BeautiFun Games

Megamagic teaser

noreply@blogger.com (Wyern) — Mon, 13 Jul 2015 14:11:00 +0000

Nihilumbra T-shirt and gadgets shop!

noreply@blogger.com (Wyern) — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 09:47:00 +0000

One day we recieved an e-mail from http://www.fyddy.com/ guys and this is the result:

With the Nihilumbra T-shirts and iPhone cases the Void will chase you wherever you go!

You can get yours at 14.99 eur here: http://www.fyddy.com/13-nihilumbra

Nihilumbra at Humble Bundle!

noreply@blogger.com (Wyern) — Thu, 29 Jan 2015 19:04:00 +0000

Today Nihilumbra appears at Humble Bundle along with 6 other awesome Spanish Games in the Humble Weekly Bundle 'MADE IN SPAIN'! This is a moment every aspirant to successful indie game awaits, and it has finally arrived for our good old pal Nihilumbra.

http://www.humblebundle.com/weekly

Pay what you want ($1 for Steam Key)
AR-K
Nihilumbra
Spy Chameleon

Pay more than the average
Full Mojo Rampage
Deadlight

Pay $10 or more
Pixel Piracy
UnEpic

Remember you can pay what you want and split it between developers, Humble Bundle and Charity.

Born is having a beer with the other Spanish videogame heroes to celebrate!

Nihilumbra iOS Update!

noreply@blogger.com (Wyern) — Wed, 21 Jan 2015 08:00:00 +0000

Nihilumbra for iOS new updade is available for download!!! iOS 8 now working! 16:9 screen is available!

We have also added some new features:
- English narrator voice
- New control scheme accelerometer + jump button
- Remastered Soundtrack
- Art Gallery
- Achievements
- Now translated to Japanse, Korean, Chinese, Polish and Galician

Check them out!

Nihilumbra arrives to PlayStation Vita!

noreply@blogger.com (Wyern) — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 15:52:00 +0000

Hello everyone! PlayStation Vita Nihilumbra version is ready to ship!

It will be available on January 27th in USA dn January 28th in Europe. Japanese version will be released soon too.

That's the press release we will send next Monday:

Nihilumbra arrives to PlayStation Vita!

The iOS classic Nihilumbra arrives to the PlayStation Vita system on January 27^th.

After its success with both iOS and PC platforms, Nihilumbra lands to the PS Store in this revised version of the game. Nihilumbra control scheme naturally adapts to the PS Vita, being able to paint the world with the Touchscreen and control Born with the cross-pad. If you still haven’t enjoyed Nihilumbra, now it’s the perfect occasion.

Face an inevitable fate

You play as the main character, Born, created from a type of anti-matter known as The Void, a dark mass of nothingness. The Void turns out to be the main antagonist throughout the game; it abhors the very existence of Born and will relentlessly pursue him, destroying all in its path and sending out shadowy minions to reabsorb him and thus restore balance to the universe.

A totally different experience

More than your typical platform game, Nihilumbra's main feature is the ability to modify the environment through the use of color. There are five colors to find, which grant you various abilities to change the physics of the world. Different colors may solve puzzles or dispatch enemies depending on how you apply them.

There is often more than one way of solving each puzzle, and the ability to paint wherever you please and experiment really adds a unique creative element to the game.

A long and dangerous journey

There are 5 worlds increasing in complexity, culminating in an exciting twist that opens up a whole new challenge. Plus, once the game is completed in its entirety a great surprise is unlocked ensuring replay ability.

Features

• The ability to change ground physics using five different colors.

• Use five worlds as your canvas and transform them at your will.

• Original soundtrack composed by Álvaro Lafuente.

• Unlock a great surprise by completing the game. Replayability assured.

Release dates:

American PS Store – January 27^th2015

European PS Store – January 28^th2015

Japanese PS Store – To be determined 1Q 2015

Prices:

American PS Store – 9.99 $

European PS Store – 8.99 €

Japanese PS Store – To be determined 1Q 2015

Read the complete press release here

Merry Christmas!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Wyern) — Wed, 24 Dec 2014 20:11:00 +0000

Have fun with your loved ones, give and recieve a lot of presents and play videogames!

New logo and end of year recap

noreply@blogger.com (Wyern) — Mon, 22 Dec 2014 11:57:00 +0000

Hello Everyone!

We are ready to show our new logo! Some of you might recognize a familiar face in it:

BeautiFun Games has gone through a lot of changes during this last months and it caused some delay in our projects. Here’s the current status of all of them:

Nihilumbra iOS 8 update: We tried our best to have it ready before Christmas but couldn’t make it. We could not use the older Nihilumbra project in order to make that update due to technical reasons, so we are porting the PC version to iOS. The good news are that new update will include some of the long-awaited features including 16:9 widescreen, narrator voices, challenges and art gallery. And, of course, it won’t crash with iOS 8!

Nihilumbra for PS Vita: At the moment is ready and we submitted it to Sony’s quality assurance. It will be released during winter.

Nihilumbra for Wii U: Our plan is releasing it during winter. There’s one audio engine bug that needs fixing and it delayed the initial March 2014 date until now. We are working hard with Nintendo and Unity to find a fix for that bug.

Nihilumbra for Android: Android version will include the same features as iOS and will also be released during winter. We are now optimizing it for as many devices as possible before the release.

Megamagic: At the moment we are on pre-production phase. We will finish pre-production in January and will start the production phase afterwards. It is still early to say when the game will be complete, but we expect to have it by the second half of 2015.

Merry Christmas!

Megamagic work in progress

noreply@blogger.com (Wyern) — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 11:53:00 +0000

Hey! We have been posting some Megamagic concepts on the social networks these weeks and we thought that we should compile them in a blog post. Enjoy!

Put down your weapon

noreply@blogger.com (Wyern) — Tue, 07 Oct 2014 14:25:00 +0000

Hey everyone!

We will start posting more and more Megamagic stuff as we advance in the development. This first concept is from one of the mysterious creatures you will be able to summon.

Yes, you heard right in Megamagic you can summon robots!

Stay tuned!

Run for your lunchbox!

noreply@blogger.com (Wyern) — Thu, 02 Oct 2014 11:01:00 +0000

A lot of people asked about Android version of Nihilumbra. At the moment it's in development and the expected release date is this December. But we have something to ease the waiting....

RUN FOR YOUR LUNCHBOX!

If you have an Android device you can download Run for your lunchbox! An Android game developed by BeautiFun's programmer Elías Pereiras @Waliactico. It was made using the art from the game made during his video game master degree, Playtime Stories.

In Run for your lunchbox the school bully wants to eat your lunch, and therefore the most logical option is running. Run as fast as you can while trying to avoid the obstacles you find in your way. Will you be able to escape from the bully and eat your lunch? You'll have to play to discover!
Also, the app it's free of charge.

Download it here

Goodbye Kevin

noreply@blogger.com (Wyern) — Mon, 29 Sep 2014 13:57:00 +0000

Last Friday our game designer Kevin Cerdà decided to quit his job at BeautiFun Games. As some of you might know he was working on Megamagic, our current project. Megamagic continues in development and its expected release date is the second half of 2015. From this point on, the rest of the team will finish the project's game design.

Kevin wrote a letter to share with all of you:

The BeautiFun team wishes you the best luck in your new adventures!

English translation:

"Last week I quit as a Game Designer at BeautiFun Games.
As some of you may know, despite always introducing myself as a game designer, I had a broader set of jobs. You've probably seen me giving speeches about Nihilumbra, doing public relationships and taking care of marketing stuff. I've also done a bunch of other stuff that you probably haven't seen such as audio effects, trailer creation, human resources when we had to hire new people for the studio... a lot of really different jobs that are quite usual when you've cofounded an indie company.

You'll probably imagine that, quitting a company, a team, a project of this magnitude, when you're the one who named it and you've been nearly four years working on it, taking care of it and making it grow, it's not an easy decision to make.

And I believe that, as the responsible of communication, public face, but most of all, as a developer, it's my duty to give an explanation and answer some of the questions that might arise with me leaving.

To begin with, I must say that this is a personal decision. I haven't been forced by anybody from outside or inside the company. I made the decision last week; ironically it was more or less at the same time that Notch left his company and, just like him, it was a decision that was slowly settling in my mind during months, maybe years. "It's about my sanity", he said, and I couldn't help feeling just the same.
I decided to walk this path because I felt bad. Really bad. Actually, I wouldn't say that I decided to leave, it was more like I just couldn't stay any longer. Logically, the reasons that made me hit rock bottom fall into the category of personal, subjective and emotional matters and It's not necessary to discuss them or expose them because they could be easily misunderstood. I already talked about my reasons with the team, they understood them and we wished good luck to each other.

But let's stop talking about the past. What about the future?
Megamagic is still in the oven. It progresses slowly, but it keeps progressing. It's a really promising project that may become a great game and I really hope it does. On my behalf, before leaving it, I made sure that they had enough stuff to finish it. I finished the main story, the characters and their own personal backgrounds, the basic game mechanics, examples of spells and enemies, description of localizations and all the events in the main story, information about world's folklore, history, factions... Even plots and characters for sequels. The part of game design that still needs to be done is mainly level design, dialogs, sidequests and adding spells and abilities. With this paragraph I just try to tell that, even when the author of the original idea is not going to be in the team anymore, the essence of this idea is documented and will be preserved in the final game. The team will do their best to keep the original vision and I've offered myself to help in case it's needed. Soon you'll start seeing things about Megamagic and I really wish you like and enjoy them.

The future for me, on the other hand, is uncertain. Right now I'm a Ronin Game Designer looking for a motivating project. I still have energy, will, and I'll keep my way of thinking. I do not intend to stop riding on sharks or disappearing from the map. You'll keep hearing about me and I look forward to create great games that you can enjoy in the future.

Before ending, I'd like to thank all of you for your interest in BeautiFun Games and my own career, which brought you here to read these lines.
During all these years of adventure I've received the support, the gratitude and the appreciation of many people. That always meant a lot to me, it gave me strength and it will keep doing it.

As a storyteller, designer, indie developer, but mainly as a geek videogame lover that one day decided to try to make a living out of it, I thank you for all these years and I invite you to share with me the ones to come.

