About

I was born in Venice, Italy, in 1972 and never really moved away.

My first computer was a Commodore Plus/4, in the early eighties. If you know what a Plus/4 is, you know it was a commercial disaster, incompatible with almost everything, and that nobody ended up with one on purpose. It booted into BASIC and waited. That turned out to be enough. From there: a C128, an Amiga 2000 with an XT emulation board bolted inside it, an Amiga 1200, and finally a PC in 1996, a Pentium 133 with 32MB of RAM.

Four decades later, the part I like hasn’t changed. You type something, you run it, and you find out you were wrong in a way you hadn’t considered.

A career grew around that, mostly by accident. I taught programming online, I’m a partner in a small IT company, and I spent a long stretch building Flash games for the big portals, back when the web ran on Flash. I’ve published books about game development, some with publishers and some on my own. I’m also on the editorial staff of The Games Machine and Zzap!, two magazines that have been writing about video games since the eighties.

Games are not only something I build. I have been playing them all my life and I still do, more than is reasonable. Seriously enough that I ended up world champion at Worms Armageddon several times, playing as triqui; a title that has never been useful for anything, which is probably why I am still fond of it.

Then Flash died, HTML5 took over, the tools keep changing and I keep not minding.

The blog started in 2006 because the experiments were piling up in folders and it seemed a waste. A mechanic I couldn’t work out, a physics engine I wanted to abuse, a prototype that turned out better than expected: I’d write it up, publish the source, move on.

Twenty years later that’s still the entire plan. I don’t write news, and I don’t have opinions worth publishing. What you get instead is something I built, an explanation of why it works, and the code to take apart yourself.

Writing it down is half the fun. You never really understand a trick until you have to explain it to someone who wasn’t there when you worked it out.

This is the point where I should list my skills, but that would be boring. Why don’t you read some posts instead?