Archive for the ‘Website/Maintenance’ Category

Summer Updates

Sunday, June 12th, 2011

After an insanely busy pair of quarters, summer is finally here. With it comes a new round of updates. First up is a new set of gameplay notebook entries, which will be uploaded daily for the next forty days. Next up is some new information about my recent and current projects, along with (hopefully) some new editorial entries.

Status Report!

Thursday, December 2nd, 2010

Well, I survived my first Semester at SCAD, the page has a new sidebar, and I finished my first game! I’ve added the rest of the “Gameplay Notebook” entries from class, and I think I might continue to write them on occasion about various games and subjects. Its also my intention to eventually expand the scope of this blog to cover sci fi movies and novels, and analyze or review them.

I have a few more projects to add to the site, and things should finally start to pick up.

Introductory post: About the Wolfmage

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

Before I get started, please note that I will be putting up identical posts here and at my SCAD blog.

My name is Leonardo J. Ceballos. Human male, born 1980 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. I’m an Interactive Design and Game Development major, focused on the gamedev track. Which is ironic, because most of my experience is in web/interactive design. I received a BFA in Computer Art from Syracuse University from where I graduated in 2002. After that I spent a few years freelancing and doing widely varied jobs; I got certified as a CompTIA PC technician, modeled over a dozen 3D buildings for a post-production company, painted murals, and slowly began concentrating on web work, mostly because that is where the jobs were.

In 2006 I was hired by RE Advertising, a small but successful company which at the time was focused on marketing new Real Estate projects. The work entailed a large amount of both web design and 3D architectural viz work. I spent four years at RE, but it gradually became evident that it was becoming increasingly hard to develop my skill set, and web design; especially at that level; was never where I intended to end up. So when I learned that SCAD was offering a Game Development program in Atlanta, I made up my mind to apply for it. And here I am.

So why Game Development? Well, here is where I tell you I’ve been gaming since I was 3. I’d wait eagerly for dad to come home so we could play on the Atari 2600. Like a lot of gamers of my generation, my first system of my own was the original NES, but I had the privilege of having my own computer at what back then was a very young age. It was an IBM PS2 computer, with a whopping 614kb of RAM, 20mb hard drive, and (then amazing) VGA graphics. Utterly pathetic compared to the average cell phone nowadays, it nonetheless ran a few games that have influenced me to this day. Among them are the Sierra “Quest” series, particularly Quest for Glory, and a little game from Electronic Arts called Starflight. If you want to hear me rant, by all means do ask me about Starflight.

The medium of Games has always interested me as a storytelling tool; I’m an avid reader, particularly of Science Fiction, and have long felt that gaming has the potential to tell stories beyond what can be achieved by books or movies alone.

Some of my older work, and a lot of my archviz work, can be found at my site. The following are a few other examples of my work.

Metro San Juan Magazine – Probably the largest site I’ve done at RE in terms of content.

Ciudad Jardin Gurabo – Flash/html hybrid site.

Torre Mayor PR – Flash site.

Bahia Minitas 12 – More typical of our smaller projects at RE.

Ocean Terrace PR – Typical of our smaller CSS-based sites.

1064 Plaza – Flash based site.

Marmotech- Simple, mostly unremarkable site, but all of the images in the “productos” category are product shot renders, something I was very eager to explore more of.

Purico SE – One of our older sites, the design is very basic. Worthy of note are the warehouse, retail and commercial listings, which are dynamically created from a mysql database that the owner can update using a fairly simple php form. It was a very interesting project to do, though nowadays we’d be likely to use a custom WordPress theme to achieve a similar effect.

PHP!

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

Just changed over to using all php files with an “included” header and footer. Aside from making site-wide updates much faster, I like the fact that it makes the normal parts of the site work even more like the WordPress areas.

Should have gone this way from the start, but I have a somewhat superstitious fear of certain kinds of php code because I think they’ll be harder to deal with since I can’t test them offline. Nonsense, of course; just have to be clever about it, but it makes me want to finish setting up my Linux box so I can set up an Apache web server and test things offline. Something to think about.

If you’re reading this, changing all them file names might’ve left some broken links. If you run across any, please do let me know.

Bugs!

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

Just went through a round of bug squashing. More to come.

wolfmage.com relaunches!

Saturday, March 20th, 2010

Well, its still mostly barren and very much incomplete, but pretty much all the main features I had in mind are installed and working. Over the next few days and weeks the content will hopefully fill out, and the remaining bugs and dead links will be stamped out.  A few minor “final” cosmetic changes are in the works, too.