Best wishes,

Kevin Cerdà"

Spanish translation:

"La semana pasada dimití como Game Designer en BeautiFun Games.
Como muchos sabréis, a pesar de que siempre me presento como diseñador, mi trabajo era bastante más amplio. Me habréis visto hablando de Nihilumbra, haciendo de relaciones públicas y llevando el márketing. También me he encargado de otras cosas que no habréis visto como los efectos de audio, la creación de tráilers, los procesos de selección de gente nueva para el estudio... Una gran cantidad de tareas muy diversas, propias de quien ha cofundado una empresa indie.

Ya os podréis imaginar que, abandonar una compañía, un equipo, un proyecto de esta envergadura, cuando le has puesto nombre y has estado prácticamente cuatro años trabajando en ella, cuidándola y haciéndola crecer, no es una decisión nada fácil.

Y creo que, como responsable de la comunicación, como cara pública y sobretodo como desarrollador es mi deber dar una explicación y responder a algunas de las preguntas que se formarán con mi marcha.

Para empezar, debo decir que se trata de una decisión mía y que no me he visto forzado a tomarla por ningún agente externo ni interno a la compañía. Tomé la decisión la semana pasada, irónicamente fue más o menos cuando Notch dejó su empresa y, al igual que él, fue una decisión que se ha ido fraguando lentamente a lo largo de meses, quizás años. "It's about my sanity", decía, y yo no podía sino identificarme con esas palabras.
Decidí tomar este camino porque me sentía mal. Realmente mal. De hecho no decidí marcharme, decidí que no podía quedarme. Lógicamente, las razones que me llevaron a tocar fondo pertenecen en su mayoría al terreno de lo personal, lo subjetivo y lo emocional y no merece la pena discutirlas ni exponerlas porque se podrían interpretar de demasiadas formas. Ya las hablé con el equipo, las comprendieron y nos deseamos suerte los unos a los otros.

Pero ya basta de hablar del pasado. Ahora que ocurrirá con el futuro?
Megamagic sigue en el horno. Avanza lentamente pero sigue avanzando. Es un proyecto realmente prometedor que puede llegar a convertirse en un gran juego y realmente espero que sea así. Por mi parte, aunque lo haya dejado, puedo garantizar que antes de irme he dejado listas la historia general, los personajes y sus historias particulares, la mecánica de juego básica, ejemplos de hechizos y enemigos, descripción de localizaciones y de todos los eventos de la trama principal, información sobre el folclore del mundo, su historia, sus facciones... Incluso planteamientos y tramas para secuelas. La parte de diseño que falta por hacer es principalmente diseño de niveles, diálogos, sidequests y añadir hechizos y habilidades. Con este párrafo intento aclarar simplemente que, aunque el autor de la idea original se haya ido, la esencia está recogida y documentada. El equipo se esforzará por mantenerla y yo me he ofrecido a asesorar o colaborar en caso de necesidad. Pronto se empezará a ver algo de Megamagic y espero de corazón que os guste y os motive.

El futuro para mí de momento es incierto. Ahora soy un Game Designer Ronin en busca de un proyecto que me motive. Sigo manteniendo mi energía y mi forma de pensar y no pienso dejar de montar en tiburón ni desaparecer del mapa en absoluto. Seguiréis oyendo hablar de mí y espero crear grandes juegos que podáis disfrutar en el futuro.

Para terminar me gustaría agradeceros el interés por BeautiFun games y por mi propia carrera, que os ha llevado a leer estas líneas. Durante los años que ha durado esta aventura he recibido el apoyo, el agradecimiento y el aprecio de muchas personas. Eso siempre ha significado muchísimo para mí, me ha dado fuerzas y me las seguirá dando.
Como contador de historias, diseñador, desarrollador indie, pero sobretodo como flipado amante de los videojuegos que un día decidió lanzarse a ver si podía vivir de hacerlos os doy las gracias por todos estos años y os invito a compartir los que vienen.

Un abrazo,

Kevin Cerdà"

The BeautiFun Team Stories - Dani Navarro - Graphic Designer - Part II

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Wed, 24 Sep 2014 09:36:00 +0000

In this second part of the interview, Dani details some of his inspirations as an artist and the most relevant projects he did during his career.

Since I was a child I loved to do creative stuff with music, plasticine, painting... when I finished primary school I found that I wanted to continue my studies on graphic design. I wanted to learn about the different artistic needs that a video game can have. A comic, or any other cultural medium in which visual design is important. I've always tried to do a bit of everything and learn as much as possible, that way I could find as many solutions to all the potential problems I could encounter.

I see you have so many different stuff in your portfolio. Could you explain us a bit about the most relevant works for you?

True, you can see many different things in there. One of the skills I've always put so much effort to train the most is versatility, so I can adapt my work to the needs of each certain project.

I will start with one of my illustrations inspired on Shadow of the Colossus. This one was selected, amongst others, to be in the background during the “Games as Art” roundtable that took place at Gamescom 2012. There were very important names talking there, as Kellee Santiago (thatgamecompany), Alex Evans (Media Molecule) or Ian Dallas (Giant Sparrow), and then they signed the illustration and then sent it back to me.

This another SotC illustration also got plenty of good critics from some relevant artists in the video game industry. It was awarded in a competition held by Sony Europe, Sumo Digital and Team ICO, being the price a copy of the game signed by Fumito Ueda.

As a curiosity, I also did a mask design for a nude Freddy Krugger elastic costume.

I really love American comics, so as I wanted to create a cover for one of them and tell a bit of a story without words. In the next illustration you can see how Venom is putting Spiderman in serious trouble.
I also like Batman universe a lot, in this illustration you can see how the Joker, dressed as Batman, wants to impersonate him and provoke chaos in Gotham. There's also a bag of explosives with the shape of the Penguin, as if they were allies in these actions.

I wouldn't be able to pick a favourite amongst all of my artistic works, once I finish each of them I'm only thinking about the mistakes, it doesn't matter if they are small, they are always relevant for me. If I had to remark two of them in particular, they will be the walking colossus one and the other with the velocirraptors.

I Also did 3D modelling and experimented with lighting and textures on ZBrush.

And how did you start developing games?

One of my first game-related project was Warcelona, a Left for Dead 2 campaign mod that got certain notoriety back in 2011 (had 400.000 downloads in less than 2 years). In this project I especially focused on the recreating and building the atmosphere of an apocalyptic city, as much similar to Barcelona as possible. An environment where all the important Left 4 Dead events already happened, as it was something real. It was really imporant to not simply show a destroyed city, we wanted to transmit a true feeling that the city was full of life before the apocalypse, and there were rumours about zombies in other countries.

After releasing Warcelona we got plenty of good critics, reviews and youtubers repercussion. So me and Carlos started working on a new project called "Coma: A Mind Adventure". We both worked doing a bit of everything without having very clear delimitation of our action areas, I ended up focusing more on the creative and artistic parts of the game, and he dedicated most of his efforts to the technical aspect and puzzle design. With COMA it can be clearly seen that we didn't want to follow the market trends (space marines, FPS, etc) so we went through a more personal approach, based on contemplative environmental puzzles. Those puzzles tell stories about the mind of a person in coma that has grown a lot of remorse inside. When you solve the puzzle, the person will progress in his state of mind, you can help him to progress in his illness, for the good or for the bad. There were some circumstances beyond my control, but the game is already on Steam with the name "MIND: Path to Thalamus".

Aside of a few small personal game projects, I've also worked on shortfilms, graphic design for companies, comic and advertising. The audiovisual work is very hard, but also quite rewarding. I still try to collaborate with them whenever I have the chance and the time for it, but where I feel more satisfaction is doing video games, the artistic needs they require are really diverse, and the player interaction with the piece adds an extra value.

Long ago I got to know BeautiFun Games and their work with Nihilumbra, so I offered them my services, we have been helping each other with good advice since then, until one day they invited me for an interview because they needed extra support in the art department. Then things went pretty smooth and we reached to an agreement pretty fast. It's a pleasure to work at BeautiFun, there is a nice teamwork and everybody is working in what they really love. I have been helping out with graphic design work for marketing related stuff, and now I'm doing concept arts and art for Megamagic.

First time I heard about Megamagic I saw how big it is compared to Nihilumbra. It reminded me to what I did with Coma after Warcelona: to be ambitious and face new challenges to try to progress to the next level.

Before finishing the interview I will dare to ask you about your main good and bad quality, and then, as every other member of the team, will love to know the best attribute of each one of the members in the team.

A good skill I have is to quickly be able to see the needs of a project, task, and as something to improve, I would say I'm too perfectionist, but in this sense is better being like that than not.

Aniol: Persistent, he knows what he wants and how to get there. He's very professional.

Kevin: A very creative guy, full of curiosity and with a very analytical mind.

Marcos: Super responsible and very good, technically speaking.

Elias: He's a really nice guy, predisposed to do whatever is needed.

Lourdes: She is a really good artist, full of sensitivity with the project and everybody working at it.

Jordi: He has a lot of resources and works very very hard. Also he introduced me to the Master, Álvaro Clemente.

You can get in touch with Dani on Twitter, he is @playerDNG

Interview made by @JesusFabre

Nihilumbra issue with iOS 8

noreply@blogger.com (Wyern) — Wed, 24 Sep 2014 09:36:00 +0000

Hi Everyone,

Sadly, Nihilumbra is not working on the new iOS 8. This is a known issue. Thanks to the many Nihilumbra players that reported the problem.

We are working on a fix to that problem. We are a small team and adapting the game to the new update takes time and effort. We expect to have the fix ready during the following weeks.

Also, if you don't delete the application the saved games won't be erased with the new update and you will be able to continue the game at the point you left it.

If you prefeer, you can ask Apple for a refund by clicking this link:https://reportaproblem.apple.com/ and report the problem.

If you have problems here are a couple of tutorials we found on the internet:
- http://gizmodo.com/5886683/how-to-get-a-refund-from-the-app-store
- http://ioshacker.com/how-to/get-refund-app-purchased-app-store

Sorry for the inconveniences, and thanks for the understanding.

The BeautiFun Team Stories - Dani Navarro - Graphic Designer - Part I

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 09:11:00 +0000

My story started after my parents came from Andalucia to work in Barcelona, the city where I was born and still live in. As a kid my passion was mainly drawing everything I saw on TV, later the comics I read and lastly the games I played. But my parents never had a special affinity for video games, if any, I would say it was the opposite.

