Welcome to my weekly post where I try to do something, anything, creative. Whether it be writing, drawing, photography or programming. This week I ended up doing a good bit of drawing and I figured I could share my doodling attempts, like the cup on a table above.

Megan has quite the affinity for alpacas and seems to go into a sort of trance whenever she sees even a picture of one. Maybe its no surprise that whenever I talk about making video games she suggests that I make a game about alpacas. Well one of the first things I figured I would need to do in order to make a game about alpacas would be to draw a damn alpaca! I looked for and traced a few examples online until I found one that suited my taste and that might work in an eventual 2D platformer.

Here's some of my attempts on paper:

And here is an attempt using Megan's new Wacom tablet and Photoshop:

Now this is clearly atrocious, but its also one of the first times I've used a drawing tablet and I have to say its much harder than it looks. There are a lot of new motor skills to train when drawing with your hand in one place and looking at photoshop in another. Photoshop itself can take quite a long time to master and I've never really used it in this context before.

I'm not claiming any of these attempts are great (or even good), but it was my creative effort for the week and one that kind of made me smile inside.

And to prove that I didn't just doodle all week here's the beginning of my alpaca platformer game:

So far, however, my year of doing something creative each week has gotten off to a rocky start. I caught a cold during the first week and it was immediately followed by Portland's week of snow and ice storms. However, I've tried to make the best of the unusual weather by taking more photos and editing old ones. Since I haven't posted for a couple of weeks, count this as a make-up assignment.

Week 2: Snowpocalypse pictures!

On the first day after the snow fell we simply walked around the neighborhood to take it all in. Portland was totally blanketed in fluffy white snow and it was a sight to behold. We generally don't get a lot of snow here west of the Cascades, so its a rare treat.

There were a lot of unusual sights, like this VW bug hopelessly stuck in the snow.

I'm also trying to get a little bolder with some of my shots, though I'm starting to notice how timid some of them are. This one of Megan is more of what I'd like to be doing regularly (with the exception of the giant SUV in the left of the frame).

We managed to make it to Chapman Elementary later in the week for some sledding with the church youth group. I'm going to save most of those photos for the church, but I took this one of the school and surrounding city for myself:

After getting cabin feverish we went to the Oregon Zoo to see some of the animals playing in the snow. The zoo got nationwide attention for their polar bears and elephants playing in all the fresh powder. The otters seemed to be having the most fun from what I saw, they love the chill water.

Week 3: Global Game Jam

Last weekend a few of us from the office decided to participate in the Global Game Jam this year and since I put quite a bit of time into it I'm counting it as my Week 3 creative thing. This is now my second game jam after Ludum Dare (which you can find a write-up of here). I enjoyed this jam a lot more since I was able to work off of a team of smart people instead of cobbling everything together myself.

One big advantage of working in a team was that we were able to agree on a game idea very quickly. It took me most of the first day to come up with the idea for First Wheel, but we came up with the basic idea of Gravity Well in a little over an hour. We flirted with more ambitious ideas like making a game about the protests that were happening around the city, but none of us were experienced enough to feel confident about it.

Gravity Well (which you can download here) is a simple physics-based game that pits two rocket ships against each other. You need to force your opponent into the black hole at the center of the screen using the gravity wave. Whoever pushes their opponent into the well 3 times is the winner.

No doubt its a pretty simple game and is "technically functional", as we liked to call it toward the end, but we were all pretty proud of getting the MVP of the idea completed and even polished a little. Stuff like the start menu, particle effects and the scoreboard didn't come until pretty late, but add a lot to the experience.

And that's it for my last 2 weeks in creative projects! Hopefully my next update will be more prompt.

This first image I got on our kayaking trip at Robinson Preserve in Florida. Its a little south of Tampa Bay near Bradenton. Here is the front of my kayak with my mom and her husband Brian in separate boats.

There's a lot of birds in the preserve. I kayaked around to get close-ups of them quite a bit. Here's an ibis looking back at me.

We took a break when we got near the bay and I walked over to a nearby bridge to shoot some of the nature around the preserve. The first image is a bird that I thought had a nice symmetry with the branches he was standing on. Putting it in B&W flattened it into what almost looks like a drawing or logo. The second is simply a leaf that I enhanced in Lightroom to standout from the water and bushes around it.

On the way back I got a shot of both my mom and Brian with paddles on opposite sides. There was a narrow corridor of green that I thought framed it nicely. One thing you won't see in this photo is a power pole that was sticking out of the top of the picture. I was able to remove that in Photoshop.

This picture I took on the way back from our kayaking trip. A couple other groups of kayakers heading the same direction overtook us and I hung back for a minute to get a shot with everyone.

I took several photography trips with my dad in New Mexico, so this is just a few of the trips I've processed so far. This is all from our first trip up to the Sandia Crest. Its a remarkable view up there and a little strange to be in such a snowy area in the middle of what's otherwise a desert.

I loved this gorgeous view of the city of Albuquerque.

After a bit of a hike on the icy trails we found ourselves at the Kiwanis Cabin, which is just a strange, now defunct little landmark overlooking the crest. It makes for some great photo ops.

Inside of the cabin, heavily HDR'd to get just a bit of the clouds in the distance.

A frozen pair of trees that I thought looked cool at the time. The clouds seem like they are bursting in the background.

And finally a couple pictures of my dad.

Not a bad first week of work!