An introduction to my page

Hi everyone, thank you for stopping by to read my blog!

In the next few paragraphs I'll be telling you all about this place and myself so read on.

Who is this guy?

Well, my name is Daniel Vázquez I'm an aspiring game designer and developer (as you might have guessed) I'm currently working on getting my title as a computer engineer and I'd love to work on the game industry. Although my career main focus has never been game development I enjoy learning about it and I've been studying game design on my own for about 2 years as of now (2014). I've also worked on some small games alongside my teammates(a bunch of people who love making games as much as I do).

What is this place about?

I decided to create this blog in an effort to apply the game design knowledge I've been getting. Of course it's great to know about game design but all of that it's worthless if you don't apply it, even tough I've worked on some games (which I might show latter) I don't quite feel like a game designer yet, and that's the reason for the "Apprentice" part up there.

So what will I be posting? Everything I learn about game design my experiences and problems about it. Specifically I wanna start by doing some posts about game analysis on the games I play; I will try to dissect them using all the things I've learned (and will learn) about game design, hopefully all this analysis will get me better at game design, and if it happens to help some of you guys that's even better!

Analyzing games? How? Do you know what you're doing kid?

Of course not! But there's a bunch of awesome people I respect and admire in the industry and I'm going to base my efforts on their work so I can hopefully one day be as good as them. As for right now I'd like to introduce two of my biggest inspirations for this blog

• Extra Credits: If you haven't heard of them go check out their youtube channel right away! They talk about a lot of issues regarding games and why they matter, they were one of my first inspirations to become a game designer, to be truth before them I didn't even knew game design existed,
• MDE: Written by Benjamin Ellinger (or Zen Rhino) MDE it's an extension to MDA(more on that on his site) that is an effort to create a formal approach for game design and analysis. I found about this about a month ago and decided to use MDE as a framework to develop one of my games. And I've found it extremely helpful! So seriously check it out, you can find it right here.

There's a bunch more people and works I'd like to tell you about(and probably will in later posts) but I want to keep this relatively short and straight to the point, don't worry tough, as I said I'll be posting everything all my experiences on game design on this post.

So what games will you be analyzing?

Well any game that comes to my hands is a candidate for this blog although not every game will get a post because I play a lot of games, especially when I work on a game on my own I tend to play and analyze lots of other games that might help me design mine.

But basically you will find computer games here since I play computer games a lot(I have a big Steam library that seriously needs to be played too). Still, as I said every game that I find interesting might end up getting a post here so expect mobile games and flash games too(maybe even some card games or traditional sports too).

How often will you be posting then?

As often as I can, game design it's my life and I love it! So even when there might not be a schedule(right now) I will be posting as soon as I have something to post, I'm currently working on a few posts to get started which I'll be releasing to their freedom in a few weeks.


So thanks again for stopping by! If some of you like my journey feel free to follow along!