Daniel Solis

A few months ago, I was invited to speak in a round of lightning talks at Red Hat. The event was in celebration of the Creative Commons' license's ten-year anniversary, so my talk focused on the winner of the Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge, which was released on that license. They were kind enough to record the talks, so you can see mine above. Hardly the makings of a TED Talk, but I think it went okay. Here's the official synopsis from OpenSource.com . Daniel Solis (@danielsolis), an art director by day and game designer by night, describes what sets ancient games apart from the ones sold in today's market. Beyond big boxes, colorful pieces, and lots of noise, ancient games employ three main criteria: access, elegance, and fun. Access—across language and geographic barriers. Elegance—applying a few rules that are easily understood but take a long time to master. And fun—we all know about that. Solis tells us that while Chess is only 800 years old, older gam...

It's been a few months since I've talked about the Prismatic Art Collection , so today on Ada Lovelace Day, it seems appropriate to give you all an update. Prismatic Art is led and organized by Tracy Hurley with a teeny bit of art direction from yours truly. The Prismatic Art Collection seeks to increase diverse depictions of heroes in popular art. Part of that mission involves hiring more women and artists of color, thereby increasing diversity among professional artists, too. I'm happy to say both objectives are progressing very, very well. Since the call for artists in March, and successful Kickstarter in late May, the project is moving along at a steady pace. We've gotten into a nice rhythm where artists send early sketches to Tracy, she sends 'em to me for some quick feedback, and the artists then finish up the piece. The collection got a major donation of art from the game Farewell to Fear, which greatly enhanced our offerings. All the art Prismatic co...

Over the past few weeks, I've been curating ccoolbook a collection of creative commons licensed photography and art. I try to pull photos based on a theme each time I add to the collection. So far the themes have been: Soup Distance Color Autumn Water Landscape Stuff like that. If you have any themes you'd like to see added to the collection, please tell me in the comments! » ccoolbook

If you ever need a source of vector icons for your board game prototypes, I highly recommend The Noun Project . They have an extensive crowdsourced collection of vector icons released on public domain or Creative Commons Attribution licenses. You can now also purchase attribution-free licenses for a nominal fee. There are some gaps in the collection when it comes to common game icons. There is a meeple , but a very limited supply of di ce and definitely no "victory points." I just uploaded an icosahedron , better known as a the 20-sided die or d20 . I'd love to upload some more generic game icons, but where to begin? What would you want most? I posed this question to my Twitter friends and got lots of suggestions. die faces 1-6, ? fan of cards 1-5 players 1-5 tiles in various shapes victory points in various shapes time: 15min, 30min, 45min, 60min… ages players: 1, 2, 3… bid most/least And there were some other suggestions that stretched the boundarie...

I'm a big supporter of science and technology, especially teaching both at a young age. There are plenty of good general reasons to pursue science, but I think the ultimate goal should be space colonization. To put it bluntly: Get off the rock. Get as many humans off the planet as possible, as long as possible, as soon as possible. Take a look at this time-lapse video of the milky way . It breaks my heart how much closer those stars could be now. Sadly, I'm not going to go to space any time soon, but here's my tiny attempt at promoting space travel – Four simple words to keep it on top of mind. Clearly, I'm not as tactful as Neil deGrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan. :P UPDATE: Want to use this graphic in your own stuff? Good news! It's released to the Creative Commons. Download the vector EPS below... » Get off the rock (CC-BY-NC)

And because I'm a shameless capitalist, I made a t-shirt ! This graphic is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic ( CC BY-ND 2.0 ) UPDATE: An alternate is now available, for you more verbose types.

For all teachers, parents, librarians who want to incorporate Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple into kids' learning: Teacher and education consultant Cassie Krause returns to offer tips and learning opportunities while guiding a whole class through the pilgrims' adventure. Best of all, it's totally free, licensed under Creative Commons from Smart Play Games . » Download Classroom Activity Guide for Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple » Also see the Classroom Activity Guide for Happy Birthday, Robot!

