fun part: these people are good at it, very good.

My job is to digitalise a certain part of one of their games. When I first got the assignment I wanted to digitalise the complete tabletop game. This seemed to be a beginner's mistake, because that took out all the internal interaction that was needed to do the whole essential team building. As a game designer, I didn't design the game, but I now designed a part of the game that will make it all run smoothly. It was a fresh challenge for me to make a game that is not fully integrated in a digital world and I think I am pulling it off quite nicely.


GamingWorks trains game-leaders all over the world to let people play these games. So if you work at a company and want a fun day on the office, I suggest you contact these guys (and gals). Ask for "the game with the pizza" (sorry, not sure if I can disclose the full name of the game), that's the one I worked on.