As I said in a previous post, in these days me and my colleague at Noctua were working in the SpeccyJam 2014. The goal of the jam/competition is to make a game with the same look and feel of an original ZX Spectrum game. This introduces a lot of interesting limitations. First, it constrains our resolution to  256 × 192 (that is, however, a really big improvement respect to the LowRezJam :D), second it forces us to use only 15 colors. But most important of all, the non-strict limitation, is to simulate the color clash effect of the original Spectrum on modern engines. This was the most hard constraint that forced us to explore 2D shaders and a lot of simulated low-level algorithms on top of a modern engine like Unity 3D.

Hi everyone. In these days, me and my friend and colleague at Noctua (EDIT: we don’t have a webpage anymore) are working at a new game jam: the SpeccyJam. The goal of this jam is to recreate a game with the same feel and look of an original ZX Spectrum game. We chose to implement a “managerial game” in which the player takes the role of a fantasy blacksmith that have to increase its fame crafting amazing weapons. This jam is very formative because it is forcing us to work in a low resolution with a very limited color space and, also, to explore the amazing kingdom of 2D shaders in Unity in order to recreate the visual glitches of the original console.

Hi everyone! I’m back. In the last week I was in Prague to attend to the 21th European Conerence on Artificial Intelligence (a.k.a. ECAI2014). This was my first real academic conference since I started my Ph.D. in the last November.  As I said before, conferences are amazing events where I get stressed like never before but, at the end, I come back home super-excited and full of inspirational ideas. Moreover, in these type of events you are surrounded by amazing people that do what you do. Meeting and talking with them is always insightful and amazing. So, first of all, thanks to all the nice people I met during this conference.

In search of the Philosopher’s Code. A small manifest on my actual thoughts and interests in programming.

I don’t know if my life is starting to be more interesting or just more hard. Anyhow, in this bloody hot August summer I really feel the need to recollect my digital goods and finally put all of them in a single place. Unfortunately, it is too hot here and my will is at historic lows so this “restyling” is taking longer than expected. As I said before, my life is just increasing in complexity and, as a consequence, I need some place for my academic things, a place for my artistic side, a place for my gamedev ambitions, a place for my work, a place for my spare time, a place for my nerdy things. I usually tried to keep all this thing separated and using this website just as an index. Thinking about that today, I don’t know why. Maybe because I always had problems handling my multiple me, my multiple sides of my interests. However, I really cannot handle all this fragmentation anymore. It is just too complicated. So, I have shut down everything and I created this. It is not a special website about something, is just one website, just about me. (Moreover, in this place there were a shitty page the I promised myself to renew for centuries. Thus, I seized the opportunity and now I’ve solved the two problem at once. Nice job, indeed.