neauoire

For Vice

Relocating from Montreal to Vancouver (and now to Vancouver Island) is a big change on its own, without the additional aspect of transitioning to the liveaboard life. How did the idea for a roaming-at-sea game development studio come about?

It emerged from discussion on how to join our two passions together, traveling and arts, and our interest in a more tactile lifestyle.

What were you both doing for work while in Montreal?

Devine was making a living developing mobile applications for iOS, and I was working as a game artist and children books illustrator.

neauoire

For Metro

How and when did you decide to move onto a boat?

A few years ago, Devine went to Prague and met someone who lived on their boat. At the time, it didn’t seem like a possible lifestyle for us, but we’ve kept the idea at the back of our heads. We traveled a lot since the encounter in Prague, lived in Tokyo for 2 years, saw new places where we'd be happy living. We decided a year ago that we wanted to keep traveling; getting a boat seemed like the most logical step. A boat offers some stability, and if you get tired of the scenery you can lift anchor and go somewhere else. We figured we could learn to sail by ourselves.

Tell me a bit about 100 Rabbits, and about your careers as game designers.

Hundred Rabbits is the name of our design studio. We work on niche mobile games, music, podcasts and recently, video diaries on the liveabord lifestyle.

neauoire

For Ian

What is your name? What do you do?

My name is Devine Lu Linvega, and I do all the things.

How’s New Zealand been so far? Glad to be settling in?

New Zealand has been amazing so far. I was told, and can now confirm, that NZ is a hub of DIY culture, where people will have a natural tendency to make their own houses, boats, things and tools - where the instinct will be to build, instead of to buy.

neauoire

For Itch

Why don’t you start by introducing yourselves, who are Rekka and Divine?

Rekka is an illustrator and animator creating assets for games, books and videos. Devine is a developer and designer building tools and writing music. Together we designed toys, printed books and released games - and some of it, while living on a sailboat.

You’ve recently began sailing around the Pacific Ocean while developing. What’s it been like to develop in such an extreme environment?

Some things were easier than others, access to power and reliable internet has been a challenge living in the remote islands of the South Pacific Ocean. But we're always looking for ways to improve our systems. With the help of Amos, we devised a way to automate the build process and upload updates using our VPN's bandwidth instead of our satellite phone's. We have acquired a small generator for grey days when our solar panels cannot give us enough power to do our work.

neauoire

For InterfaceLovers

Devine Lu Linvega - XXIIVV(Photo)

Operating under the Neauoire moniker, Devine is a polymath working on a series of experimental tools and applications while sailing around the world and documenting their life at sea.

What led you into design?

I am not sure that I have arrived into design yet. But I certainly have been falling toward it from an early age. My first memories of optimizing for aesthetics had to do with evocative video game HUDs. From flight simulators, to turn-based RPGs, I gravitated toward the ones where most of the actual game experience happened within the interface itself. This manifested later in my enjoying of games like [Eve

neauoire

For Nin

I plan to publish music via distrokid, so i don't have to bother with micromanage each and every account.

I use Distrokid too, it's a terrible platform, with awful analytics tools with a super creepy CEO. But it does, like you said, centralizes a lot of pain of maintaining multiple platforms at once. iTunes/Spotify/etc are terrible platforms moneywise, for me. Most of my music income comes from Bandcamp.

The audience will have to find me.

When has that ever worked.

neauoire

For Xavier

Est-ce que l'action de te mettre à "saisir" ton temps est devenu rapidement un automatisme?

It took me about 2 years to get it right, I populated my logs of 2006 to 2008, with streaks of 40-50 days before giving up and forgetting about the system for a couple of days and weeks. And then trying it again, before, again, giving it up. After some time, I started to find a purpose to this data collection, either from graphing it into meaningful visualisations, or by using it as a base for project planning and time planning. My guess is that it is never second nature, it only has to exist in a place that is readily available and useful for it not to be forgotten and unused.

De quelle manière traites-tu la concurrence potentielle des activités ?

neauoire

For Anxl

What’s the biggest misconception people have about your work – that drives you mad?

I have the sense that some may think that I work more than I actually do. I've ran into people blinded by the apparent output, and whom worked themselves up to an unreal expectation of productivity. I've ran into this interesting problem where, the more data I made public, and the more explicit it is that I really only seldom actually sit to do deep work, the less people read the numbers, and blindly presupose that I must be at it endlessly, tirelessly each day of every week.

You mentioned that you always set up the purpose of the next day; but do you also set up experimentation spaces?

Of course, they go hand in hand. I usually begin by experimenting as part of the process. You can see my development workflow here, and it seems to pretty much the same for any project. Maybe I should graph the different ratios for each task, and see how much time I spend doin

neauoire

For Somnius

I’m thinking of trying to go vegan, and am giving it somewhat of an attempt after being inspired by you & Rekka. If you feel comfortable, would you mind telling me the reasons that led to you deciding to do so, and how long you’ve been vegan?

Rekka and I both had different reasons to turn our diet to an entirely plant-based one. Rekka did the switch faster than I could, so I shall only speak of my own choices.

I was vegetarian for almost 10 years, when we stumbled on The China Study, it initiated a train of thought that would concretize into turning vegan shortly after — But I first had to fully internalise that data to actually apply it. At the time, I was beginning to increasingly question my choices and to validate them against some data or another. Learning about the phisiological changes of consuming meat and dairy, between the China Study and http://nutritionfacts.org, it became more obvious that my dietary choices did not align with m

neauoire

For Kormyen

How does your horaire logging work if you work on multiple projects, or multiple sectors in one day?

One of the goals of Horaire is to limit multitasking, I do one thing only, one sector, all day. If you don't care to multi-task, you could use a timestamp alongside your logs.

Like if you spent a day hiking, listening to philosophy podcasts and meditating.

These are all sources of input.