Some events I am up to in the next weeks and months! Most of them related to Game development.

• Being a game design teacher at a game jam style workshop at San Sebastian (Spain). 6-8 September
• "The secrets of game design" A talk I give at Binaris, digital school. Seville (Spain). 18 September
• Anti-social meeting at Bristol Games Hub. Bristol (UK). 26 September
• My wedding! 12 October
• Visiting ExPlay 2013 at Bath (UK). 30 October-1 November

And hopefully more to come. Recently I also joined FullIndieUK which are very interesting people.
Actually I am discovering a lot of groups and movement on game design around Bristol and the South West and I am starting to get to know more people and discover more similar events. I think there may be even more hiding there.

That is a table I keep in my files to have a quick overview of projects or experiments I have open. While reviewing the objectives of this blog I though if this is a creative lab I should sate more clearly what are the "experiments" going on. It may not be completely up to date sometimes but it is there if I need it. Now, I can use it as a foundation for a new way of representing what is going on in the lab.

I am going deep with rethinking the blog and there is more work on the way.  I got a bit stuck and I am using extensively a self-coaching technique (long story short, writing a dialogue with myself), it works great. If I don't get to the conclusions in the next two days (before the end of the week) I will just start to do "random creativity" posts to fill up.

Sometimes, the planets align and I enjoy programming long into the night.

I am not a programmer, but sometimes I like to tinker with the code and see the ideas coming to life.

It's amazing when you have a big long conversation with someone and you cover all these different topics, and at the end, even when the conversation have been so long you feel it has actuallly been productive in its own way.
Today it was, with topics such us;

• Creating a video trailer for an upcoming book about game development. Finding why and how.
• Writing books deals.
• Future game development book projects
• Game design doctor and the possibilities of coaching game designers.
• Game design in general, specially, about commonly pointificated lessons made by some other game designers when they should actually be more professional by testing and cosidering more perspectives and contexts.

Yes, a nice long, very useful, conversation.

Today was the last day of the drama & improv class I was attending. So we have performed in front of a small audience. It has been very fun and I am going to miss the acting games.

We have performed some improvisation games such as "freeze & go", "Endowements" or "Dubbing", which is actually the one in the photo below were two of us acts babling in a made up language and then another performer "translates" what we have just said with hilarious and unexpected results.

I have alwasy considered that having some skills in acting and staging have been very useful for me when designing or creating almost anything. Whether it was a video game, fiction or painting an oil picture, to name a few.

I would like to keep improving these skills because I have loads of fun doing this. And I sometimes think how can I tell and help other designers with the lessons learned. Maybe it is something to think about: "Acting and staging for game designers".

I usually on of that thas says that ideas without execution doesn't worth anything. And that what matters is the "how" and not the "what". Actually I love how Derek Sivers explain it in his post Ideas are just a multiplier of execution.

Well, the thing is I sometimes have a little doubt about this. In a very specific situation, when I use my very own past ideas as new seeds, for motivation, inspiration or, so to speak, energy recalling. This is why I have brought with me from Spain these folders with lot of ideas, stories, concepts and sketches that I keep for many years, and some of these are even from my childhood.

I want to review these annotations to scan and store some of them, throw away others and in the process see if some of them have matured in my head or have been, somehow implemented in a similar way by me or others.
I also want to see what kind of things I thought about. Are more of them game ideas, stories for writing, comic? I will see.

This is a shot of the prototype I have been working today. It has been a quite Sunday, and I have been cleaning and fixing some details of the implementation so I can create more situations to test the mechanics and the game flow. This is a project that can get out of my reach very quickly, so I don't want to tell too much about it as I don't expect to keep a regular pace woking on it.

I have been thinking about switching to Unity 4 and I downloaded the free version because I haven't even tried it yet! There are some new features that looks promising. Updating to the pro version is something of a not-so-near future, though :-/

I'm going to try again to embed the prototypes and test those I already have because I think that having the feedback can open new options for me. Working quickly in Unity has become quite comfortable and it is a tool that I can certainly want to keep in my creation book.

In another vein, tomorrow I expect to write, and maybe deliver, the June summary for all the subscribers. So this may be a right time to subscribe if you haven't already.

Post for today, 24 June 2013

I am having problems with sites in the same server, domains, DNS and A records. So this is going to be my temporal solution until I fix everything while keeping sane. I have to fix other things first, but this doesn't need to stop my goal of publishing a post each day.

Whish me luck!

You can still visit the site and the other blog posts of AlejoLab

Last Friday I posted my first mini-product for sale a writers tracking spreadsheet to help improve productivity when writing. Apparently my mind thought all the work poured there surely deserved missing the post on the following day. Yep, that's the second day I miss the daily post. I was the whole Saturday working (or fighting) to develop the web for my upcoming wedding and at the end of the day I just wanted to go to bed and keep my reading of A storm of swords.

Today I had another session to work on the Oppa! video project, but the weather was so awful that we ended in a cafeteria and nothing worthy to be speak of was made. Because of the way the project is this was expected to happen anytime. I wonder why do I want to make a project that relies so much in the weather if I am in the UK.

I have also been writing, and using my brand new and cool tracking spreadsheet for the first time. I wrote 1583 words in two sessions, with an overall speed of 590 words per hour. I was working on character notes and synopses. I don't have enough data yet to draw conclusions, but it seems that I can spot a pattern appearing. My speed is a bit higher on my second session during the day. I will keep an eye on that since this is just a vague hypothesis, I don't even have proper data about long sessions or days in a row working.

See you tomorrow.

Today I wanted to do something for the Oppa! video project, but I had a visit to the dentist that left me out of game during most of the day. So I have been tinkering a bit with the AdWords campaign, experimenting, and I already set up the ads for the 3rd round.

I have also discovered some new settings to improve the experiment. I am taking note of all these so I can make a full guide and report of the complete experiment. So, coming soon:

.. or a similar title.

The idea is to use this as one of my first attempts into making small digital products to sell online. A nice presented, detailed and explicative report and guide for a very low price (maybre around 1$).

I you would be interested in something like that. Why would you be interested? What would you expect to find or learn from it?