You can now download a zip file containing the Bajjutsu Master icons and background in a variety of formats. All released under the following terms: Bajjutsu Master Icons and Background by Daniel Solis (http://www.danielsolis) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) Furthermore, the rules text for Bajjutsu Master is also released under the following terms: Bajjutsu Master by Josh Mannon and Daniel Solis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Both licenses allow you to share and remix either the work, as long as you attribute the original work to its author(s). You are not allowed to sell either work (without the authors' permission, anyway). Otherwise, happy downloading! » Bajjutsu Master Icons and Background » Bajjutsu Master Rules Text

Here's a resource for all teachers, parents, librarians, bookstore staff and who want to incorporate Happy Birthday, Robot! into kids' learning. Teacher and education consultant Cassie Krause offers gameplay tips, extension learning advice, and experience guiding a whole class in a single story. Best of all, it's totally free, licensed under Creative Commons from Smart Play Games . » Download Classroom Activity Guide for Happy Birthday, Robot!

Man, I'm kind of on a t-shirt kick right now. I said this on Twitter today and some people wanted a t-shirt. These shirts are now available from my CafePress store . » Graphic licensed on Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike: Vector EPS » UPDATE : By popular request, here's a new commonwealth version.

This design is based on an original tweet from Eleanor Crumblehulme to Neil Gaiman last year. Neil requested a t-shirt, so I submitted this design and released it on creative commons . The American Library Association Midwinter Meeting is next weekend and this graphic was quite popular during the ALA meeting last summer. There is still time to get your shirt shipped. Here's a quick overview of what is available at cafepress: » Men's Ringer T » Women's Cap Sleeve » Women's Plus Size V-Neck » Women's Organic Fitted » Vector EPS Download: CuttingLibraries.eps released under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License

Following up the previous post , here's a new video of me making a second prototype game box. This time, I printed the template on kraft paper and spray mounted it onto cardstock. Please ignore the band-aid, by the way. It's an unrelated Jungle Speed injury. » Music: Neverhood Soundtrack - Olley Oxen Free

Got a couple of board games as presents for my co-workers, both made of renewable bamboo resources. The games, I mean. Not the co-workers. The co-workers are made of meat. The games' small form-factor was quite pleasant. 5"x5"1.5" kraft paper tuck boxes with real wood bits packed into a very compact package. I got to thinking this might be a package I could put together at home for my prototypes. Making a tuckbox with these dimensions would be impossible on an 8.5"x11" letter size sheet of paper. Drew up some plans on some legal paper. (You can find a PDF of the finished template below.) Turns out I can make a top and bottom lid out of a letter-size sheet with extra room for bleed. Grabbed some scotch tape and scissors to see how this worked in three dimensions. After cutting the outlines, I folded along the seams as shown above. If you're using thicker material, you should score along these edges so that you get clean folds. And taped the t...

The last Marain font was so popular , I decided to take another stab at it in a different style. This time, the letterforms are based on Herculanum. (Herculanum is sort of a younger sibling to Papyrus in that it is often over-used, but not nearly as egregiously as its big sister.) As with Marain Script, I imagine this font being used by an ancient culture (lowercase-c) who adopted the language of the Culture (capital-C) long ago. This time, the font actually has all the proper Marain characters, too. They're mapped according to the chart on the right. Once again, I used Fontifier to create this font. I am looking for another font creation tool that won't make the characters so pixelated. (Update: Mark Sherry was kind enough clean up the o, O and @ so they're a bit less pixelated.) If you have any suggestions that are just as easy with better results, I'm open to any ideas. » Free Download: Marain Ancient » My previous Marain font: Marain Script » More about ...

My wife says these look like the Martian skies in an old pulp paperback cover. Just one idea for how you can use these high-res textures in your projects. » Download: Free texture set on Flickr » Released under Creative Commons attribution 2.0 generic license .

Here's a new free font for you to install: Marain Script. It's my first one! I'll be using it in Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple . I used a web service called Fontifier, so the quality works best at small sizes. At large sizes, you see the slight pixelated corners the web service creates. At small sizes, those pixelated corners just look like a grainy texture that fits an alphabet written by a brush. Hey, happy accidents! The letterforms are based on the Marain alphabet, from Iain M. Banks' "Culture" novels. In those novels, the spacefaring Culture use the Marain alphabet because each character is unique and can be read in any rotation. That seemed to make sense for use in Do, since the monks and pilgrims are not bound by gravity either. » Download MarainScript.tff Marain Script by Daniel Solis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License . » More about Marain » More about the Culture novels » More about Fontifier

» Based on a quote by Rob Donoghue on Twitter. » Download: Vector EPS | High-Res Transparent PNG » Rob's Cafepress » Released under Creative Commons Attribution license. There was some discussion about whether this quote was too suggestive, but Rob insisted that a less crude "Anyone willing to fail can create" lacked the same punch.