03 Dec 2017, 01:27

Ludum Dare 40

I made a little Ludum Dare 40 entry by the name of Idle Icon. Try it here.

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02 May 2016, 03:14

Ported to Hugo

I have ported the Wordpress site to Hugo, an excellent static site generator. In the process I have also hosted it on GitHub Pages, at https://thejare.github.io/. Some posts will be badly formatted, or missing related files.

19 Mar 2014, 01:52

GDC 2014 Slides Compilation

Edit: I think the GDC Vault has been updated with all available content, so you may want to go there instead. See you next year!?

Get’em while they’re fresh! If you know of stuff missing here, please tell me about it on Twitter @TheJare. You can also check industry sites like Gamasutra, Polygon or Develop for ongoing coverage, and hopefully a lot of these materials will show up in the GDC Vault soon.

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04 May 2013, 02:55

Firedemo 20th anniversary

It’s been nearly 20 years since we released that old fire effect and the demoscene turned out to love it. I have ported it to HTML5 to celebrate!

It all started when we bought a math coprocessor for our 386/25 and I started playing with fractals and plasmas. A few programming mistakes later, this thing came out and looked neat, so we slapped JCAB’s VT player and released it. Eternal gratitude to Jester of Sanity for unknowingly lending me his fantastic ‘Elysium’ mod – it didn’t take me long to learn that such acts were VERY badly frowned upon.

You can check out the source code on github if you are so inclined. The comments are slightly better this time! This version runs rather slowly on Chrome, and I don’t really know why, but IE, Firefox (Win and Android) and iOS Safari work great.

28 Mar 2013, 21:22

GDC 2013

It’s that time of the year again, when everyone else is partying and having fun (or maybe not – WTF IGDA?) at GDC in San Francisco. I’ll try to collect any links to lecture materials I come across. If you know of stuff missing here, please tell me about it on Twitter @TheJare. You can also check industry sites like Gamasutra, Polygon or Develop for ongoing coverage, and hopefully a lot of these materials will show up in the GDC Vault soon.

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16 Mar 2013, 11:59

Improv math

I always loved math and it was one of my favourite subjects during school. I have to thank my dad and my bro for instilling that love in my head. My young self was always baffled by how most people around me not only hated math, but they seemed to have a hard time with it. How could it be hard? It was all logical, you hardly needed to work or memorize anything because, hey, with just a few basics in your head you could deduce any formulas or theorems you needed during an exam, right? Heh.

This year I’m one of the tutors for the Master on Game Programming at the U-Tad. The subject I’m teaching this course is Game Architecture: Game Objects, Main Loop and Timing, Reading & Saving, etc. This is the Master’s debut year, so while I believe the course is going great (and students seem to agree so far), some bits and pieces are not ideal and will need improvement for the following years.

One of them is, unsurprisingly, math.

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03 Mar 2013, 23:05

Haskell

Back in my 2nd year in college (1990), I took a half year course on functional programming. Back then, having several years of heavy duty Z80 assembly videogames programming, and being recently introduced to high level languages via Pascal and Modula 2, my brain was very fresh and open to new paradigms and ideas. Structured languages like Pascal and C were a great way to remove some of the tedium and bureaucracy of assembly, but functional was mindblowing. I already understood the idea of passing functions around as parameters, since we did a lot of that in our semi-OOP approach to game character behaviour. But when you create your first infinite list, wow, that’s a moment to remember!

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09 Jul 2012, 00:35

About Me

My name is Javier Arévalo Baeza, I was born in sunny Spain in the year 1970. I have been making videogames for over 25 years, and I intend to keep doing that for as long as I can.

Other places you can reach me:

09 Jul 2012, 00:35

Articles

09 Jul 2012, 00:35

Downloads
Articles and lecture slides Slides from my talks at Mundos Digitales and GameLab, July 2006 (in Spanish). Slides from my talk at the Universidad Politecnica de Catalunya, March 2006 (in Spanish). Slides from my talk at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, April 2005 (in Spanish). Slides from my talk at the University of Seville in March 2003 (in Spanish). Source Code RectLayout, a class to aid in resolution-independent 2D layout of rectangles.

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