UnDUNE II: The Demaking of a Dinasty
Speaking of Dune II, here’s a jaw-dropping port of the game to the PICO-8! What!? Mind. Blown.
Margin
One of the things I urgently need is Margin. I need to recover breathing space, my schedule and obligations have grown again this month and it’s going downhill to chaos.
My kids are growing and demand more «family time.» I saw this period of vacations as the right opportunity to have this time because of no hectic school mornings, no school presentations to prepare or homeworks to assist, early bedtimes, etc.
So how is it possible that I’m now even more busy? Can someone explain this to me? It’s madness!
I need to stop, reassess and, most importantly, start saying «NO» to a lot of things. Reject new things and prune existing things.
Michael Meeks is back!
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! New domain, same blog as ever. Looks like people.gnome.org was shut down because Michael was the only one active there, haha. He didn’t even realized right away his blog was down.
Glad to have you back, Michael!
A phenomenal insightful article about the creation of one of my favorite games. Although the mechanics haven’t aged well, Dune II will always hold its place in history as the father of modern RTS games.
I remember a school friend raving about it, saying it was a very different game and not knowing exactly how to explain it to me. «Real-time» wasn’t a thing back then. The whole gestalt of building, gathering resources and strategically placing your units was overwhelming for us kids. Just looking at the details on the Windtraps, the little flags waving, the units walking, the sand tracks left by the Trikes, it looked like a real, living, breathing world existing right there in the screen. So fascinating.
Oh, and the manual (we had a photocopy of it) had a cool photo of the development team on the back. That was also super cool and inspiring, as the dream for Oliver, Oscar and I was to develop our own games.
Strange dreams
I often have strange, weird dreams. So often that one of the recurring morning jokes between Thalía and I is:
Me: «I had a weird dream last night!»
Thalía: «Oh, that’s so normal.»
Thirteen
Today Thalía and I celebrate thirteen years being together. Time does fly! And yet, sometimes it seems as life has always been like this and I can’t imagine how I could ever lived without her.
Happy thirteen years, my dearest love, I love you with all my heart. And may God bless us with many more years.
Writing, and Consistency Over Perfection:
The idea is to acquire the habit of writing daily. If I miss one day, then my focus should be on not missing a second day.
[…]
My plan for 2023 is to continue writing daily. I’m aiming at consistency rather than perfection, so I rather publish every day than spend two or three days trying to make a post exceptionally good.
This is so inspiring. Ugh, I want so badly to write consistently on my blog again.
You know what, that’s it. Don’t think about it. Don’t plan for it. Just start.
Now.
That English thing, again
I had an unexpected pocket of time, so I picked one of my long-neglected items in my «Someday/Maybe» list and quickly added a new custom taxonomy to this WordPress blog in order to have Languages.
I’ve failed time after time to start a new blog in English. By «blog» I mean both the engine and the writing. Yet, call me alienated, call me whatever but there’s this part of me that thinks in English. I’m not of the idea that «English is better,» or «sounds cooler than Spanish,» it’s just that I read, write and talk in English daily (I do freelance work for English-speaking clients) and I’d like to reach this audience too.
I’m still not sure if this blog is the best place to do this, but I’m super tired of indecision and paralysis. I decided to stick to what I decided long ago and just write.
Let’s see what happens and decide later. Maybe I discover a key reason to have a separate blog. Or maybe not.
We can always setup 301s later. That’s the beauty of controlling your own platform.