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Welcome

Years ago I created a site to put anything that didn’t belong on my main makasoft site (which is for my coding projects) or my various bands’ sites.

Now, I’ve decided to renovate the site with a more modern content management system: WordPress.

I’ve moved some of the more relevant content from the old site, but left out a lot of stuff that was either too old or irrelevant by now.

In the future, I’ll use this site for the same purpose as I used it before: to put any content that doesn’t belong on my other sites. That’s usually music, but it can be almost anything else…

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The Foreign Characters

I’ve created a new web for my latest musical project: The Foreign Characters.

It’s basically the natural evolution of the project I started back in 2008, singing, playing the acoustic guitar and the harmonica. Since Iván (Güevo) with whom I’ve been playing in different bands since we were teens, the project has transformed into a full band and has changed significantly, moving towards garage music but keeping some of its roots.

On the new web site you can see pictures, listen to some of our songs and watch videos from some of our concerts. You can also learn about our upcoming concerts.

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Star Trader’s Luck – A Dice Game

In this game, players try to be the most wealthy space merchants, flying from planet to planet, buying and selling goods, trying to maximize their profits.

All that is needed for play are: 6 dice, the rules (especially the prices table), paper and a pen.

5 of the dice show different types of goods and they’ll be rolled to determine availability and prices for each good. The sixth die is used when a player tries to sell illegal goods, and will determine their success.

With such simple components, the game offers a nice range of decisions thanks to the fact that players will not only manage their money, but also their time. Would you rather travel farther, taking more time, to reach a bigger planet with more variety and quantity of goods? or maybe you’d prefer buying fewer but selling them illegally at smaller planets, gaining time, but also risking more?

The game is freely available as “print and play” here:

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My Boardgames

Here are links to some of the games I’ve created for the piecepack gamesystem which I really like:

  • Climbing Man – A solitarie game that simulates how a climber climbs a rock wall.
  • Maze Makers – A simple fantasy game where players try to be the first to find three artifacts inside an ever changing maze.
  • Dungeon Builders – A game about building a dungeoun between all the players that then one will explore.

I’m also designing for the Icehouse gamesystem. A set of hollow pyramids in 3 sizes that stack and nest inside each other.

  • Virus Fight – A game about programming computer virues that fight eachother (based on the classic Core Wars).
  • Colorful Clues – A game about trying to find the hidden colors.
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The Empty City

Icehouse – The Game

I’ve been thinking a lot about the game Icehouse lately (as opposed to the Icehouse gamesystem). It was the first game that used the pyramids and it has an interesting origin: The fiction stories of one of its creators, Andy Looney.

It also has some sort of mystique around it, some kind of aura that separates it from other games. I think this comes, in part, from the stories on the book The Empty City, where a small cast of characters live their lives around this game that in their reality has replaced Chess and Go.

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Immediate Recordings

Over a period of three years I published a kind of podcast, but only with songs. The goal was to compose, record and mix a song in just a few hours, then post it on the podcast. At first I did it about once a week… It was fun to experiment with electronic sounds, record guitars, trumpets, etc… and try to take simple ideas and see where they could go. Some songs are good, others not so much, but a couple are amazing and I still love them today…

As I remake this website, I’m not going to post each individual song as it was posted back then. All the songs are at the Internet Archive, so here are the links to the individual songs in “broadcast” order (My favorites are in bold):

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Icehouse Pyramids

It’s been a long time since I added something to this site, and now I’m adding something about board games. I’ve recently discovered this game system and it is much more interesting than I first thought when I heard about it.

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It’s all about stackable pyramids in different colours. They can be placed standing up or laying down, and are hollow, so they can be placed on top of each other too. There are 3 sizes a complete set has 4 colors with 15 pyramids in each color. But there are a lot of games that don’t use as many. In fact, they are sold in groups of 15 pyramids in 5 colors (1 of each size for each color) as a game named Treehouse. Buying 5 of these sets, you get a complet 5 colors set.

There are many different kinds of games that can be played. Somo of the ones I found most interesting are: Zendo, IceTowers, Volcano and Homeworlds.

This game system can be combined with other elements and also with the piecepack. There is actually one game: Alien City that uses the piecepack and the Icehouse pyramids but I haven’t tried it yet…

The problem is that it’s difficult to find the pyramids in Spain. There are some on-line shops that do have them and there’s a distributor that has some products from LooneyLabs? but I haven’t actually seen them at any shop. But well, the pyramids can also be done with cardboard. There are some nice pdf files to print, cut and assamble at: http://www.labsk.net/index.php?topic=1001.msg4789 (you have to register to see the file)

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First Recordings

You can download these songs at Archive.org

  • Arena Bajo el Mar (english)
  • A Oscuras Mirando por el Cuarto (english)
  • El Baile del Mono Tono (english)
  • No es Jazz (english)

A small collection of songs I did last year while experimenting with Logic Audio. They’re instrumentals, mostly electronic but with some recorded instruments also.