Blog Stress and Updates

Everyone that updates their blog after a very long time usually starts out with “I haven’t updated the site for a while, so I thought I’d write something…”

Well, in all honesty, I haven’t been thinking about this blog at all, and it might have died a normal death, save for the fact that I read an article in a dutch newspaper about “blog stress”.

Have any idea what that is? Apparently it’s got something to do with professional bloggers getting stressed because they have to…you know…blog so often. Well, poor them. It requires therapy to get past this I’m told. Maybe this can help.

I my case, I am not going to make any excuses: the dog ate my homework and I totally forgot about doing updates. But now that I am here and you are here…well, I can spare some time.

As some of you might know, I am one of the original founders of a game development company in The Hague, the Netherlands, called Khaeon Games B.V. The company was established in 1999, and I was CEO, Creative Director and Producer. We did Alpha Black Zero and EuroCops for the PC, and though they weren’t great, they were my first games and I have fond memories of those days. In 2004, together with my (ex) business partners, I founded Spellborn International Ltd., a company that is (currently) developing the Unreal powered online RPG “The Chronicles of Spellborn”, whose setting and main storyline were conceived by me.

I left Khaeon and Spellborn at the end of 2006 – sold all my shares - and am now handling Producer duties on a very cool teenage survival horror game called Obscure 2. It is being developed by Hydravision (who made Obscure 1) and will be coming to the PC, the Playstation 2 and the Nintendo Wii. Especially that last part has got me totally psyched! The game will be released later this year (Q4 2007).

I am also the Producer on an Xbox360 title that is currently under development. I can’t say much about that now, but I will when everything has been officially announced.

Next to that I founded Mystic Box, which you will be hearing more about in due time, I taught two courses in game design which ran for 12 weeks at QANTM (on their frontpage is a video in which you see a few of my students prominently and it has an article about a student of mine Ricardo Makoski doing his own indie game!), - and oh, I'm writing a book!

So that’s what is currently going on in my life. Let’s see if I write anything else this year!