The 1990s

Somehow I managed to convince my parents to buy me a Mega Drive. One of the main reasons why my parents finally did that was because they wanted to avoid me to stay all day long at my neighbour's house playing NES or Master System. I spent countless hours in the arcade rooms hooked on action games. Mostly remember the frenetic ones, House of the Dead, Time Crisis, Aliens Vs. Predator, Metal Slug and Cadillac & Dinosaurs...

As a curious anecdote from my old arcade days, one day while playing House of the Dead 3 cabinet in Salou, my trained skills allowed me to reach the last stage of the game relatively easy. Then I saw how people gathered around me and, soon after this, I got killed by the final monster. At that exact moment I was in the urgent need to find a coin to beat the game and my wallet was empty, so I turned my back to the crowd I saw watching my game five minutes earlier, only to see if somebody could lend me a coin... but sadly everybody was gone and, irremediably, I lost my game.

If I have to look for a starting point when comes to defining the games that marked my life, I should start with Sonic, one of the first games I've ever played on the Mega Drive and also a title I'm emotionally pretty much attached to. The controls were so simple and, at the same time, gameplay was quite deep for me as a child. The SEGA's mascot had (and still keeps) loads of charisma. Sonic original character design seemed very simple but at the same time is really well thought if you think about what SEGA wanted to achieve with him.

Here are other games I loved from that first era:

Jurassic Park: Always been passionate about dinosaurs, long before Jurassic Park was on theaters. In fact I loved movies like The Lost World (1925) or The beast from 20.000 fathoms (1953). Consider myself a hardcore fan of sci-fi movies and horror monsters, but the fascination I had when I saw Jurassic Park was very special, loved how it blended the realistic theme with those stunning visuals (mixing animatronics and digital effects). I couldn't forget to mention both versions of the game, released for Mega Drive and Super Nintendo, they made me feel so close to the movie universe.

Altered Beast. A good friend borrowed it to me and had it at home for enough time to love and hate it in equal measure. The game was insanely hard, but the habilities to transform the main character and their mythology-inspired scenarios really fascinated me.

Gunstar Heroes. Was enthused by its graphics, and the crazyness of each stage, full of shootings and explosions.

Streets of Rage 2: That game offered a lot of possibilities, the recreation of the city was superb, still nowadays it represents an aesthetic reference for me as an artist.

Now after talking about SEGA, cannot foget to say I lived very intensely that era when both, Nintendo and SEGA were dominant and also antagonic rivals. I was quite young to have a more reasoned opinion about the “confrontation”, but the case is that I started as a blind supporter of SEGA, with a mascot full of charisma (and somehow naughty) and those direct "Pirate TV" advertisements. Since the first comparison of what both brands had to offer I quickly made the conclusion that SEGA games were much more dynamic, aggressive and intense, but discovered how wrong I was when I visited a friend's house. He had a Super Nintendo and we spent endless hours playing. So both choices where equally good in the end.

On the SNES I remember devoting hours and hours to Street Fighter II, with its fast fights, detailed scenarios and fighters full of charisma (Ryu and Ken were really easy to control, but Blanka was really my favourite).

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time:

Aside of dinosaurs, I was also a big fan of Ninja Turtles, and loved that game, for me it was the best ever made based on the franchise. The stages were varied, funny and very ingenious, full of quite different characters. My favourite stage, and at the same time the hardest one, was the one that took place in the sewers.

Killer Instinct. Was not my favourite fighter in the system, but I ended up kind of addicted to it for the impressively well designed characters, and the art in general.

After the Mega Drive I got a Game Boy, played Tetris, Dr.Mario, Tennis, and countless hours at Pokemon Red. Also always wanted to have a Game Gear, because of the incredible color screen, luckily I got it later.

Then was when discovered my father's PC and the next few games that would impact my mind like a meteor in Maniac Mansion.

Age of Empires.

Maybe because of my father (who is a teacher and archeologyst), I love ancient civilizations. So the chance to create an empire from the very beginning, managing all the resources and growing my own civilization was an incredibly entertaining. It was so intuitive and simple to play, and at the same time I was overwhelmed by the huge amount of actions my troops could perform at anytime.

Lemmings.

Was a brilliant puzzle game, a true classic. Loved the idea of having a myriad of creatures fighting for a common good. Simple and addictive, albeit the design of the characters always seemed quite ugly to me.

Doom.

With a bold level design, initially looked like a bit monotonous to me, but in the end the labyrinths were so diverse and the brutality was shocking for any teenager of that time.

Aliens vs. Predator.

I'm a die hard fan of the Alien and Predator sagas, so when that game came out I remember I started going everyday to the videoclub to rent it. The developers put a lot of effort into simulate the experience of controlling an Alien, but above all I enjoyed the enormous amount of movements and skills a predator had. Finally I cannot forget the anguish you could perceive in the atmosphere of those so faithfully recreated scenarios.

Now I want to thank, once more, to another good friend of mine who borrowed me a PSOne, thanks to him I got to play great titles like:

Metal Gear Solid.

All the games from this saga put a lot of attention into the details. The pleasure of silently crossing those so well designed environments, with tons of tension while trying to go unnoticed, it was simply incredible. But, above all, I liked how smoothly the story was told.

Final Fantasy VII.

I remember how, at the beginning, I had a bittersweet feeling. But step by step I was getting more and more involved with the story. characters and soundtrack. Truly loved the cinematics.

Gran Turismo.

When it's about racing games I have to admit that I really prefer arcades, but after trying the first Gran Turismo discovered a very deep game, where you could spend days or even weeks to get handle a car. And man, cannot forget those astounding graphics.

The 2000's

It was hard for me to convince my parents to buy me a new home console, so I kept playing at friends houses for many months. With portable systems there was no problem, but it took many years until my parents bought me a Dreamcast, a console that will always have a special place in my heart. When you look at what Dreamcast achieved nowadays you can notice how ahead of its time it was, those innovative peripherals (like the fishing rod), unrivaled 3D graphics for that time, plenty of "pixel-perfect" arcade games, Internet connectivity. I played Shenmue back then and thought that video games had started to grow up and were reaching a more adult era.

I quit playing PC games in late 90s, but recently I came back and really enjoy the diversity and affordability that platforms like Steam or GOG offer. At the moment I can say I am a very balanced player, enjoying the consoles and PC without making a big difference.

Is quite sad that SEGA had to abandon the hardware sector after Dreamcast, I loved that system. Now from that golden era we only have Nintendo as a hardware manufacturer, and when I look back at how they evolved through years, it really surprises me what they achieved with the Wii, a system that really opened video games to whole new segments of the population. Curiously, at the same time, the price we all had to pay for to seeing our parents playing videogames translated into a huge amount of crappy titles that were mercilessly launched, that way flooding the market. Maybe that huge audience moved on to other platforms (like smartphones or other consoles). I'm a bit worried now for Nintendo, the Wii U is not doing as well as they expected, but on the other side I loved playing all the portable systems they released since Game Boy (for me it was like having an arcade in your pocket, you got instant fun at your hand!).

After Dreamcast was released, I got a Playstation 2 around 2005, Shadow of the Colossus is a game that you can feel it has a quite artistic tone while you're playing it, has a very calm pace when you go wandering through the world, and suddenly you feel like you approach those giants without seeing them and start to get excited. Then you find the colossus and enjoy contemplating it as part of the whole scenario. It's not only the overwhelming feeling you have when fighting those gigantic creatures, everything is so well wrapped with that amazing visual style that you feel like the game has some kind of magic, a feeling you cannot describe with words.

Metal Gear Solid 2.

This Metal Gear was the one that impressed me the most, when compared to the previous installments in the series. The dramatic atmosphere that surrounded you, that dark color palette, helped by the story and the claustrophobic feeling that implies to play on a boat.

Burnout Series.

It's aggresive philosophy and the realistic recreation of the car crashes got all my attention, pure entertainment.

GTA San Andreas.

Recuerdo una época en la que nos juntábamos algunos compañeros en casa de alguien para hacer el burro con el juego. La cantidad de posibilidades que ofrecía para entonces era enorme.

Devil May Cry.

Loved the gothic art style atmosphere, also the gameplay seemed really intuitive and well designed to me.

After the PS2 I bought the XBOX only for House of the Dead III, Panzer Dragoon Orta and Doom III. Also for me Dino Crisis 3 was not a so bad game, as many people said. From Panzer Dragoon Orta I loved the art and character design mixed up with an arcade mechanic. Doom III showed some of the most detailed textures and advanced lighting systems I had seen to that date.

The 2010's

I've always bought consoles for their exclusive games, and played the multi-platform titles on PC. Bought the GameCube for Resident Evil 4, then XBOX 360 played Halo 3 and Dead Rising. A Playstation 3 for God of War, Uncharted and The Last of Us. About the first two, have to admit I love games that take inspirations from ancient civilizations and also their gameplay was really polished), also The Last of Us is for me one of the best games made to date. The way the scenario provide you with the resources you need and how it delivers them to you seems perfect to me. About the game story, I should remark that the character design is excellent, reminded me of Shenmue at times.

In the current generation of consoles I personally wonder if Microsoft had a clear idea of what to do with their system in the future (second hand, Kinect always connected, allowing indies to do self-publishing...). In contrast, from the beginning I saw Sony had much clearer ideas and partnerships with plenty of independent studios in addition of the big publishers, and that's something I'm quite happy to see.

Now with a PS4 I will confess the games I'm most looking forward to are mostly indie titles. One of them is The Witness, because I'm curious about playing what Jonathan Blow comes up with after Braid, and also I'm curious to know more about Tequila Works' Rime. In the more mainstream zone, I want to see a sequel for The Last of Us, and also pray for Shenmue 3 to be released someday in a near future. In general, I'm eager to see the continuous changes in the industry and how this evergrowing ecosystem will evolve during the next years, like the rise of indie games and self-publishing, Free to Play, Virtual Reality, mobile phones and tablets versus portable consoles, etc.

