Josep
Ciurana Herrera

My name is Josep Ciurana and I am an Informatics Engineer. I live in a city 30 minutes from Barcelona (one of the most famous cities in Spain). My working interests are game design, artificial intelligence and computer graphics.

I decided to start this website because I thought it would be good to keep all my games, projects and publications in one place. It should also help me keep track of my personal work. More than once have I lost an old project because I couldn't remember where I saved it.

I have liked video games since I was a child, specifically I remember playing Starcraft and Monster Hunter with friends at school. It wasn't until high school when I started wanting to know more about video games, the following questions came to my mind back then:

• How were they made?
• Who made them?
• What knowledge was needed to make them?
• What was a game engine?

So I started learning how to program and decided to pursue a Bachelor Degree in Informatics Engineering to learn about computer graphics, artificial intelligence and more video game related topics.

Studies

In this section you can consult the most up-to-date information of the studies I have completed.

High School

It wasn't until high school that I had my first experience with programming. Thanks to the programming elective I learned how to program an Arduino and how to make a video game using Scratch. Not only that, I also started using open source programs like Gimp or Inkscape.

Bachelor Degree in Informatics Engineering (specialization in Computing)

I took a Bachelor Degree in Informatics Engineering (specialization in Computing) at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). This degree is also known as Computer Science in some countries. During these studies I learned most of what I needed to make video games and I also realized that I like everything related to computer graphics. The works I am most proud of during this time are a video game, its name is Does Not Compute, and the degres's final project, called Advanced visualization of medical models.

Inspirations

I'd like to take advantage of this little corner to talk about some video games that are very dear to me. I love games like Shadow of the Colossus or Silent Hill 2, but I feel like the following 3 games changed me in meaningful ways.

Mass Effect (BioWare, 2007)

Mass Effect was the reason I bought a 360. It was also the game that made me realize that I wanted to know how video games were made. To this day, I'm still amazed at the ability of the original Mass Effect to make its universe seem bigger than it actually is, the writing and some clever design decisions do wonders for the game. Talking to the Sovereign for the first time is still as powerful a moment as it was in 2007.

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (Kojima Productions, 2001)

The first time I played Sons of Liberty I remember feeling like I was missing a lot. I came back years later just to realize how thematically advanced this game was for its time. Sons of Liberty is a work about memes, video games and the relation between player and creator. I could be hours talking about Hideo Kojima's best game but I doubt I can compete with George Weidman's terrific Critical Close-up:

NIER (Cavia Inc., 2010)

I played NIER for the first time in 2014 and since then I've been thinking about it from time to time. What Yoko Taro (and many others like the dev team at Cavia or writer Sawako Natori) achieved with this game shows that videogames still have a long way to go before we reach the limits of its expressiveness. I'm glad that with the recently updated version more people have been able to play this monumental work.