Hello World!

Hey everyone! I just wanted to put up a quick introduction post to break the ice.

I'm Izel, a sophomore majoring in Game Art at Ringling College of Art & Design! (At the current time of writing, anyway. Hopefully if you are reading this twenty years from now, you're feeling ecstatic because you found this old gem, a college-era art process blog by world-famous, ground-breaking video game designer Izel Moctezuma. Feel free to laugh at my old stuff and embarrass me with it at my next big keynote speech at a conference near you. But I digress...)

I am a parent to five lizards, who I love despite their ongoing rage at me performing unspeakable atrocities such as cleaning their tanks or waking them up for dinner. The little imps were the inspiration behind my first-ever officially released game, a laid-back and light-hearted casual title called Gecko Garden for iOS. Developed in a highly fast-paced, iterative environment in conjunction with a quickly growing community of fans, Gecko Garden started as a simple project over winter break of 2015 in order to pass the time and get my feet wet with both asset creation for iOS platforms as well as Apple's relatively new programming language, Swift-- but it soon grew into a much bigger ongoing labor of love, which I still happily maintain in my free time.

Beyond making cute pet collection games and graduating college, I hope to one day craft not just traditional video games but entirely new player experiences in order to instigate and facilitate meaningful change in communities around the world through work in conservationism and sustainability, healthcare reform, and more. Video games are already an amazingly complex and powerful medium for sharing in each other's human experiences, and I believe that what we're seeing now is just a glimpse of a fantastic technological revolution that will surely shake our society to its core. Frankly, I'm beyond ecstatic to be a part of it.