You can get in touch with Dani on Twitter, he is @playerDNG

Interview made by @JesusFabre

A crazy week full of events! PAD, Gamelab and Indie Burger Developer Awards

noreply@blogger.com (Jesus Fabre) — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 08:54:00 +0000

If we had to point out a particularly good week in the whole year to be a game developer in Barcelona, that will definitely be the previous one. We enjoyed the successive celebration of three gamedev events in a row! Two of them international: Gamelab and P.A.D. Congress, and the third one, the Burger Developers Awards, which is focused on having fun with the local Spanish indie scene (But everyone's invited!). So get ready for a tour in which we'll introduce you some of the greatest stuff that happened during the last (and very intense) days!

P.A.D. - Professional Associated Developers Congress.

After P.A.D. Congress we had the pleasure to take dinner with the nice people from the organization, like Eva Gaspar, Nacho García and Ricardo Fernández (Abylight), Nicklas Dunham (Gamingcorps), also Dajana Dimovska (Knapnok Games) and Laura Suárez (Devilish Games).

Gamelab Barcelona 2014.

Kevin participated in a very interesting roundtable during Gamelab where, along with other three indie developers, they centered on exposing and analyzing the weak and strong points of being an indie developer and also on giving some advices to other aspiring game developers. He was in the company of Jordi De Paco (from our friend studio Deconstructeam), Mattis Delerud (DOS Studios) and the moderator was Juan Gril (Joju Games).

The first morning at the Gamelab we had a great lunch with a nice group of developers and journalists. As you can see in the faces of the ones who are sitting, that meeting was truly enjoyable.

Among the many important speakers that came to Gamelab this year we had Keiji Inafune, well-known father of sagas like Megaman, Resident Evil or Onimusha. We presented him a few concepts of Megamagic and explained the game idea. He was gladly surprised about it and said he'd like to play our game in the future! We want to thank you Keiji for the support! Also in the picture above on the right you can see the expression of happiness when Jordi learned that Inafune liked his work. Priceless.

On Thursday we were at the Gamelab Awards Ceremony where some of the most relevant Spanish studios got their deserved recognition from the Spanish industry after a year of hard work. We want to congratulate everyone, specially the winners! Here you have the full list of winners, but we really recommend you to check also the finalist because the overall level was incredibly high.

Indie Burger Developer Awards

And finally, on Friday night, we celebrated one of the most awaited events in the year, the Indie Buger Developer Awards! This is the third year we enjoy this wonderful party, where all the Spanish indie developers gather to share the most relevant games produced and present their upcoming projects. This edition was particularly successful, with almost 300 hungry attendees. It's totally worth to notice that each and every one of them enjoyed a full blown hamburger with chips and had a soft drink, a beer (or even a few more if they felt thirsty enough).

Above you can see part of the team behind Indie Burger Meeting 2014 organisation, from left to right: Gustavo Aranda, Lourdes Nicolich, Xavi Heras, Joan Albero, David Jaumandreu and Kevin Cerdà.

And after the awards, the dinner and meeting tons of other developers, we ended the night with a team pic, showing our great sense of fashion. (After all, what combines Beauty and Fun in a better way than a Hawaiian shirt?)

The BeautiFun Team Stories - Elias Pereiras - Programmer - Part II

noreply@blogger.com (Jesus Fabre) — Fri, 13 Jun 2014 08:06:00 +0000

Jesús Fabre: Why did you applied for Computer Science? Where does your passion for this field comes from?

Elias Pereiras: After I finished highschool I was pretty lost about what would be my next step, I started to try out different options that could be suitable for my skills and that didn't require me to move out of home. As I always loved Maths, thought it could be a good choice to try my luck and try to be a matematician, but nothing was further from reality. Soon I discovered that math-related abstract thinking was not my thing at all, and started to think intensely about which road to take. So I finally decided to do Computer Science for the simple reason that I've been always in touch with computers and technology in general, and I liked it. I was lucky enough to find what could be the closest thing to a vocation for me. Without being a genius, I have to admit that I was good at computers, and also enjoyed very much almost every subject I studied during the whole degree. Some colleagues complained a bit about how boring or difficult some topics were, but I always took in consideration that all that knowledge would be useful at some point in my future career, and perhaps this was the main reason why the grades I got were quite high.

JF: What did you enjoyed the most from your degree?

EP: I loved programming, more in concrete that feeling we all have when we don't know anything and then start to make good progresses from scratch. Then comes the moment when you discover you can make things you believed were impossible. Respecting programming languages, the ones I worked more intensely with during my studies where C, Java, and... the ancient and venerable Modula 2! I know it sounds totally weird and hard to believe, but during the first year we learned programming in that language, I still look at the sky and keep wondering why that happened. On the other side we didn't learn a single thing about the powerful and widely used C++ (that I had to learn at home, during my free time).

JF: And when you finished you degree, did you already had an idea of what you wanted to do?

EP: Enjoyed programming, but have to admit I had no idea of where to apply my skills. I've always loved games and was interested in being part of the industry, but also knew it was really hard to be part of it, I saw that as a real challlenge. When I was in the last year of my degree in the University of Santiago de Compostela, I noticed that the topics offered for the final project weren't attractive enough for me (databases, network programming, robotics, but nothing related to computer graphics). Then I took the decision of going out and pursue a career in game development, that brought me to Barcelona, where I attended Universidad Politécnica de Barcelona (UPC). There I studied the last year of my degree and then a Masters in videogame development.

JF: How was your first year studying in Barcelona?

EP: The first thing I did, even before going to Barcelona, was to configure the subjects I wanted to learn in my last course at UPC. I tried to do every optional subject related to computer graphics, what took me to learn a lot, studying during around 8 to 9 hours a day, and in consecuence focus my final project intensely on working with graphics. Finally I got to finish the project, a flying simulation game for Android. Must admit the teachers loved the project and it got the maximum qualifications. It ended up published on the Google Play Store, if any of you want to try it, you can find it for a dollar under the name World Air Race.

JF: How was the experience at the UPC Masters and why did you choose that one and not another?

EP: The main reason for me was that their studies covered art and programming, nevertheless afterwards I noticed that the programming part wasn't as strong as I expected. The most useful point of doing a Master in videogame development for me is that you can meet tons of people who are also passionate about the idea of creating games, so you have several candidates to team up and create a game. This single point is not insignificant at all, especially when you think that in Spain nobody contracts a novice programmer without seeing at least a finished game. If you take a look around at the Masters you can apply for in Spain, you'll find they use to be quite expensive for our general economic level. So if you don't have the money I'd recommend you to go your own way and try to develop games on your own. If you can find some friends to learn from and share thoughts it will be even better. Also those people can be found at game jams, game development events, and the like.

JF: Just the very first day of the Masters you had to form a group to develop your final game project, that will be presented at the end of the course. Could you go a bit more into the details of that process and the game you developed?

EP: It was something that caught my attention a lot: the fact that on the first day we had to form a group and also decide about the game we wanted to develop, all without barely knowing each other. I would have waited a few weeks to let the students form the groups and decide the games they wanted to develop in a more natural fashion, taking their affinities into account. In our case, we were fortunate to to agree in the creation of an all vs. all arena game, which we'd call Playtime Stories and that will be set in a very typical western school. As we didn't want to reduce the game to a shoot'em all mechanic, we added some depth with narrative events during the game, and also adding the costumes mechanic, which add tons of dinamism to the game. To explain it better, imagine you are a cowboy at a certain point, and if somebody gets closer to you with hostile attitude, then you can switch your costume to a viking instantly and take advantage of that costume special skills, that is much more effective for melee attacks. Was a hard work to think about each costume's special properties and also to balance them.

JF: What were the biggest challenges during the development of Playtime Stores?

EP: The development lasted a year (a whole academic course), and the busiest time was during Summer. We had to focus on defining all the cases that could appear, goals of the game, narrative events, costumes, skills, characters (and their respective design), also defining the costume switch mechanics, etc. This first part of game design - although it didn't require of any technical knowledge - was really exhausting. The game's artificial inteligence system also deserves a special mention, since we were defining many state diagrams to get the most natural behaviour possible out of the characters controlled by the computer. For this, we took Quake 3 Arena AI design document as reference, there each AI had its own long-term goal (i.e. win the match), another mid-term goal (i.e. kill that player I just saw and has a quite low life level), and a third and short-term one (i.e. get closer to that player). Also it's curious what happened with the game art, since we didn't have any dedicated artist. We were really lucky because the four of us were really passionated about the project and all of us worked into artistic tasks and combined them with our respective functions. I helped out in this aspect, doing some scenarios and characters modeling, I did textures, UVs deployment (that consists in establishing the match between the 3D model vertex and a flat texture that will later be applied to the model, so it will look like the texture has been adapted by hand). In conclusion, I can tell you that the project was super gruelling, we were too ambitious and had to polish quite a lot of stuff. Even had to delete some parts of the game that were already implemented to keep the coherence of what we could technically present. To help you make an idea, Playtime Stories initially was going to have only four characters, with three costumes each and three skills for each costume. Seeing how much it took us to create only a couple of characters with two costumes and skills each, I believe this work could have taken us several years to finish. Think we aren't talking only about doing the animations separately, we had to think about each and every combination of them in sequence, and make the transitions as smooth as we could. We go a step harder when we adopted a third person camera, what costed us a lot to program correctly.

JF: How was the feedback received once you presented the game? did you wanted to take it further than a simple student project?

EP: The game received tons of praise from both, classmates and teachers, they loved our presentation and even mentioned us on social media. We got the third place in the Social Point awards for the best games in the promotion and also won Best Game Award in the Three Headed Monkey Awards UPC category and also were finalists in all categories, what made us really happy.

After presenting the game at the university, we spent some time thinking about a business plan, in which we thought about what could be the best design to make the Free to Play model work. But sadly in Spain it's really hard to get the attention from investors if you don't have any previous published game. So, after that I decided to start a project on my own, a runner game for mobile devices. In this project I learned a lot too, especially in all things related to how to optimize resources for mobile, would say that ended up dedicating aproximately 6 hours per day to that game.

JF: And was then when you went to do the interview at BeautiFun Games?

EP: Yes, I already knew the studio, since I played Nihilumbra, and totally loved it. Always wanted to work with the Spanish indies that "emerged from the void". So I didn't hesitate a second and sent them my CV. When I attended the interview I took my works, including the runner project for mobile, in which I was working on my own, and I think it was the key to get the job.

JF: What would you recommend to other developers that, like you, don't have a lot of work experience and want to enter the industry?

