Welcome to my blog!

Intro Sometime in June 2023, my son Leon brought from Köln a mid-90s laptop with Windows 95 installed. The only game it had was a version of the famous Chinese solitaire Mahjong called “Shanghai II”. Leon didn’t know the game, and he got really excited about it. When I saw the game, I told him: “But that version is terrible, it looks horrible. There was an older version, on the Commodore Amiga, that I used to play with my dad that was much better.” Seeing the connection I had with that game, he said: “Why don’t you program it? So it’s available on modern computers?” ...

Pixel is a reminder of what the pixel means and its power. Today’s screens, by creating ever-increasing pixel densities, the pixel is completely overlooked. This experimental game, on the other hand, gives it prominence and even in displays of extremely high density and resources barely perceived by the human eye, the pixel is staged, which is the minimum representation of any digital work. Since each element in the game is represented by a pixel, this is also the largest element in the interface; there is nothing else: there is no visible score, there is no running time, only pixels. The whole game can represent a classic game of ships, or also a person struggling in vain against the heat of the planet, or whatever each player can imagine. The pixels agree to be representatives of whatever players want. ...

When I was a kid, my mom used to say: “The Sun in Europe during winter is this tiny little thing, and by 3 PM it’s almost night time.” Although I liked astronomy, that seemed strange to me. They also said things like the day lasted 6 months at the poles and the night the same, another thing that seemed like a legend to me. I had never been to Europe, nor anywhere near the poles. ...

Some months ago I started to develop an art 3D gallery for the computer browser. The initial objective was, in a way, to imitate a gallery from the real world, with walls, artwork with frames, some lights and a camera to walk through all this. Long ago, I had started experimenting with a 3D library for Javascript called ThreeJS. The experiments of those moments included a 3D pong that looked quite interesting. So first I had to decide whether to try ThreeJS again or see what other options I had. ...

Or How a Videogame Enemy/Boss Can Drive You Crazy It sounds cliché, I know. But I think it’s one of the great lessons that some videogames can leave us. How so? The Equation of Perseverance The equation is simple: There’s a problem that can be solved, and the player can try to solve it infinite times. You try, you fail, you try, you fail, and so on… in a loop, until at some point it gets solved. ...

Thanks to Press Over News, and their spectacular essential section, I discovered Pico-8. https://pressover.news/indies-pensables/ufo-swamp-odyssey-mini-metroidvania/ Pico-8 Pico-8 is a virtual console and at the same time a game engine. It’s designed to imitate a fantasy console, emulating the hardware limitations of 80s devices. For example, the screen resolution is 128 pixels by 128 pixels, quite far from the 4K standard of today’s PlayStations. The number of colors is 16, with a fixed palette. ...

Five years ago we were traveling with Marcela and Leon to Nicaragua on a trip of a few days. We visited Granada, which sits on the shores of Lake Cocibolca. Beyond the things that happened during the trip, like the hotel room flooding in the middle of the night due to a torrential rain and other things, today I watched this small video art piece I made on the road. ...

Photo by McGeddon - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 , Link Every day I’m amazed by the wisdom of my Russian and Ukrainian colleagues. Today while we were talking about automated testing and security topics, I shared an old anecdote that happened to me with Sergio Marino and Rodrigo Román 10 years ago where we were discussing the compatibility of the website we were working on with IE 5.5 or some other browser from yesteryear. Since that browser wasn’t in the site’s usage statistics, the idea arose that nobody used the site with that browser, and then we erroneously inferred that its compatibility wasn’t important; to which Sergio and Rodrigo logically refuted saying that if it wasn’t in the statistics, it was because simply people with that browser couldn’t use the site and therefore weren’t visible in the statistics. ...

An Introduction Videogames were born in the 20th century, at the beginning of the seventies. In a historical context of rising capitalism, and as part of an innovation that mixes technology with entertainment. The innovative trait taken from modernity functions as a fundamental axis of the industry and keeps it in constant evolution. An evolution in three fields: technological, ludic, and creative. Technological Evolution, Creative Evolution, Ludic Evolution ...

It was 1982, I was in fourth grade, and at my school they had decided to teach us chess for a few months. So it turned out that every Wednesday after lunch a special teacher would come to teach us how to play and make interesting moves. Towards the end of this little chess course, we organized a mini tournament. My friend Ramiro was about a year younger than the whole class and exactly one year younger than me, since we had birthdays on the same day. ...