what i'm working on

sometimes i find myself thinking "hm, i'm not doing enough". and then i find it useful to write down a list of current projects. not necessarily things that are taking chunks out of every day, but things that are bubbling along and taking up a burner of the hob of my mind.

and why not also post that publicly? nice to tell people what i'm up to – i write a good amount on here, but little of it connects directly to what i make money doing. which is fine, the work is in the specifics and that's harder to write about, but... anyway, here's some context for you.

so, here it is, in rough order of "am i getting paid for this":

• in the end stretches of putting together a prototype with Marie, Dick & Angus. we're funded to the end of the month, and then hopefully we can (Marie can) show off the vertical slice and get more money to keep making it. this is the biggest thing i'm working on right now. it's a real cool project, i have a lot of faith in it.
• a few weeks of work with Arlo testing out playful interventions we can do on people who have just left a play. it's the kind of thing where we're artists being brought into an academic context.
• maybe doing a few days of work fixing up some tooling for an immersive theatre company. hopefully the start of more??
• this doesn't really count because i've done all the work and just need to invoice for it - but i was doing some consulting on a game about Vikings with too many emotions. this came out of a lab i went to at UAL on disinformation a few months back. more academic entanglements...
• i've got some Downpour workshops coming up this summer. and i guess i should pitch some more? lemme know if you want me to come show people how to make videogames by doing crafts with their hands.
• ongoing Downpour code work - trying to change some boring hosting stuff that should make it little less stressful to run. and then back to adding video hosting, which is half way there... this is gonna be real exciting when it's live.
• Now Play This has had it's final festival, and the CIC needs to close down. but first... i need to do the accounts, and close up services, and transfer the website and emails somewhere so they can get hosted indefinitely. boring work, but worth it for things to close down in an ordered fashion. the labour of ending a project.
• in the early stages of a collab on a game with a cool artist. could be real exciting, could go nowhere... fun to talk about all the things we could make, anyway.
• i'm continuing to playtest and tweak Knife Fork Spoon. getting shown at a party at Develop next month, so i wanna make sure it's solid & spectacular for that. need to order some fake sausages. i've started fantasising about getting it published... hm hm!
• continuing to make pottery - it's the Open Studios this weekend, so I'll be selling a few bits, and also showing off this nice jug i've submitted to the studio competition. got ideas for some interactive pieces...
• oh, and i was gonna make some of the cups i'd made into candles, but that needs some rounds of testing and refining to actually get a good wax/wick combo. that's maybe a spur for me to try working with porcelain, too (for the translucency)
• finally actually messing with livecode stuff again... i've done visuals a few times recently with this webpage (warning, it can be flashy), but i am starting to practice with Hydra & get some custom shaders working for that. wanna perform live with it! yes to being on stage in front of a crowd of people dancing!
• going to some overnight larps later this year... i'm still enjoying exploring larp and doing it more, and have an aim to write... something? this year.
• need to fix my nice pink bike... i still don't have a wheel for it. or a saddle.
• maybe some sewing? i got a sewing machine, but i've not busted it out. it needs bobbins and needles ordering, new thread. i have plenty of stuff to mend. and i have been thinking about quilts?
• writing this blog post. writing on here more generally, it feels like good work to keep stretching these writing muscles.
• exercise? i'm just writing down my todo list now. anyway, i'm in a decent run of health, i should use it to regain some fitness. i did one (1) jog this last week, maybe i will do another soon?

i think that's more or less complete? it seems like too many things, and maybe it is. but it's feeling okay, manageable, enjoyable. fingers crossed that my health holds up and i can keep going with this.

i was feeling nervous about paid work once the month is out and this stretch of prototyping has ended, but enough small bits have come in that i feel better about that now. i mean, also i'm away through most of August... but if there's any interesting projects that i could help on from September onwards, do get in touch. as the sprawling list above says, i do a lot of things - but generally my expertise is about making games and playful experiences which happen in unusual contexts. using real world maps, when it's actually a social network, controlled by touching a porcelain sculpture, inside a pretend spaceship. figuring out what the technology allows, what the social context suggests, what things would be satisfying to do. and also, i understand that stuff AND i can write code. which means we can try things out pretty quickly!

anyway, i did not mean for this post to turn into me pitching. but, yeah, this is what i'm up to at the moment!