EP: I would give them a single but very powerful advice: Go work on your own projects, alone or with a few others, and prioritize the quality of what you do over quantity as much as you can. So when your potential employers will take a look at your portfolio they get truly amazed, both in the visual aspect and on the technical one. This is even more valuable than having a Master degree.

JF: And now you are almost two months here, how do you feel here at BeautiFun?

EP: I have to admit that is a pleasure to work here, everybody trust a lot on me and in what I do, giving me freedom to manage my time and solve any technical issue that appears in my own way. This is a professional philosophy that's very hard to find elsewhere.

JF: I know you are working on our new game, Megamagic, since you enterered. What do you think about the project and what are your main tasks?

EP: The project is huge, very attractive and really well designed. If I was working somewhere else and I knew how the game is, I'd have to admit that it will be an instabuy. Here my duties are mainly logic-related topics, pathfinding and graphic programming.

JF: Now here comes the final part, when I ask you to describe some good attribute from each of your colleagues.

Marcos is quite methodic, responsible and he explained me everything I had to do in Megamagic really well . I'm very grateful to him for all his support since I entered the company.

Jordi is a tremendously compromised guy, always thinking about how to improve. also it's amazing how fast he works!

Lourdes has an incredible talent, and as my other colleagues said in past interviews, she always takes care of all of us like if she were kind of a mother.

Aniol is really persistent, when he sets a goal for himself he goes forward and fights as hard as he possibly can to achieve the most perfect result.

Kevin has brilliant ideas, he highly surprised me with Megamagic game design, and also has a really charismatic personality that attracts the attention of the press.

In your case, Jesús, I see you love what you do, and how much this fact fuels your work to go a step further everyday. The results are helping a lot to improve the visibility of our studio.

JF: And a good and bad point about yourself?

EP: Something good I think I've proved along my student life and my short career is the compromise degree with the projects I take part in, always try to dedicate as much time as possible to them so they can have the maximum visibility as possible.

If I had to remark a negative point of myself, it would be my grumpiness, nothing seems good to me at first sight. Maybe it can convince me a bit afterwards, but at the beginning I'm always too exigent with everything I do.

Link to Part I.

You can get in touch with Elias on Twitter, he is @WaLiactico

Interview done by @JesusFabre.

BeautiFun News and Discoveries Ep. 20

noreply@blogger.com (Jesus Fabre) — Thu, 12 Jun 2014 08:32:00 +0000

We participated in the book "The Art and Design of Video Games", published by Dutch magazine EYE for Games.

Rai Sewgobind, director at EFG and her crew have been working really hard on a book to gather more than 20 indie devs and compile beautiful game art pieces accompanied with very interesting in-depth interviews to their authors and also who used them game designers in their respective game universes. Our interview is mainly focused on the creatures inhabiting the world of Nihilumbra. We talk about how was the creative process behind them, our main references, their role in the game universe... definitely a full blown bestiary of what can be created out from the Void.

Extensive Nihilumbra Making of at Grab-It Magazine.

It can take everybody by surprise when you see how fast they've grown up, but its totally understandable when you see how they are making their own way through a very serious, honest and compromised work. I'm talking about Grab It Magazine, whose next issue will be available soon in the App Store! Check it out if you can, it includes an extensive and thorough postmortem of Nihilumbra, full of interesting and unpublished insights. Here you can purchase only the part containing the Nihilumbra post-mortem.

Gaming for Good gratitude video

As some of you may remember, at the end of the past year we colaborated with a good number of Nihilumbra keys to the Gaming for Good initiative. It consists basically of a web portal where anybody can buy their digital games and all the revenue goes directly to NGO Save the Children. A few days ago they surprised us with this moving video, in which their promoters/coordinators, youtubers Athene and Reese Leysen, thanked us for our support and showed a bit of where the money of our sold games is going.

We backed, and recommend you to back: Spaceteam Almiral's Club and BEARZERKERS!

This week we backed two charming Kickstarter projects. First of them is Spaceteam Admiral's Club. For the ones who still don't know, Spaceteam is a multiplayer mobile game in which you have to closely and timely cooperate with between one to three other players to repair your spaceship along tons of threats unexpectedly emerging all along the way. Take a look at the video below for further and don't miss it, remember it's free on both, the App Store and Google Play.

The second project in which we put our money into is BEARZERKERS, a crazy multiplayer game that mixes Tron Light Cycles with Nintendo Land, and looks so much fun! folks at Australian studio Wildgrass Games have taken their prototype game project Pandamonium (you can try it here) and now they want to take it to the next level. Take a look at the video and judge by yourself.

We played and recommend you to play: Slumberland. Via @JesusFabre

During last week it took place the Nitrome Game Jam, where several devs created games inspired in a common theme, that was dreams, we stumbled on this really funny game called Slumberland. Developed by the Canadian independent studio HalfBot. It exhibits a brilliant pixel art aesthetics and animations combined with really cool gameplay, since you have to beat enemies and then after beating each one you take its control, having to adapt to it and master new skills.

Little Mel is trapped in a dream about his favourite video game. Take over the enemies and use their powers to help find little Mel's missing game cartridge.

If you like the game, you can give your feedback to the devs with your comment here.

If you haven't satisfied your appetite with everything you've seen so far in this compilation, here you can check out our previous issue of BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries.

The BeautiFun Team Stories - Elias Pereiras - Programmer - Part I

noreply@blogger.com (Jesus Fabre) — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 10:24:00 +0000

It's been a while since we published the last interview with a team member, but as the team has grown since then, this time around we are talking to Elías Pereiras, a young programmer who joined us in late April. He graduated at Universidad de Santiago de Compostela but was born and raised in A Estrada (a small town in Galicia, North of Spain). In this first part of the interview we start with his personal story as a gamer.

How did you discover video games?

One day my neighbour's parents bought a PC and he invited me to play a game called Prehistorik. I had never seen a computer before, it was amazing to see that game, with such colourful graphics and funny universe. Think I was used to play with marbles, peg-tops, etc, so a video game was radically different and totally new for me. So I came back home and told all my family how awesome that game was, I should have been really convincing, since my father installed it at his office. He was a doctor and played it when he had no patients to serve, it lasted for a while, until one day he came back home celebrating he had just beated the game and stop playing forever.

So Prehistorik was a big thing for you, to which other games it took you to?

It was the game that got me intrigued and almost obsessed about this creative medium, so when my friend bought a Sega Megadrive it was a real fever for me. After insisting for countless times my parents bought me the console and finally I was able to enjoy gems like Streets of Rage, Dynamite Headdy, Comix Zone and Bomberman at home.

But if you want to know what's the game that marked a hit in my gaming story, it would be Sonic & Knuckles without question. Loved it, I should have beated it at least a thousand times. Maybe this was caused because the game forced me to explore every corner with each character to get all the items. I was a completionist, so loved that. Sonic & Knuckles usually comes to my mind because now as an adult I don't have that strong will that encouraged me to restlessly beat the game again and again as a kid, I finish them once and that's more than enough. I remember that I played a lot Streets of Rage with my neighbour friend, we loved the cooperation, but didn't beat the game so many times, perhaps because we liked to fight each other during the game!

The next big thing that happened to me was in 1998, when my parents bought me the first PlayStation and Crash Bandicoot 3. After playing that platformer I seriously started wondering how the hell video games were made, and the curiosity made me play PS1 games more than I ever played with any other system.

Also with PlayStation I discovered RPG games, Final Fantasy VII, VIII and IX, Legend of Dragoon. If I had to remark a certain quality from a Final Fantasy game, it should be their deep and variable storyline. I was used to play games with stories that were developed in quite a linear way, for example Sonic or Dynamite Headdy, and then I found those titles where I can change my path, take decisions, and with my explorer spirit I ended up spending hundreds of hours on them, it didn't took long until the game's time spent meter got overflow!

Other great PlayStation games are Medievil, that was kind of an evolution of the platformers I played during the 16 bit era. Also Tony Hawk Pro Skateboarding presented a great challenge for me, loved to combine movement after movement on the fly, a great point I valued in the game was how realistic it was recreating the scenarios and the life of a professional skateboarder. Curiously at that time, I didn't find many console games that tried to represent realistic environments, one that tried to do that was Syphon Filter.

Were you a fan of 3D games when the technology came out in the mid 90s?

I loved both 2D and 3D games, but I have to admit that games with 3D technology caught my attention a lot. Tombi 2 was a great 3D platformer where you had to accomplish several missions. Remember how curious where some of them, for example one in which I had to find a lost spatula, it may sound a bit ridiculous, but ended up presenting a pretty serious challenge. Also you could wear suits with powers and the character grunted quite weird noise. The game had an unabashedly sense of humor in general and that was something I truly adored. I wasn't only a fan of platformers, also liked fighting titles like Tekken or Soul Blade, still comes to my mind how the story in that game was more complex than in other renowned and also great fighters, as Tekken, where it was less trickier, but brilliant as well, with all those cross references between the characters' stories.

I see you loved platformers, but perhaps the biggest thing that happened to you as a gamer was the discovery of RPG games. Could you go a bit further into detailing that?

Thanks to the first Playstation I really got hooked to the Final Fantasy Saga, but only until the 10^thpart. Sadly on parts XII and XIII the graphics were amazing but gameplay wise it wasn't the same at all. Seems that things changed recently for Square Enix, especially after they released Bravely Default and it proved them there is quite a considerable amount of gamers who still love old school RPGs. It was a pity that one day publishers started to lose their faith in classic RPGs and wanted to innovate adding more action elements, what caused a strong rejection from most of the hardcore fans.

And what about your next system, was Playstation 2 an instant buy for you?

Not at all, since my budget for videogames was really limited as a teenager, I was always playing previous generation's systems, discovering hidden gems or enjoying games that most of the people recommended. My parents didn't give me any sort of weekly pay, instead they bought me stuff when I needed it, but they were logically a bit reticent with such expensive things. So as I already had the first PlayStation, it was quite hard to convince them to buy me a PS2 until it got really cheap, and it was a bit before PS3 was released.

Once I managed to get my hands on my own PS2, I played Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3. Both games were amazing, with their adult themes, also got shocked by Shadow of the Colossus, God of War and Kingdom Hearts.

