November was a strange month - busy, but with many small tasks that are hard to summarize in the report, so it looks weirdly empty. Let me assure you we weren’t having any vacations or anything though.
Games
I did some work on the Rack Match project, but nothing official to show just yet.
Writing
Nope, nothing solid if you don’t count the reports and the event summary.
Design
Ewa did some photos and banners.
Events
I gave a talk at the Future of Micropayments 2020 conference that was held online on November 5th. I was tasked with leading a Creative track based on the js13kGames competition entries. This resulted in “Limitations spawn creativity” talk where I also went into guessing if Web Monetization can help developers wanting to switch from web to (web) game development and earn any decent income out of that.
I’ve just reposted the video of my talk to Cinnamon.
Other
The Web Monetization Community portal was launched, and so we have our own profiles there, plus the organization page - it’s going to be a place for official reporting on our Grant for the Web progress. Expect some fresh content very soon.
I don’t want to say this too loud, but the work on the new js13kGames website just started. I know this happened at least 5 or 7 times in the past 5 or 7 years, and I said this a few times already, but I’m confident this time we’re going to finish it. The current semi-manual setup (created in 2013 with only minor changes since then, and lots of hacking) takes way too much time and effort to run, and I can’t spend half a year every year only on this.
The js13kGames digital prizes were sent to the winners, and I also asked those who weren’t gonna use them, so we can organize a redistribution to those who were interested, and I think this went really well. The printing and shipping of the t-shirts is delayed (again) though, and I’m currently waiting for the response from the printing house.
I had a lot of video calls, discussions, did a whole bunch of email intros between various parties from the gamedev spaces about Web Monetization. I guess getting back to tech evangelism (after Mozilla Tech Speakers group was officially disbanded) is something I’d like to do, even though since the pandemic started I wanted to shift focus to coding.
I know it’s not much gamedev-related, but a fair amount of time this month was spent on writing Neuroshima Hex posts about the Year of Moloch special limited edition of that board game.
Plans for the next month
Write the first official Grant for the Web report, which will basically be recapping our monthly reports, but focusing on Web Monetization work done so far. Catch up on stuff, prepare and test my brand new audio/video setup, since I’m going to heavily use it in the coming days. Oh, and try to get back to coding (again).