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!
After a three-week gap between blog posts, this time it's been four weeks! What happened? Well, not much—hence the longer break. Recently, when people ask how I'm doing, I find myself saying "slow & steady." Things have certainly been calmer than before, perhaps even the calmest they've ever been. And I'm starting to enjoy it! Through this peaceful period, progress continues steadily. Below, I'll give a brief overview of how things have been developing in my three main fields of work over the past month.
As I mentioned in my last post, the Cat Cafe Manager 2 team is finding its footing in our Scrum structures, creating flexible alternatives to workflows that typically require in-person collaboration. Recently, we've been developing more detailed processes, particularly for creating art assets for different game environments. While we handle gameplay features sprint by sprint, art assets follow a linear pipeline—starting with concept art and ending with implementation in the Unity project.
Both this dev-ops approach and our Scrum sprints include internal feedback processes, which we're continuously refining. For example, we've successfully implemented asynchronous retrospectives, which work better than I expected. At the end of each sprint, team members answer these four classic retrospective questions:
Rather than discussing these questions immediately in a meeting, I collect and summarize the responses before sharing them with the team. I then address concerns promptly and collaborate with team members to resolve issues before the next sprint. As a bonus, it's wonderful to have a written record of what people enjoy about our process!
Fortunately, I still get out from time to time. Like here on a small field recording trip near Deventer to capture ambient sounds for Cat Cafe Manager 2!
My work for Mighty Merch has settled into a steady rhythm, giving me space to address smaller tasks that were waiting on the backburner, like pruning the plugins we're using in our Shopify setup for example. And even better, we recently launched a new client on the Mighty Merch store: Landfall's Haste now offers T-shirts and posters for sale on www.mightymerch.store—check it out!
Lastly, for WerkPlant, these past few weeks have been the calm before the storm. We're aiming to officially announce our WerkPlant foundation by the end of May. I've been meeting more frequently with the board as we prepare everything—from PR materials (press releases, LinkedIn pages, and Discord server setup) to legal requirements (consulting lawyers, selecting a notary, and finalizing paperwork). While we're not quite ready yet, we have enough in place to start testing the waters in the coming days!
Fortunately, I still get out from time to time. Like here on a small field recording trip near Deventer to capture ambient sounds for Cat Cafe Manager 2!
Though these past weeks have been calm, the upcoming ones will be anything but slow and steady! This week I'm heading to Berlin for the A MAZE festival—an event focusing on arthouse and independent games. I'll mainly be exploring what's happening in that part of the industry, while also having plenty of conversations about WerkPlant.