I know you are a musician, I wonder if that had some kind of influence in your passion for video games, did you like music games?

My parents signed me up for violin classes and ended up playing it for a bit more than 10 years. They wanted me to employ my free time out of school on learning music. So I gladly practiced and improved my musical violin skills until one day it was almost impossible to keep studying and learning music, so had to continue only with the University.

Regarding games, I guess my passion for music may have had something to do with the huge amount of hours I spent on Guitar Hero. The music game from Harmonix was my obsession for quite a long time!

Which other systems have been relevant in your life?

Well, during my music learning days I clearly remember how much fun I had with a Game Boy that I had with Pokemon Red and Crystal. It wasn't easy at all, because you wanted to get them all, capture every single creature in the game. On Game Boy Advance I also loved the turn-based strategy game Advance Wars and a game full of Final Fantasy spirit called Golden Sun.

One of the latest consoles I bought, and quite late after it was released as you may expcet, was XBOX 360 with Mass Effect. It seems like yesterday when I was playing it on a 13 inches TV and beated it! After that my parents bought a huge flat screen TV. Mass Effect is amazing, I love the detailed universe that Bioware built for the game, stories, races, characters, etc.

Lastly I cannot forget to mention the Nintendo 3DS, a system I got mainly to play Pokemon X. Since Pokemon Red I hadn't experienced something similar, the fever came back and it was in good part because I hadn't played another Pokemon game in a lot of years. That kind of idealized my idea about how cool the saga was. And Pokemon X fully covered my expectations!

What are your hopes and worries about the medium as a gamer?

Most remarkably what makes me stay hopeful as a gamer are indie games. There is pure gold among them, and that's an increasingly difficult thing to say about AAA games nowadays. Sure, there are fantastic AAA games, but generally money is what big companies want, so they have to keep exploiting non-risky formulas, which they know they will be profitable. They go that way instead of adventuring in more "experimental" games, as indie studies do and that most times result in amazing and original ideas that bring video games closer than ever to an art form.

You can get in touch with Elias on Twitter, he is @WaLiactico

Interview done by @JesusFabre.

BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries Ep.19

noreply@blogger.com (Jesus Fabre) — Fri, 30 May 2014 10:55:00 +0000

Pop Middle Ages, retro art prints from the Middle Ages. Via @BeautiFunGames

Pop Middle Ages is a print-series based on the coolest referents of popular culture, video games, comics, etc. They are basically 8.3x11.7 prints (A4 size) available both B&W and color which represent characters from popular culture in an edgy medieval style. They are a fine blend of the style’s elegance with the freak and awesome of the action cartoons from the 90’s and indie video games. The project is made by We do stuff, a creative agency from Barcelona.

Alz, a flash game that puts us in the shoes of an Alzheimer patient. Via @JesusFabre

Alzheimer's disease, and any form of dementia, can place a great burden on those who love and care for someone suffering from it. The brief, poignant flash game Alz tries to tell the other side of the struggle: what it's like to go about the day when your memory is so displaced and filled with gaps.

Terrordrome, a PC 2D one on one fighting game featuring the most popular horror movie characters from the 80s until now. Via @truguers

We took this paragraph from their site, that will help you to make an idea of what the game feels like:

If you're an unconditional fan of japanimation style video game, pose to pose animated characters and epileptical moves happening in a blink of an eye, you may not be seduced by Terrordrome. The game is more about realistic characters and animations with even more violent and lethal moves than any ninja or karate master!!

You can download the current version of the game here.

Mario Kart 8 gets cross-promoted with Mercedes. Via @IIEvadne

Lourdes and Jordi got pretty amazed when they saw this funny Nintendo ad with Mario driving a Mercedes. It's uncommon to see such a close collaboration in-between Nintendo and other brands. As we could read in Eurogamer:

"The upcoming DLC isn't the first time that Nintendo has featured other brands in its first-party games - Pikmin 2 was full of liscensed items for players to find, while Wave Race 64 featured Kawasaki jet skis. But the inclusion is a bit more blatant than most of these deals - and may stem from Nintendo's recent decision to license out its character IP to a greater extent."

Reflect-it. An indie platformer with a twist. Via @JesusFabre

We hear it everywhere, puzzle platformers is a really overcrowded genre in the indie scene, so exactly for this reason we want to remark the ones that try to innovate, as the following one.

Reflect It is all about mirrors and reflecting the world around you. Built for the Playstation Vita, a mirror creates a reflected clone of your surroundings. It is possible to reflect both the ground and static objects as well as any dynamic objects in the world. However, be careful what you are reflecting as the reflection will disappear once a new mirror is drawn. The possibilities for thought-provoking puzzles involving physics and reflecting both positive and negative space are vast. Picture this: you reflect a kinematic platform which also reflects it’s direction of motion and now you can move in a different direction. You can reflect ladders to a reachable height and now are able to climb; you can reflect negative space over a rope and swing from one platform to another. You can even reflect negative space over your enemies and maim them. It’s a puzzle with so many different possible solutions that creativity is necessary and exploration is encouraged.

Super Smash Bros. Source! Via @truguers

What if Valve took their most relevant characters and put them into a Super Smash Bros-like game? it would be amazing, right? so lets put our imagination into images and start dreaming:

If you haven't satisfied your appetite with everything you've seen so far in this compilation, here you can check out our previous issue of BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries.

BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries Ep.18

noreply@blogger.com (Jesus Fabre) — Thu, 22 May 2014 09:27:00 +0000

We were invited to Non-stop International Animation Festival. Via @BeautiFunGames

Along the past week the Non-stop International Animation Festival took place in Barcelona. Many professionals from very diverse areas under the animation field gathered in Espai Jove Fontana. We gladly accepted University of Barcelona invitation to participate in a roundtable about animation for video games Lourdes went there to share and contrast her impressions on how traditional animation changes when you are working with video games. The roundtable was also participated by many recognized game professionals, from left to right: Oscar García Pañella y Roman Zabal (Cookie Box), Samuel Molina "Fukuy", Pau Moreno (DLE) and Lourdes Pérez (Blinzy Studios).

Elias and his team won a UPC Three Monkey Headed Award for Playtime Stories. Via @WaLiactico

Our brand new member Elias Pereiras and his colleagues at UPC developed Playtime Stories a funny arena multiplayer game that will bring you back at school days where you had battles with your friends, each had a role with its own habilities. Who hasn't ever played as a ninja, cowboy or a viking? Turns out that yesterday the game just won the Three Monkey Headed Award in the ex-students category.

Elias work has been focused mainly on programming, but he's also been working a lot on many graphic textures and animations. From his point of view, one of the most significant technical challenges and also attractive points in the game relies in the opponents IA, that implements quite a complex behavioural tree for each character. It is also worth to remark that the game was designed to be very scalable and with a monetisation strategy in mind, so it wouldn't be hard for them to get release if they had the proper investment. We recommend you to try a Windows build for free here.

We backed, and encourage you to back:

Shiness: Halfway between a dynamic fights' manga and the fantasy of an RPG.

French developer Ynnis Interactive wants to bring us a very ambitious project. Shiness is an RPG full of action, fantasy and puzzles. They are aiming to build a story that delivers 20 hours of gameplay, what is a lot for an indie project. We hope they will reach their funding goal!

SUPERHOT: A unique first-person shooter game where times moves only when you move, making each level a deadly puzzle.

Back in February we already talked about SUPERHOT, a game that took FPS mechanics and evolved them in a direction that nobody expected to see before. The result was this online demo that received tons of praise from the players and critics. In their campaign, their team, composed mainly of Polish developers, is looking for funding to make a full game that will blow our minds away, and they are getting the proper money to make it a reality.

Amplitude: A rhythm-action music game based on the 2003 cult classic.

Veteran developer Harmonix wants to bring back a new game with the flavor of their cult titles Amplitude and Frequency. Released in early 2000s, those games outstanded on their own and ignited the experimentation with music games that later on will end in the creation of sagas like Guitar Hero or Rock Band.

The Worst game flyers in history. Via @truguers

Kevin discovered this awesome post on IGN Spain, compiling some of the most horrendous video game fliers ever, you should check it out. Here are three samples that can prove how bad nostalgia can be.

To Leave, a different game from Ecuador. Via @JesusFabre

Stefano Palacios is the creative director at To Leave, a puzzle game that put us in the shoes of a young boy trying to get out of his stucked personal situation. Ecuatorian developer Freaky Creations wants to deliver a game full of metaphores referring challenges of life. As Palacios said: "The game's theme was inspired by unhappy relationships, people stuck in unhappy jobs and the fear of venturing out".

As we found in an interesting article published by Polygon:

To Leave was developed within Sony Computer Entertainment's Latin America Incubation Program, which is an initiative that helps game development communities in Latin America make games for PlayStation consoles. The Incubation Program loans development kits to game-makers in the region at no cost and provides them with access to Sony's developer support website. Palacios told Polygon that without the program, To Leave would not have come as far as it has today.

How would it be to play with isometric view in Bioshock. Via @Sueythelaw

Suey stomped on this amazing work by STASIS creator Christopher Bischoff, he recreated in a very careful way all the graphic details we can find in the first level of Irrational Games masterpiece. STASIS got funded in last December thanks to Kickstarter and the team is now working hard on it. We are really looking forward to play it!

Sometimes you can have a good laugh while you're in the bathroom! Via @llEvadne

The funny note of the day comes from Lourdes, our artist, who found this hilarious pic on the Internet that seems to be taken in a bath. It's curious what you can find while looking for references for your next game.

If you haven't satisfied your appetite with everything you've seen so far in this compilation, here you can check out our previous issue of BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries.

BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries Ep.17

noreply@blogger.com (Jesus Fabre) — Fri, 09 May 2014 07:43:00 +0000

Nihilumbra showcased at Rethinking Game Concept exhibition. Via @AniolAlcaraz

This week we were invited to present Nihilumbra at Rethinking Game Concept, an Art exhibition that started on 6th and goes on until 11th of May at the Communications Institute of Universidtat Autònoma de Barcelona. Aniol was there showcasing the game and explaining details about the development. Rethinking Game Concept is an event composed by serveral conferences, roundtables and an exhibition that wants to invite the visitors to reflect about the importance and role of digital and more traditional games as a communication tool. Another game that was exhibited there was the beautiful adventure "Los Ríos de Alice" by Delirium Studios.

