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!
I'm still not sure whether to post these blogposts weekly or biweekly, but this time the decision was easy. My last two weeks were so similar, it made sense to bundle them. They centered around one main task: submitting Creative Europe grant applications—twice!
Both for Cat Cafe Manager 2 and an undisclosed project I'm consulting on, the bulk of the work came down to these last two weeks. With projects eligible for up to €200.000,- in funding, you can imagine the stress levels were high.
Fortunately, both applications were true team efforts. With the external client, we cycled rapidly through writing, editing, and discussing the documentation. Roost Games followed a similar approach, with the added benefit of a diverse team bringing different expertise to write and review the materials. Being involved in both applications allowed me to apply lessons learned from one process directly to the other.
After weeks of intensive work, culminating in a stressful deadline day where I nearly submitted a faulty document (whoops!), we finally submitted both applications last Wednesday. Now we wait... Come July, when I've probably forgotten all about this, we'll discover whether the EU will support one or possibly both projects!
Fortunately, I still get out from time to time. Like here… what’s up with this car?! Is this even a car? Or a van? Or a submarine on wheels?
After submitting those applications, another major task awaited me. For months, we've been grappling with stock-keeping issues at Mighty Merch—specifically, tracking exact stock numbers for items across different warehouses. For a business centered on web-store fulfillment, this was a serious problem.
The root cause? SKUs (Stock Keeping Units). While these were initially mysterious to me when I started at Mighty Merch, they quickly became central to all my merch-related work. Simply put, an SKU is a unique code for a specific product variant in stock. Each item—whether it's a ballpoint pen or a mug—gets its own code. Even T-shirts with the same design but different sizes need separate SKUs. These codes are crucial: they connect everything in the backend between warehouses, logistics, and web stores, ensuring that when you order a blue Super Mario shirt in XXL, that's exactly what you receive.
The trouble began about six months ago when we connected our American and French warehouses to the same web-store backend to resolve other issues. Whenever one warehouse updated its stock numbers, it would override the other's. This created a mess: items would show as out of stock when they weren't, or worse, appear available when they were actually sold out!
To fix this, we've recently overhauled our entire SKU structure, creating separate SKUs for European and American markets—even for identical products. This way, each warehouse manages only its own set of SKUs, preventing any cross-warehouse overwriting.
While this solution looked good on paper, implementing it was tricky. Last Thursday, once the grant application stress had passed, I closed both the Game Bakers and Mighty Merch stores to manually update all the SKUs. After completing the updates, I checked with the warehouse to verify the changes. They went through, but the process generated unexpected artifact data, creating confusion about which SKUs were valid.
That's our current situation. This week, we'll be testing everything thoroughly before reopening the stores. And hopefully by the end of the week, fans of **Furi, Haven and Caves Of Qud** can get their hands on some fresh merch again!
Admittedly, I have stayed in a lot too, but this little guy makes working from home a lot more fun!
Right in the middle of these past two weeks, my longtime friend and newest Roost Games co-member Irene Preuss visited for a couple of days. She hadn't yet seen my current home in Deventer yet, and it was the perfect opportunity to make her membership in the Roost Games Cooperative official with the KVK (the Dutch chamber of commerce).
The main reason for her visit, though, was a dinner last Monday hosted by Galaxy Grove's Joost van Dongen, bringing together folks from the Dutch games industry. The event's tagline was "Why only see each other at international conferences, when we can all easily come to Utrecht and have dinner together?" It was a brilliant idea that aligned perfectly with Irene's recent interest in understanding how the Dutch games industry works.