Himmel Attack!

Jesse Himmelstein

Developer, game designer, researcher, teacher & entrepreneur

Welcome to my personal website.
You’ll find occasional blog posts, links to my projects, and talks that I found valuable.

  •   Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals was written by Katie Salen (who co-created Quest to Learn) and Eric Zimmerman (from the NYU Game Center). Its is a BIG book, by which it means it covers a lot of ground, but…

  •   I finished reading “Reality Is Broken” by Jane McGonigal. It’s a pretty long book (370 pages), but very well written. I highly recommend reading at lest the first few chapters. The author explains how playing games is essentially doing…

  • The Nightscience Hackathon just finished, and I’m writing this on the long train ride home. It was a lot of fun, and though we didn’t get nearly as far as we had naively hoped, I’m happy that we have a decent…

  • I just finished reading Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design. Overall, its focus is squarely on modeling game economies, rather than other types of mechanics, which do not apply as easily to the kinds of games that interest me. However there…

  • Meet the PAF Peacock I just got back from a 3 day trip at the beautiful and mysterious PAF, in the countryside near Reims, about 2 hours east of Paris. The place is made for artists, dancers, and musicians to…

  • Black ball is up! Pretty exciting for me. This has been a lot of work for Quentin and I over the past year, if can believe it. Not that it’s really a year’s worth of work, but just that we had a lot…

  • Although it took quite a bit more effort, I’m glad to say that JC and I managed to update Dog Eat Duck with two major enhancements – animations and sound. Both make a big difference, and made me realize once…

  •  Time: on and off over 4 weeks Team: Me, Ben Wertheimer, Julia Himmelstein, Jean-Christophe Letraublon Link: funkyfunkygames.com/dead/about/ Another project for  Runaway Parade. This time the theme was “decoy”, and Ben and I decided to make a Django web app to…

  • Time: on and off over 6 weeks- probably about 15-25 hrs total Team: Me, Quentin Jouret, Philippe Birgy, Pwikmasta Link: heavenstone.net/three/ Well, time is definitely up for my contribution to Runaway Parade. On the theme of “Three’s a Crowd”, Quentin and I had…

  •  After a few months of really hard work, we finally submitted Sporks Up to the Apps for Healthy Kids competition. I’m happy to take a break on it, though it was a lot of fun. This is my first full…