In this series, I want to give an overview of what I'm doing (sort of) professionally from week to week. What projects have I been working on? What was the progress and what were the struggles? Any thoughts on that? Lessons learned? That kind of thing. The main goal is to document this for myself, but if you're interested you're welcome to read along of course!
While most of this week revolved around my trip to A MAZE in Berlin, we still managed to make progress with the Cat Cafe Manager 2 team on some crucial planning challenges. Specifically, we determined:
To tackle this, we held a meeting with nearly the entire team where we shifted from our typical week-to-week perspective to a broader month-to-month (and even year-to-year) view. The meeting followed our usual sprint format: first establishing clear, achievable goals, then discussing the specific tasks needed to reach them. However, the detailed task discussion turned out to be to much for the time we had and would be better handled in smaller teams, so we scheduled a bunch of follow-up meetings for the following week.
Fortunately, I still get out from time to time. Like here, on a walk through Berlin!
Now for the main course: A MAZE! For those who don't know it (most people, admittedly), it's a festival for independent and arthouse games and playful media, as they describe themselves, held annually in Berlin, Germany. If you see the games industry as a spectrum between business and art, A MAZE is firmly positioned on the artistic end. For example, the festival featured compelling talks about transforming trauma into video games and a feature film about game makers from Gaza (both great, by the way!). But there was also space for business-minded workshops, like one about the art of self-publishing, which attracted many game developers eager to maintain both their artistic integrity and economic independence.
Among the high-quality programming, there was a chance to play a wide selection of experimental games and interactive installations—which, in all honesty, I didn't get to at all. And of course, there were plenty of opportunities to network and hang out. A MAZE always offers me a perfect mix: meeting old industry friends (or even team members like Irene, Mischa and Esmeé!) in person, while connecting with new folks who operate on the more artistic side of the industry yet maintain an interest in the business aspects.
This blend provided an excellent testing ground for our upcoming **WerkPlant foundation announcement** (coming next week!), with a visit to the **Tumult Kollektiv studios** in Berlin on Friday being a particular highlight. We sat down in a local lunch spot, had sandwiches, and discussed at length what initiatives we could collaborate on to help creatives become—and remain—more independent in the future. More on that later, I hope!
Fortunately, I still get out from time to time. Like here, on the A MAZE festival!
During A MAZE, I managed to find one morning of time to check in with the Cat Cafe Manager 2 pre-production team. During these calls, we discovered we were hitting a roadblock with the first version of our initial game environment—specifically with finishing it. While we had noticed this slowdown in pre-production, pinpointing the exact cause turned out to be tricky.
In our previous meetings with the full art team, no one could clearly explain why this problem persisted. However, this Thursday morning, speaking with smaller groups revealed that team members were unknowingly waiting on each other—a classic case of assumptions! Though we all know such assumptions can derail a production process, they're notoriously difficult to identify, because they exist inside someones head, and only there.
Thankfully, once we uncovered the issue, we resolved it quickly. Later that same day, while taking a break from A MAZE to sit outside, I got to see our first in-engine footage: our player character walking through the very first version of our first environment. Pretty cool!
Fortunately, I still get out from time to time. Like here, on a walk through Berlin!
Before next week's big event—the Dutch indie games conference, Indigo—I've got a packed schedule. I'm following up on A MAZE connections, finalizing the WerkPlant announcement, and using every spare moment to nail down the production planning for Cat Cafe Manager 2 as we march towards our next milestone of a first playable version of the game by September! Want to stay up to date on how that goes? I'll keep you (blog)posted!