Hello world!

Hello everyone,

This is a post I’ve been waiting for a really long time to make.

You see, it’s been on my mind for many years to start a blog where I’ll be able to post things related to game design. I’ve been designing games for 10 years now and I’ve been fortunate enough to do it full time for the last 4 of them (see more about me here). I love what I do and I also enjoy giving feedback/advice to other aspiring game designers. In those years, I’ve participated in numerous discussions on the web and gotten many messages with questions about designing (and sometimes publishing) games. At some point I thought “Why not make my own blog and post articles about this there?”.  Due to busy workload, family obligations and (above all) procrastination, it took longer than I expected, but I finally decided to press the switch and launch it!

Obviously this (especially now, in the beginning) is going to be a bit experimental. I have lots of ideas on what to write but I’m still trying to come up with the order, the format and so on. Do I go with fewer but larger posts that cover many details or more but smaller ones? How much of an issue should I focus on each time? (theoretically, one could write from a small paragraph to a whole book on each step of the process). Do I write more general/begginer’s advice (which is very useful but also found in lots of other places as well) or do I go with more personal thoughts/opinions on matters? I’d like to believe that this will gradually be established on its own. I mean, I’ll write the way it feels more natural to me and see how it goes from there. Of course, I’d love to get your feedback on this so feel free to share your opinion in the comments below.

Another matter on which I haven’t settled yet inside of me is how much of the content I post here is going to be in Greek vs English. You see, most of the questions I get are from Greek people who approach me (or post in a Greek forum) with questions on what to do with a game of theirs. While there are lots of things they could read online, they would prefer to read something in their native language (or are so early in the process that they don’t even know where to look). On the other hand, I’d like share my thoughts with as many people as possible which obviously makes it difficult if it’s not in English. For now, what I’m thinking of doing is posting mainly in English with an article every now and then in Greek for the local community.

Finally, I’d like to give a big thanks to Artipia Games (and specifically my friend Konstantinos Kokkinis who runs the company). Not only for allowing me to use assets in this blog like art from its games (the guy in the logo for example is from the Make Board Game card in The Pursuit of Happiness) but for giving me the chance a few years ago to work on my passion full time. I am forever going to be grateful for this.

So, that’s all for now. Let’s move to the interesting stuff, shall we? 🙂

Vangelis

Image Copyright © Artipia Games