I’m currently in my final semester for the Bachelor of Graphic Design degree, so I’m devoting my time to a project I haven’t discussed here so far. Now that I have something to show, though, I think it’s time to talk about it a bit. I’ll start from the very beginning: the conception of the idea.

I’ve been an avid videogamer for the best part of my life, so I can account for many hours spent in front of a screen, with a controller in my hands. One day, around two years ago, probably while playing this brilliantly elegant game called Polarium,1 I realized that I was having more fun creating levels, and making sure that they were both solvable and aesthetically attractive, rather than just playing the game proper. I found that the visual patterns created by the simple colored shapes in puzzle games like Tetris, Puyo Puyo and Puzzle Bobble could, and sometimes would, form beautiful patterns. This is, of course, where my training in design comes in; I realized that a game could be made where the objective, the very goal, was not to match shapes or make chains, but to create an interesting visual composition.

I had very little experience programming, though, so I never took it upon myself to make that game. Time passed, and one day there was a special event, hosted by a friend, called the Super Game Bakedown, that simply consisted of creating a game for the duration of a single month, in the spirit of the NaNoWriMo. I knew I couldn’t achieve such a feat, but I joined anyway, and made it my goal to finish a design document for this dream game of mine. I even added a secondary characteristic to the game, which was an idea that had intrigued me for a while: The game would not use words (or numbers) whatsoever. In the end, I didn’t even finish the design document, but I did get a clearer idea of what I wanted to, and could, achieve. […]

1. Polarium is a videogame developed by Mitchell and released for the Nintendo DS. It’s an abstract puzzler whose objective is to turn every row, from a rectangular grid of white and black squares, into a single color, by means of tracing a path that flips white tiles to black, and vice versa. This simple premise, intuitive during the first few stages, gives way to mind-bending puzzles that test the player’s ability to analyze and recognize patterns. It includes a level creator. There is also a free-to-play Flash clone called Blackflip. [↩]

I’m in my senior year, studying graphic design and doing my final year project, which will be due in January 2009. I’m a big gamer; played videogames since I was little and got my NES (which I still keep,) and have kept going at it since then, more or less uninterrupted. So I guess it’s no surprise that I decided to make, for my project, a game; the first videogame I’ve ever made. Nevertheless, this post is not about my project, but, rather, about my opinion on videogames, which I hope will serve to justify my choice. Though I consider myself a critical individual, I’ve cut videogames a lot of slack in the past; I’ve become a lot more critical of the medium lately, though, and done a lot of reading on the subject because of my project. Thus, a collection of some posts I’ve made elsewhere, on the subject of videogames: […]

It was a busy day! I’ve been setting up this website, and the only thing I hadn’t yet done was post here. Among the update’s there’s a new main page with links to the blog, the portfolio and the piclog. The latter is a Pixelpost installation for what some people call a photoblog, but the word has a negative connotation to me (at least phonetically,) and it wasn’t meant to be for photographs only, so I chose ‘pic,’ for picture. The difference with this blog is that the piclog is more of a gallery with not much other than the pictures themselves; to flesh out the process, the ideas or the anecdotes behind them I will use this blog. So they’re meant to complement eachother.

I set up a script that lets me more or less automatically send my pictures from the piclog to my Flickr account. Why the redundance? Because Flickr is more ‘connected,’ so more friends, or whomever, can find my pictures, comment them, et cetera. I’m not really into text blog communities so I don’t intend to do the same with this blog.

Another thing I spend my time in today was uploading videos to Vimeo. I already had a YouTube account, but since Vimeo has so much nicer image quality, I signed up, and in a couple of hours I had already uploaded everything. Now my YouTube account is outdated; I’ll have to consider whether or not to upload the rest of the stuff there, since I will mostly just be using Vimeo to embed the videos here and get them streaming, to tell the respective tale. Some videos are kind of embarrassingly mediocre-to-bad, though, but I just put them up because they’re interesting one way or another.

So, what’s still left to do? The hardest work will be making a custom theme for this WordPress installation. It seems quite a bit more complicated than with Pixelpost, but I’ll just have to find the time, because I really dislike the overload of most ready-made themes, and the fact that I can’t comfortably go into the code and add a bar with the latest piclog updates, or Vimeo videos, or whatever. What else? Well, I should smoothen out the wrinkles in the piclog, and I also want to, eventually, integrate both blogs with the main page, and maybe the videos too. Not much else, for now!

I don’t like blogs all that much, to tell you the truth, Dear Reader. I don’t think the phrase has much weight when it’s written as my first post in this here blog, though. I usually don’t like them because they feel exhibitionistic and egocentric in many cases. But there are some important, useful, interesting blogs out there, and these are nice to have; and am I to judge what a good blog is, anyway? A blog is good –it is useful– if it’s fulfilling a purpose. I may find some of those purposes less relevant, but it might be very much so for the person writing it.

What makes this blog worthy for me, then, even if I can’t foresee it getting any more than a visit per day? I simply needed a dumping place for my things; little things that might not be appropriate to display anywhere other than this tiny personal space, but which, put together, might form a collection worthy of showing. I lack a timeline for my doings in and out of the Web, one that could document my own growth. And I wanted a more personal web space, something that felt more like myself rather than what I do (my portfolio.) Yes: this blog is my face, my mind, my hands. It’s already starting to feel like it’s my child. I will not post here for you, Dear Reader; I will do it for myself.