Welcome to my second (and third) Thing a Week posts! My resolution is to do something (anything) creative each week and publish it to my blog somehow. It can be anything from drawing to writing to photography and even to games, but it should be something complete and sharable.

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.