About


Geisha Studios is not the name of a company nor even the name of a group. Geisha Studios is the name I use to publish, as it were, the little games I develop.

Usually, my games are small “time-wasters”, although sometimes they are ports of games that I’ve found entertaining but weren’t available outside the Windows ecosystem, such as in Mac OS X, Linux or homebrew consoles (specially GP2X, Dingoo and soon, I hope, Pandora.)

I also made some simple games and programs using literate programming. I made those applications in order to test whether literate programming is a viable methodology to develop stable, easier to maintain games. I’ve haven’t formed a definitive conclusion yet, but for now I lean towards the “not specially time efficient” mindset.

I’ve chosen the name Geisha based on the literal meaning of the Japanese word 「芸者」 which would be “artist”. Despite what others might think, I believe that games are pieces of art whose objective is to entertain, like a true geisha, using a variety of techniques: animation (or “dance”), music, songs, storytelling, etc. The Studios part is there only because I thought it sounded better than “Geisha Games” or any other name I could think of.

The Site

When I started developing this site, I wanted something which would be easy to update, but not too heavy thus I wanted to avoid the “kitchen-sink” kind of content management. I also wanted to edit the site using the text editor I spend so much time and effort to learn because I feel that a browser window with a text area is not the proper way to efficiently edit any decent amount of text. This ruled out most wiki software out there.

With these requirements in mind, I had very few options and at the end I decided to make it very simple using AsciiDoc to convert the page from plain text files to DocBook and then to HTML with an XSL stylesheet. This is all glued together by a very small Makefile. In order to have a wiki-like history of the website, I keep all the AsciiDoc and support files in a mercurial repository at Bitbucket. Sure, this means that not everybody can edit the website a la Wikipedia, but I don’t want others to edit my page, and if anybody have to they can either send me a pull request or ask me for to add them to the repository’s access control list.

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