Explaining students how hard (and fun at the same time) is to create your own video game studio. Via @truguers

Also last Tuesday, Kevin was invited to gave a talk at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, there he explained how was the process of founding our studio to many students who were eager to learn more about how to make their way through the game industry. The talk lasted around two hours because of the numerous questions Kevin's talk motivated among the audience. The event was part of a series of conferences organized by the university to promote their upcoming brand new video game development degree in Terrassa.

We encourage you to back:

The Way. Sci-fi puzzle-platformer full of Chahi's influences.

Red Goddess: Inner World.

Via @BeautiFunGames

This week we've encountered this Kickstarter project called The Way, it was something that caught our attention from second one. Almost instantly, we felt in love with its beautiful landscapes, the character designs and animations that three-man Polish studio Playway is crafting for the game. Also the funding goal is really accessible, with 27 days till the end of the campaign, they have more than 2/3 of the money already!

The Way also takes some of the same influences present in Nihilumbra, like Heart of Darkness and Another World, so now we have even more reasons to support it!

Also, if you remember well, three weeks ago we backed the Spanish project Red Goddess on Kickstarter. A metroidvania with puzzle elements and colourful eye-candy graphics. Sadly the project didn't reach its goal with that first attempt, but now they're back! And for our great surprise, turns out that Red Goddess: Inner World has already achieved more than $16K in barely 48 hours, thats more than a half of what they are asking for! Now it's a great chance to play their demo and see if their project is worth your support, for us the game still has a very high quality, so that's why we backed it again!

Prehistory: Play a Neanderthal in this educational MMORPG.

Via @truguers

It was somewhat surprising for us to learn about Prehistory, an educational MMORPG that wants to put us in the shoes of a Neanderthal who hunts animals, recollects vegetables and also carves stones and other materials to craft tools. You will have to lead or be part of a clan that will fight for survival and supremacy of your region. The game is being developed in Unity 3D and the team is quite large for an indie project, 17 people at the moment. Also they are open to extra collaborators. Also we want to remark that they are putting a lot of attention into making it the most realistic as possible.

Be the greatest 80s-90s fighter in Video Hero Story!

Via @JesusFabre

In the past years, and with the rising of indie game development, there are two main characteristics in games that developers have been using more and more. One is the usage of pixel art graphic style and the other is the amount of games based on classic titles from the 80s and 90s. In the intersection of these two areas we can find Video Hero Story, a game that let us live as if we were some sort of Rocky. We'll have to train, fight, level up, take decisions that will determine the future of our career and, in summary, live the epic story of an 80's-90's street fighter action movie hero that will be filled with nostalgic references to that era. You can check out their site and play the alpha here.

VHS development team is composed of 4 people from Russia, they are based in Saint-Petersburg, and as you can see they are working hard, with the only need of Mr. Arnold's vintage poster moral support, looking at them and encouraging them from their backs!

You must check out those amazing pixel art demakes by Junkboy. Via @AniolAlcaraz

Recently Aniol discovered this great pixel artist called Junkboy, you should check his portfolio, look at this Vanquish-inspired artwork in pixel art as a proof of his awesomeness:

There's always a good excuse to play games with your family. Don't you think so? Via @AniolAlcaraz

Go to Cyanide and Happiness' original article.

If you aren't satisfied your appetite with everything you've seen so far in this compilation, here you can check out our previous issue of BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries.

BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries Ep.16

noreply@blogger.com (Jesus Fabre) — Thu, 01 May 2014 07:00:00 +0000

New member acquired! Welcome Elias! Via @BeautiFunGames

All of us at BeautiFun Games are very happy to receive a new member in the team, programmer Elias Pereiras. He was born and raised in Santiago de Compostela and recently finished his studies at Universidad Politècnica de Catalunya.

If you are curious about his previous work, you can check out his final thesis project. The free game Playtime Stories, looks like a lot of fun.

BeautiFun Games was at RetroMadrid 2014. Via @Sueythelaw

This past weekend one of the most important retrogaming fairs in Europe took place in Madrid. RetroMadrid gathered around 7000 industry professionals, gamers of all ages and many families attended the event with the purpose of reliving the good old times and play some classics.

The nice folks at Spanish indie game site Indie-o-rama organized a stand with a bunch of many other Spanish indies, so we could reserve a space there to showcase Nihilumbra so Kevin and Marcos travelled to Madrid to participate in what could be called an "retro-indie booth". As you can see in the image below, some visitors were really hooked on our game!

That chance to attend RetroMadrid was also a great opportunity for three members of the team to meet in person after many time, Kevin, Marcos and Jesús, who just came back from Brazil (where he has been working remotely) and is also part of RetroMadrid organization.

We backed, and encourage you to support:
"Hearth Forth, Alicia".
The journey of a mexican indie developer. Via @BeautiFunGames

It was a huge surprise for many of us to discover this Metroidvania RPG on Kickstarter. The graphics quality looks impressive, gameplay-wise the game takes influences from 90s classics as Castlevania SOTN, Zelda and Xenogears. Behind Hearth Forth, Alicia there are only two people, Alonso Martin (as artist, animator, game designer, writer and programmer) and Jonathan Greer as musician.

Researching a bit on Youtube, we can find a gameplay video of how the game looked like in 2010, so you can imagine how much work did it take to only one person to polish the art and code of the game to the extent that is shown in the Kickstarter trailer.

The Pirate Bay Bundle. Via @JesusFabre

Indie games advocate @moshboy has recently put together the Pirate Bay Bundle with 1001 free games that are worth to check out. We encourage you to watch the trailer below and try a few of them. Below you can watch the video and here's the link that takes you to the .torrent file:

Hey Nintendo, let's talk about games. Please listen to us! Via @BeautiFunGames

As we heard that Nintendo is receptive to use their characters in other developer's games (similar to what recently happened with Sonic Lost World with some Zelda characters, enemies and many clear references to the famous Nintendo franchise). From here we would like to ask the big N if we could use Ganondorf so he would be a character in Megamagic! Could we?

If you have not satisfied your appetite with everything you've seen so far, here you can check out our previous issue of BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries.

BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries Ep.15

noreply@blogger.com (Jesus Fabre) — Fri, 25 Apr 2014 05:43:00 +0000

The curious story of Batman, Spiderman and Shinobi. Via @Sueythelaw

Generally we are somehow used to find tributes in video games, references to a certain classic character or world from other IPs. In this case we are talking about a true action-adventure game as Shinobi that counted with up to four versions of the game. Every version had some modification in some of those "tribute/references" characters. We recommend you to look at the Wikipedia to learn more about Intellectual Property and games with this case here.

Hyper Dragon Ball Z firmly aims to be the best Dragon Ball fighter (at least amongst the fanmade ones). Via @AniolAlcaraz

What would happen if we mix Darkstalkers and Street Fighter II animation and fighting styles with Dragon Ball Universe imaginery (attacks, movements, backgrounds, etc)? the answers is this fan game created in Mugen by a group of very skilled enthusiasts during several years. You can play a demo here.

We recommend you to play: Donkey Kong Country. Tropical Freeze. Via @llEvadne

Lately, Lourdes and her family have been playing a lot the last Donkey Kong title for Wii U, she claimed Tropical Freeze is much better than DKC Returns (released for the Wii) a must play for any platformer fan. "Only when you complete the previous levels to 100%... you will be able to unlock new stages, and those new unlocked levels are more and more exciting!", she said.

We recommend you to listen: VHS Head. Via @AniolAlcaraz

Blackpool based artist VHS Head began making music in 1999, since then he has been using video tape as the primary sound source and 80's B movies as his inspiration. The music is a collage of vocals, stuttering guitars and drum hits taken from a vast amount of ex-rental videos teleporting the listener back to the golden era of the VHS format. If the final work meet the expectations, this will be Aniol's album of the year! Listen to it and tell us what do you think about it?

We backed, and encourage you to support: Outcast Reboot HD and Death In Candlewood.

Via @BeautiFunGames

This past weeks we backed two Kickstarter projects, the first one is Outcast Reboot HD, a project that wants to take back to life a true classic title. Released in 1999 by the French independent studio Appeal and under the production of Infogrames, Outcast was a true innovator in many aspects. The game presented a free-roaming 3D open world where the character could decide how to deal with the other actors/living beings living in Planet Adelpha. To mention a few more things, in Outcast you could ride an animal, an innovation that many people thought was introduced by The Halo Saga.

Death In Candlewood has been a true surprise for all of us at the studio. We didn't know that a developer called Rosebud Studios in Barcelona was creating this atmospheric survival horror FPS. Found out the development started in 2010 and that there are members of Bioshock, The Witcher and Silent Hill, what makes you think that something big is coming from this young studio formed by really talented professionals.

Here you can check out our previous issue of BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries.

The BeautiFun Team Stories - Kevin Cerdà - Game designer and writer - Part III

noreply@blogger.com (Jesus Fabre) — Tue, 22 Apr 2014 12:41:00 +0000

Kevin: Now focusing on Nihilumbra, I think you have already answered a lot of all the possible questions a person can imagine about the game. So, there is only one thing I can ask you. What is left for you to tell about the game?

Jesús: As I already told you, before Nihilumbra I was developing a AAA title in which I had put a lot of hope. When the project was discontinued I felt like really bad, thinking all my work would never be seen, so I felt like everything I did became nothing, my work was suddenly erased from the world. Those sort of emotions influenced me a lot to craft the story and design of Nihilumbra, its story, the dark aesthetics and all the sadness surrounding Born when he starts the adventure.

What's the less expected feedback you got from the players? and also, what got lost in translation from your head to what they receive when playing the game?

I was ready for the backslash that a few people throwed against the game, claiming it was pretentious rubbish and made use of cheap philosophy. I don’t know, it hurts, but you kinda expect that kind of reaction in the Internet. But I wasn't really prepared for some of the good comments, many people appreciated the game a lot, especially how it treats many topics that every human being has during life. Fear to death, the arrogance that sometimes happens when you get an achievement, it's a game that communicate things very few games accomplish to do successfully. I have to admit I wasn't ready for that kind of good feedback, but I have to outline I really appreciate those players who write us telling how much the game connected with them. As a player, you don't have to try to get all the underlying messages hidden in the game, but if you do, then you will have a much better understanding (and in consequence I think it will be more enjoyable).

