⛰️ Prepare & Peak
Week 21-22; Detailed Milestone Planning; WerkPlant announcement; Indigo
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!
What Have I Been Up To?
⛳️ Detailed Milestone Planning
The past two weeks have been about preparing and peaking—in that order. For Cat Cafe Manager 2, the focus was on preparation. During the week of May 19th, we continued the milestone planning process from the previous week. Working in small teams focused on specific disciplines—art, development, and marketing—we finalized our lists of "epics" (large chunks of work that can be broken down into "stories") to plan everything for our upcoming milestone at the end of August.
With these lists complete, I could return to short-term planning, now guided by our team's collective input. Armed with clear data on epics and their priorities, we efficiently prepared for the next sprint starting May 26th. Before Monday morning's sprint meeting, I met with our leads—Carmen for art, Rick for design, and Ernst for tech—to align our vision before presenting to the whole team.
And this worked brilliantly—with all stories prepared and goals formulated, the sprint meeting wrapped up in just 30 minutes! After months of figuring things out on the fly and planning while working, we could finally start a sprint with a detailed, shared understanding of our destination and how to get there
🪴 WerkPlant Announcement
For WerkPlant, months of preparation finally culminated in last week's announcement of the WerkPlant foundation!You can check out the actual announcement right here. Right up until launch, I was busy getting everything ready—fixing the domains and layout of the WerkPlant website, launching the second season of the WerkPlant Podcast, and preparing the Discord server for new members.
While we didn't break the internet, we saw an encouraging increase in Discord membership after the announcement. To maintain momentum, Roy and I released another podcast episode two days later and introduced ourselves to everyone in the server. To my delight, this prompted many new members to share detailed introductions about themselves!
We're excited to keep this energy going and foster more conversations about sustainable independence in the creative industry. If you'd like to join us, please do! You can find the WerkPlant Discord server right here.
🎪 Indigo
As icing on the cake, I attended Indigo in Rotterdam for two full days right after the WerkPlant announcement. This was the first edition since Dutch Game Garden's closure—the previous organizer—and there was some anticipation about whether it would live up to the legacy. They knocked it out of the park!
Our art lead Carmen delivered a fantastic talk about Cat Cafe Manager 2's art direction, and we had the largest-ever gathering of Roost Games developers in one room! The high-quality talks, strong presence from both Dutch and international industry members, and the excellent World Trade Center venue left me eager for the next edition.
With no pressing business meetings or looming deadlines, I could fully immerse myself in the festival. I enjoyed informative talks about production and business strategy, plus great conversations with industry friends like Adriaan and Manuel from Abbey Games, Matthijs from Twirlbound, and Romy from Poki (among others).
What's Next?
After these intense weeks, things are set to calm down a bit. Perfect timing, since the Nintendo Switch 2 launches this week—bring on the Mario Kart! I'll keep recording WerkPlant podcasts with Roy as we work to maintain momentum and expand our foundation's activities. Speaking of media production, I'm thrilled to start bi-weekly streaming for QuestBeat with Sonya, beginning this Friday! Curious how that will go? I'll keep you (blog)posted!