Gregzilla Games

Aniol: About the videogame industry, I have to say at the beginning we were a bit skeptical about how successfully commercial an indie game could be. Everyone was talking about casual and social gaming for mobile and Facebook, but after our experience with Nihilumbra (that's making a game we would love to play as traditional videogame players), things changed very favorably! Now we trust that keeping our efforts and passion, we can make our own road as part of this vibrant indie scene.

J: Nowadays, BeautiFun Games has grown and added three members more, so it almost doubled its size since it was funded, back in early 2011. How those changes have affected your roles at the company and what are the biggest challenges you faced?

A: I started to work as a producer without noticing that "producer" was the name for that kind of task. Focused on coordinating everyone's work so we all can get all done with the least possible delay. I also make sure that the result has the level of quality needed. More than order "what" we have to do, my main task is about the "how" we have to do it and what to change in order to get it on time.

About challenges, as programmer, I think one of the most difficult situations we had to face happened while developing Nihilumbra. Firstly getting used to work with the tech capabilities of a cellphone, since we couldn't read the textures from scenarios pixel by pixel, we had to sort-of invent a method using tables in RAM memory. After this issue was solved, we had to program the game physics and also create a realistic "painting effect" when the player touched the screen.  The painting effect was specially tricky, since we had to recur to use polygons to represent paint stains, also those polygons had to be small enough in a way when the user is painting close to any surface border, there won't be any stain "half floating" where that border ends. Something curious that not many people know is that we had to add a limit to the amount of painting you had in the game. The purpose of this feature was to avoid a potential performance slowdown if the player started painting -filling with polygons- on all the surface available.

A: Surely we could have chosen an easier path to go and try to avoid facing those challenges, but in the end we followed the hard path since we believed that those features were sort of unique and nobody had technically created such experience with a touching device until that moment. In addition, the gameplay demanded it and it made full sense to all of us. Finally, we got our effort rewarded with good sales, and it was not only because of the technical achievements in the game, I believe it was thanks to the combination of great art, level design and narrative.

A: I specially enjoy the starting and closing of projects. To create a solid technical base, and then polishing the details during last weeks of the development.

A: A videogame project is subject to many changes, that means you may need to adapt the implementation of some parts of the game depending on the variable needs of an artist, the game designer or even the musician. So to try to diminish the negative impact those changes have, as a programmer you have to code in a very tricky and strategic way with the goal of making your code as reusable as possible. This hability is very important here at BeautiFun Games, because our projects main direction are driven by the artists and designers, more than the programmers.

A: We received messages from people telling it was the best iOS game they ever played, that was mind-blowing. Also we got great comments about the PC version, something amazing who nobody expected was a fanart by a Russian fan called "~Nemesis~fierce", it mixes both universes from Nihilumbra and Journey! It is been a true honor to be compared with ThatGameCompany's masterpiece.

We try to leave a mark in gamers, like those movies you remember for a long time, if we achieve that, that will be a success.

A: About Pol, as I explained before, I met him before thanks to our shared fondness for poker, but it was a coincidence that he also entered the same Videogame Development Course as me. In that same course I met Lourdes and Kevin... for the final project Pol went to work with Kevin's group and Lourdes was in the same working group as me. So it was only a matter of time until the core team of BeautiFun Games was born. 

A: Kevin always gets his way. That's not a bad thing, because I always put a lot of spokes on his wheels, and consequently we end up approving only the best of his ideas.

Pol is always making your day easier, he hasn't only good mood, he also knows when is the best time to use it. 

Suey works hard as hell, always running the extra mile to make a project go forward.

Lourdes is kind of a mother for everybody. I know it may seem weird to you, but its somehow like that. Aside of working really hard, she also takes care of the whole team. Something that makes her unique is that she is very versatile, working with the same passion on scenarios or an options menu.

Jordi is the fastests hand in the painting western! In a very short time he can draw something amazing.

And lastly you, Jesús, I think one of your best qualities is to be insistent and always wanting to get to the heart of each matter. I think that is a very good, since your job is to be like an explorer, somebody who stays alert about what we can do to spread the word out about our games and the studio, and at the same time putting an eye on the community to get feedback about how the world feels about us.

A: I would say I work too much and also some people from the team tell me I have the bad habit of being tedious because I always remind them what is left to do. But I need to be like that, to try to establish a discipline that can be valid for everybody and some common rules in the team. This is the only way that, in the end, the processes will be streamlined. So my bad quality can be also my best one, since the purpose of that insistence is always to facilitate the work to others.

A: I can say we are going to showcase a few things about the game this March. Megamagic is nothing like Nihilumbra, well, somehow yes, since magic powers will be key. Gameplay-wise, it is going to be a mixture of action-RPG Zelda-like games and strategy mechanics... and also tons of awesome Magic! Won't be as dark and depressing as Nihilumbra, but we can warantee that the same "spirit" will somehow remain there. As it happened with Nihilumbra, we want to make the game accesible to all kinds of audiences. From the beginning, we will consider the casual and the hardcore gamer experience. Sorry, I cannot say many more things at the moment. 

A: Nihilumbra was a closed title, and we don't discard a sequel at the moment. With Megamagic we are creating a world that we can expand in this and future games, so all the feedback we get along the development process will be used to try to improve the experience.