Nihilumbra means a lot for me, it's my first commercial title and that carries a lot of responsibility. Even now, almost two years after we released the game, it's quite hard for me to cope with critics in general, whether they come as a face to face commentary, a journalistic review or a tweet. I fight everyday to be the best game designer I can, so I have a really high self-exigence.

Now on Megamagic, what do you feel when comparing the birth of Megamagic and the birth of Nihilumbra?

Definitely, Megamagic is having a much more complicated development; if Nihilumbra was a kamikaze project, Megamagic could be considered as suicidal without hesitation. The project is a new adventure, a new challenge, much more extense and with a very innovative gameplay. We are fighting to finish it on time and with the expected quality.

From story and design points of view, what have been your main motivations?

The story is quite deep and elaborated. I built a complex universe, with different factions, beliefs, cultures, individuals with their own stories, personalities and problems. The events that occur amongst the characters have their very particular reasons behind, etc. One of the reasons I'm more enthusiastic about the project is that I believe in those characters, they deserve to come to life and let the players experience their stories.

About the gameplay, I took the main mechanic of a game I played as a child as inspiration and added new elements to improve it as much as possible. Our inspiration is a game very rarely remembered nowadays, but that was one of my favourites PC games as a child. Also, Megamagic is designed in a way the player is suddenly dropped into the world and he will have to discover it step by step. The nonlinear experience we are creating will be quite interesting, as an example, in a fantastic medieval game like Baldurs Gate you know that somewhere in the quest there is a dragon waiting for you that you have to beat, or a princess in distress. But in Megamagic the ambient is really new and the player won't have a clue of what is waiting around the corner, so the game will surely surprise him.

Now, as with the rest of the members of the team, it's your turn to remark a good quality of them and also something that you like and you don't like from yourself.

Aniol: I know him for almost three years now and still surprises me, something I have observed is that he is a really smart guy with a lot of rational thinking. Sometimes he is too rational, up to the point of having difficulties to understand the more emotional members of the team. I have the feeling I understand him better than most people since I have the same problem. He's also very perfectionist, sometimes complaining about the very small details of each proposal I present to him. But I always try to present my favorite idea surrounded by other mediocre ones, in this way he always chooses the right one!

Pol: I have a lot of complicity with him since we were already working together on The Creature. Also we have a very similar sense of humour.

Lourdes: She is very passionate about everything she does, for the good and the bad. She's always taking care of all of us. It's always good to have somebody more human like her around. Artistically I love her watercolor works, also how far she goes looking for references and inspirations, even when I push her to go far from her style, that's more happy and colourful.

Marcos: He is a great guy, super productive, we have the same passion for the 80s culture and since the beginning we get along very well.

Jordi: He is really fast at drawing, as fast that I can sit beside him and watch how he draws things in real time and correct him without having to go back to my place. Incredible. On the other hand he has a very defined style and is hard to take him out of it. His dark humour is something I love, but his jokes aren't suitable for a public audience!

Jesús: I see you are always doing, learning and sharing things, even when you don't need to. That's something very valuable for us to have somebody always tuned up about the last news happening in the industry. I see you're a very proactive member who likes to purpose new alternatives to spread the word on the studio and our games.

Now you gave your impressions on the rest of the team good qualities. Which ones would be your most outstanding personal attributes, both good and bad?

Let's start with good points first. As a game designer, I really trust my hunches. I've studied lots of theory about game design, but sometimes I break with all of that and follow my instinct, doing something I've never seen before. Examples of that are The Creature's trailer or Nihilumbra's Void Mode. Once I learn to control such impulses the receive them whenever I want, I’ll become extremely powerful!

About my bad points, sometimes I get too much stressed, I go crazy when things go wrong, but also when everything is running smoothly I get worried about the smallest detail. Also it hurts me too much when somebody don't like my work and criticizes it, that contributes to increase the stress even more. But the worst deficiency I have is that I'm not able to create my own game from scratch, I learned how to code and animate, but would love to create good art. For example, I was amazed when I met Francisco Téllez (Unepic), someday I really aspire to be like him and be able to craft almost every part of a game. This is probably caused because I feel ideas aren't useful without the technical skills needed to create a game from scratch and I feel really vulnerable for this!

Link to Part II.

You can get in touch with Kevin on Twitter, he is @truguers

Interview done by @JesusFabre.

The BeautiFun Team Stories - Kevin Cerdà - Game designer and writer - Part II

noreply@blogger.com (Jesus Fabre) — Wed, 16 Apr 2014 16:22:00 +0000

Welcome to the second part of the interview with our game designer and writer Kevin Cerdà. Today we talk with him about video games from a more professional perspective and see how he evolved as a student, until he co-founded BeautiFun Games.

Jesús: Your first finished project was The Creature. Can you introduce us the circunstances that lead you to create this game?

Kevin: Yes, TheCreature, as Nihilumbra, takes elements from classic games I played as a kid and mix them with new ideas, preferably ones that hasn't been seen before. It was my final project at Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya (UPC) Video game Masters Degree. I remark these studies had no specific game design especialization, so I only had two choices, to focus on art or programming. I chose programming, because I thought that it was my weakest point. One day the teacher told us about how the final project was going to be like: next week we would have to form groups and each of them would develop a small demo of a game. I wanted to use the degree to earn game design experience, so I worked really hard on a design proposal before the day when we had to form the groups arrived. Some people started to talk and grouped themselves by following similar preferences; my case was a bit shocking, since nobody expected to see a guy with tons of design documents and sketches ready to be implemented. For me it was essential to walk that extra mile as I needed to be able to say I had designed a full game once I jumped into the job market after my studies.

How was the experience of coordinating the team for The Creature?

Finally I managed to convince a bunch of people to join (Pol Urós was amongst them), and summarizing pretty much what happened, have to admit I ended up being kind of a dictator. It was hard to organize a team of people that didn’t know each other. There was one guy from our team that left the degree without any explanation! But I think it ended very positively since we made a full game with many levels, high replayability, hidden secrets, final enemies, a great soundtrack. It was crazy compared to the typical 15-20 minutes demo almost every students group use to submit as Masters final project. I think we were able to achieve all of that thanks to having everything specified on a design document, and that also avoided to lose time on the typical arguments that appear when things are too open and there's no clear direction.

In addition to the lead game design role, you also worked as project manager/producer. What did you learned about your experience in this new role?

My goal with The Creature was to create the best product I possibly could, with the crazy goal that, as soon as it got released, I would start receiving calls from big companies, like CAPCOM, to hire me as a Vice-President. In a word, I wanted to get as much recognition as possible with that first project; it is really hard to become a game designer without a team so I couldn’t lose a chance like that one. What I didn't take into account was that not everybody in our group had such high expectations, and here was where we had the toughest conflicts. For me it was vital to polish the game to the maximum, and that resulted in a huge level of critic and exigency to myself and consequently towards most of the team, so some people started to get fed up with me. I really believe that we wouldn’t have finished the game if it wasn’t for that, but it was really stressful for everyone. I've learned a lot since then and now things aren't like that anymore. Nowadays leadership is something I don't specially enjoy, I try to do my best and also give freedom to the team members to do things their way, and at their own pace.

The Creature's core development team. From left to right and top to bottom:
David Gallardo, Andreu Ferré, Kevin Cerdà, Pol Urós and Lluc Romaní.

What do you admire the most from the final result achieved with The Creature and what have you learnt about the development process?

Really admire the soundtrack, by Álvaro Lafuente. I would say it is even better than Nihilumbra's. Also appreciate a lot the mysterious atmosphere permeating the whole game. It tells many things with very simple details, and has also numerous secrets that very very few people discovered.
Learned a lot about how much it costs to finish a game, I have to admit the end of The Creature was especially complex. I also worked on lots of areas other than game design, took care of all the animations, did a lot of rigging and character texturing, sound effects, level designing and building, learned useful stuff about Unreal Engine, like how to create cinematics or edit particles and materials... In general, during the development of The Creature and the whole Master I learnt a lot from books I bought and from conferences I attended. Every time you need to struggle to finish a game you end up learning a lot from it, and the result is that you become a better professional.

Click to listen to some tracks from The Creature OST

Something I'm also very happy about The Creature are the contacts I gathered, from press and also other companies related to game development. I remember for example Mike Rose from Gamasutra and Paolo Giaiero from Indies4indies (a company that later on worked on Nihilumbra translations) contacted me with comments of high praise about the game.

Can you explain us about the transition from The Creature to Nihilumbra?

When we ended The Creature I started a marketing campaign to show it to the world. I sent emails to lots of people, I wrote one post on The Creature’s development blog every day during a whole summer, while we were on the last stage of the development… I barely slept during those months! And I also did this trailer. Seriously, I recommend you to check out its awesome trailer. Everyone loved it.

After the game was launched, some publishers contacted me to make a sequel of The Creature. Why not? I thought. But that ended up being kind of impossible, specially because we hadn't set up as a company, each member took his own road, like Dragon Balls, and it would be really messy to gather them or to do it without them. So I started looking for other projects. Unexpectedly, I found myself involved in a great and really ambitious AAA title where I started to collaborate as a game design assistant and ended being the main designer. I finished all the high level documentation of the game and a huge publisher okayed it, but sadly, in the last moment, it got cancelled. At the same time, I started to meet with a group of classmates to try to see if we could develop a game without a budget.

Two of the first Mockups for Nihilumbra

Those meetings started with around 15 people gathering once a week to share ideas, so we joined and tried to work each one on his side to produce some materials. The meeting started to get less and less crowded, since some of the people found a job or simply lost the motivation, so finally we were only a few folks there left without much hope to achieve something significant in the end, until one day Aniol surprised us with a lot of money he wanted to invest to create a video game studio. That studio needed a flagship game, so I started to illustrate and describe a game that could please all of the team members. The game was going to be self-published on iOS, since it was the best platform for indies, we could have tried to jump to PC first but at that time Steam doors were pretty close to new and unknown games. We decided to take what seemed the safest way: publish a game on iOS, but it was not going to be “an iOS game”, if you know what I mean.

Continues soon in Part III.

Link to Part I.

You can get in touch with Kevin on Twitter, he is @truguers

Interview done by @JesusFabre.