Bi-weekly blog #3: Upcoming Appathon and new interns (Patreon)

The last couple of days were pretty busy for me (which is also why this post is late and bite-sized). We are busy with preparing the office and creating work for our two new interns that will be starting today. Also, I landed a temporarily gig as a teacher at my old school which is more time-consuming than I expected. Next to that, we are working hard on a new concept that we will develop in an upcoming gamejam called Appathon.

The Appathon is being organized by Liberty Global, which is a big international cable company offering internet, tv and lots more in a whole range of countries. Here in Europe they got the Horizon Box, which is a set top box/router that you can place beneath/next to your TV. The goal of the Appathon is to create a game of gamified experience (that runs on this box) to make people engage with one another around the tv in the living room. If you win, you get an HTC Vive, an electronic skateboard or a 360 camera! The difficult part of this assignment is the fact that the Horizon Box isn’t a very powerful device. The hardware is comparable with the Samsung Galaxy S and iPhone 3GS (Yes, phones from 2009/2010), so a big requirement for developing a game for this device will be that is has to be simple and relatively small because we have limited processing power. If you want to compete in the Appathon, you need to have a team of 3-4 people. Since we're only with two, we asked a couple of other guys to join us. Since the whole project has to run in a webkit/webbrowser environment, we needed someone with experience in this field. So we asked Hidde van der Meulen (a good friend of Abel, www.developweb.nl) to help me with that part. To help us create a good concept and to do the user interface design, we asked Sal Hagen, Abel's younger brother, who helped us a lot by bringing fresh views to the table.

In the next blog post, we'll probably be able to tell you how the Appathon went. We'll share some pictures/photographs as well!

A busy week is coming up but we'll survive ;) Also, expect a guest blog or short introduction of our fresh interns the upcoming weeks. We got some interesting projects coming up!

Christiaan