Lara L. Schenck

Computing researcher, maker of monsters

Author: Lara

  • Some definitions of games & Game

    There are many many definitions of a game, most of which differ only subtly. Some are dependent on the definition of play, but that’s a whole other discussion. Maybe I should have written about that first, oh well. Anyways, here are a few ways to define a game, accompanied by thoughts: Katie Salen and Eric…

    ,

  • Raph Koster on how to become a game designer

    Be sure to check out the links he lists at the bottom, exceptionally useful.

  • to dos over the next year

    Grad school is on the horizon. Well, I’ll apply next December, but it’s time to start preparing and pick up where I left off after school. Which is where? My ultimate goal (in life I think) is to design games for college curricula, ergo I will go to grad school for game design. In undergrad,…

  • Site Redesign Preview

    Only the blog so far. The header still needs work, but I’ve got some baller post formats in there. I’d like to post about them in more detail because until this point I’ve thought post formats were a little useless, but with some work they can be great. Of course there’s a nice responsive deal…

  • Bones has made me like WordPress again

    That’s right, I didn’t like it for a while. Had a pretty scarring experience with a WordPress/BuddyPress site running on 20+ heavy duty plugins, and I fully realized why people say it’s messy on the backend. I had been doing a lot of custom coding, and dealing with WP hooks and filters, misc filepaths, and…

  • Freelance project: Cast Partner

    Recently launched a portfolio site for Castpartner, a Hollywood casting company. The site design is by Nate Harrison and hand coded by yours truly. I have to say it was a relief to not be responsible for the design – it’s nice to just be told what to do every now and then. Also, custom…

  • Digital Placemaking logo

    Here is a logo draft for Digital Placemaking, a spin-off philosophy/blog about using digital tools in (guess what) placemaking for local communities. Read more about Digital Placemaking here.

  • What I’ve been doing the past 6 months

    It’s been a crazy few months. Working 60hrs a week at times, but I guess that comes with the territory when you’re talking about startups. The startup in question here is Scenable, the app for local communities. There is an active startup and co-working scene here in Pittsburgh, definitely loving this city. Read about Scenable’s…

  • Book recommendation: Designing for Emotion

    I’ve been reading Designing for Emotion by Aarron Walter, the lead designer for MailChimp. It’s a quick read, very engaging, and infinitely useful. I’d been in a bit of a creative slump, focusing on navigation patterns, getting inspiration from great work other people are doing, and generally avoiding the being creative part. This book has…

  • Scenable Intro video: about animating to narration

    Introducing Scenable: A New Platform for Bringing Communities Online. Over the past week, I made an animation introducing Scenable: a new platform for local communities online (i.e. my job). This was my first experience animating to narration, so I thought I’d post some tips as well as the video. Brainstorming the script and initial storyboarding…

  • If localhost/PhpMyAdmin is 404

    Then most likely you’ve been sloppyily setting up configurations – this was my case at least :/. First make sure phpmyadmin is installed, then include its configuration file (httpd-phpmyadmin.conf) in your apache’s httpd.conf. On a Mac, httpd-conf will probably be in /opt/local/apache2/conf, and httpd-phpmyadmin.conf in conf/extra. If that’s the case for you, add this to…

  • Move a ball on the screen with Arduino & Processing

    Here’s what it looks like on the Arduino (with a potentiometer and two buttons): Here’s the code: And here’s what it looks like on the screen: There’s a few things to know about getting the Arduino working with Processing – here’s a link. And, with luck, later I’ll post a better image and description of…

  • Productivity Scene in Pgh

    I went to a great talk at Assemble (art/tech gallery on Penn) the other night by author of SharePgh.com Connor Sites-Bowen. The event is was called Manifestto:DO: getting Sh*t done in Pittsburgh. Not your standard/redundant life hacks information, great, real info from real people. During the talk, everyone named good work/inspiration environments in the city.…

  • WordPress Maintenance Mode

    Why haven’t I encountered/thought of this before?! If you noticed earlier, this site and the WPF2 demo site where giving off some 404s…embarrassing but oh well. Planning to write a post about all of that later. Anyways, maintenance mode is a setting you can turn on to let viewers know things are being changed/updated. There’s…