Thursday! Let’s see what stuff I’ve discovered this week.

HootSuite

HootSuite.com It’s a useful service for yourself or your business to manage the several Social Networks that we use constantly. It can replicate the same posts in all of them, manage the followers and comments, and see what they are saying about you in every network at once. I use it for both personal and Gamenific spheres.

Concurso INOVApps

comunicacoes.gov.br/concurso-inovapps Brazilian only. É um concurso que o Ministério das Comunicações que está interessado em promover apps e jogos móveis. Serão 25 ganhadores nas duas categorias. Eu estou pensando seriamente em participar.

26 melhores sites brasileiros sobre desenvolvimento de jogos

https:://producaodejogos.com/os-26-melhores-sites-brasileiros-sobre-desenvolvimento-de-jogos Brazilian only. A great compilation of 26 Brazilian sites about game development. There is a mix of associations, indie devs, and general discussion. Great source of material and a good networking opportunity.

Second episode of series, I comment some sites that I stumbled upon.

ArtStation

https://www.artstation.com

Simply an amazing community and portfolio website service for professional AAA artists. Many of these artists already work on a company and probably will not accept a freelancer job. My bad 🙁

Soundrown

edit 2023-04-23: Defunct

Relaxing sounds, used to help focus during work, is something that I like a lot. The main differentiation from other similar services is the ability of mix dozen different sounds types like rain, fire, train, thunder, etc. They are all very balanced. My favorites are coffee shop and fire, that do not have much treble sounds that tend to increase anxiety, at least for me. I generally combine them with others, to experiment.

Google Academy

https://analytics.google.com/analytics/academy/

A mini central repository of Google Analytics courses. Very good. I am doing some to increase my knowledge of game analytics.

The very first entry of what is going to be — hopefully – a routine: a list of interesting materials that I found. Blog posts, sites, documents. Everything that I believe is worthy mention here.

Productive Flourishing

https://www.productiveflourishing.com/

It is the paradise of people that will start a new life. They present very sheets to make your personal and professional life more organized. There are an one for everything: monthly planning, blogging routine, todo tasks, GTD related. But seriously, there is no productivity guru that do not stress the “make this a habit” mantra. So force yourself to use them for a while. In the blogging organization tag, I found the following site:

Editorial Calendars and Professional Blogging

https://www.problogger.net/archives07/editorial-calendars-and-professional-blogging/

This post is gives very quick view about the benefits of scheduling blog posts based on theme. It is not new by any means, but it I mentioned here because is the reason I am writing this very post! I will adopt some of the suggested themes:

• Link round-ups – put together a list of the best posts you’ve read within the week (always good for Fridays)
• Interviews with other bloggers in your niche
• Reviews of products/services/websites in your niche
• Tutorials or how-to articles – pick a day where you’ll share your expertise with your readers
• Ask Me – create a post where you answer open questions from your readers in the comments section.
• Blog Carnivals – host a blog carnival on a regular basis.

The Art of Animation

https://theartofanimation.tumblr.com/

A stunning blog that gathers amazing artists. I found it when looking for an artist to draw character concept art for my next game. There are many concept art in general. Really inspiring.

Starting today, the blog will be now maintained using Google Blogger service.

It was 4 years using Drupal for my personal site. I still like it very much, but for a such small and simple mission, there is absolutely no reason to maintain the whole infrastructure for this site. Installing updates, maintaining versions and fighting for the correct configuration is no easy task.

I already struggle to write new posts. while I write a personal (really personal, only for myself) log quite regularly, writing for other people is a totally different endeavor The text requires a much more logical and careful writing

The final and decisive blow was the problems I was having with Bluehost that was not possible to use the Clean URL feature in Drupal. All the pages needed a weird “?q=” in order to function. I was not able to correct it properly. So I decided to change.

For the next few weeks I hope to be able to move everything to this new place. The theme will be changed as well. A lot of experimentation will be done.

My new game, Picubic, is now released under the Alpha flag.

Mechanics

Picubic is puzzle game inspired on the Japanese Picross, or Nonogram.

The objective of Picross is to discover what image is hidden, using the hints. That’s why the name is a mix of picture and crosswords. But there is a fundamental difference between Picross and Picubic: Picubic is a 3D puzzle! It uses the same general logic, but with a great twist. The final pictures are, in fact, 3D objects: TV, Sofa, sportsman, truck, trees…

There are hints for each of the axis (X, Y and Z), which might create interesting challenges.

Graphics

Because the game is essentially an abstract game, it was a challenge to decide a theme for the game. The first and obvious choice was a black/white theme. But I was not happy about it. I wanted to give it a personality, a distinctive face.

After some attempts, I decided for a general look and feel of wood. It is something not usual for games, so it would be somewhat unique. It’s beautiful.

The graphics were created using 3 sources: myself, free stuff from internet and outsourcing. I’m not an artist, so the current version have a lot of temporary material. Later I will replace it for the definitive versions.

Development and Road map

It’s an one-man game for now. I personally did the whole programming. Done entirely as C# code using Unity3D and Monodevelop. I’m really happy about the IDE.

There will be an editor for players create their own puzzles, send to friends (an Facebook and Google+ integration planned). The editor is the same used by myself. It’s not in the current alpha because of some bugs.

The final version is planned to be by October. Each 15 days I plan to release a new version. The lite version will have about 10 puzzles, besides the tutorial.

Where to Find it?

The game will be launched for Android and iOS phones/tablets, Windows/Linux/Mac as well web version, playable in any modern browser. The Alpha and beta versions will be probably only deployed as the web version.

See picubic.com for furthers news.