Friday 31 January 2014
Pol is not currently working on BeautiFun Games. However, he's an awesome guy and he's still our friend, so here's his story for you to read.
Click to read part I of this interview.
In this second turn of the interview, as it is usual in the series, Pol talks about his professional story.
Pol: When I was at high school I aspired to be part of the development process of a videogame. Programming is something I have always been interested in, and on the other hand I'm really bad at drawing. So I chose to study a Videogame Development Masters Degree after finishing my Bachelor in Computer Science. There I met Kevin, Aniol and Lourdes, with whom I founded BeautiFun Games.
Jesús: About the Masters, what was the most important stuff you learned there? Did you studied anything related to game development before, during your degree?
P: I had learned a considerable amount of stuff on game development during my degree, thanks to a subject that was focused on that matter, by chance the teacher was also the Masters director. They taught us how to create a game engine using low level APIs, like DirectX and OpenGL. That was useful to understand how things worked from the inside, but not so convenient if we wanted to create and publish our own games in around six months. Now most people use third-party engines, like Unity, Unreal Engine, GameMaker, etc. Perhaps the most important experience I carry on from the course was to have met really enthusiastic and hard-working people, and of course having released a full game! The Creature was the result of a lot of effort from Kevin as well as the rest of our team.
J: What can you tell me about The Creature?
P: The game was very complete, with twenty levels, a lot of features, several final bosses, secrets, also we implemented a mechanism in which you could unlock a parallel level as you progressed... I'm quite proud of it.
We also had problems during the project, since one of our team members decided to give up and abandoned the Master, and consequently the project, just when the final months of the development were starting. So we were only two programmers left, David Gallardo and me, we both became very good friends. Kevin, aside of designing the game, also did character design, and also we had Andreu Farré and Lluc Romaní (who also found a job before finishing the project) that were modelers. I remember the last day of the project, when we were due to deliver the alpha version of the game. I went to bed at 11 in the morning! It was quite simple, if I didn't finish the project nobody would do, so I slept 4 hours and then went to class to showcase the work...I almost fell asleep that afternoon. When I look at the game now, have to say it has aged quite well, but will always have the limitations of being a students project.
J: How did you experience the transition from the Masters Degree to kickstart BeautiFun Games?
P: After the Master, we started having meetings between several students with the intention of creating a game, this was after doing a first prototype that had potential but needed more dedication, then Aniol came up with the idea of using his savings to create a studio and turn our passion into paid work. As for the rest of the team, for me that movement was kind of surprising, but not so much, since I knew Aniol was a great poker and Magic player. I was following his progresses and knew he had a remarkable success in both worlds. I was also playing Magic and decided to try my luck in the poker scene and see how much I could make too. So I was playing regularly during one year, and especially very hard for one month. The result after all were around 10.000 euros. It was engaging since I started from the bottom with no investment at all, and step by step I saw how I was rising more money only with my effort. But once I made those 10.000 I thought it was enough for me, it took a lot of time and I didn't wanted to keep doing that for the rest of my life. So I focused completely on game programming.
J: And when you started BeautiFun, do you remember how the idea of Nihilumbra emerged?
P: I remember Kevin sit down with us one day and presented the idea of developing a game for mobile devices, something that was more mature than everything that can be found on the market at the time. Something that had nothing to do with the casual Angry Birds model everybody was trying to imitate. At the time (early 2011) there was nothing similar on mobile. We all agreed and then we embarked on a really hard but thriving adventure, the game took us significantly more time than we expected to be finished. I remember we were really tired after fourteen months of development, Aniol worked many days until really late in the morning, testing the game again and again. We wanted to polish it to the last detail.
J: Now I would like to know something about your day to day routine, how do you work best?
P: I believe my case is not very common in this business, I use to work some days at home, especially when I need to focus on something that depends exclusively on myself, and also I concentrate much more when I'm alone. Other days I go to the office because I need to work hand to hand with another members of the team, or when we have meetings and we talk about common important issues.
J: What have you learned during this first years in the industry?
P: The most important thing I have learned, and perhaps the most obvious one, is teamwork. Working in a team is a technical challenge, but it also demands from you to have a high degree of empathy towards others. In the end we all are here to make great games that can allow us to earn enough money to make a living out of it. If someday we get rich it would be great, but that is not the main goal here.
J: Can you tell us some details about the complexity in the programming when you are working in a team?
P: I try to put special attention in creating a code that will be as clear as possible for others to understand. Also, as our projects are more directed by the artistic and design aspect than the purely technical aspect, we try to make tools for the designers and artists to use during the development. In this way we put a lot of effort in creating those tools, but it pays off, since they don't need any technical knowledge and can start doing their job faster.
J: I would like to know what are the things you like the most about the other members of the team.
P: Aniol is a very straightforward guy. When he says things to others he goes right to the point, that's something good because he know what he wants to say. Also he is a great programmer.
Kevin has a lot of good ideas, he is always thinking about new ways to improve our games design, and also how to make our life easier by writing a lot of useful documentation. In addition, he is always supervising our progresses to see if we are doing things as he tought they should in accordance with the design document.
Lourdes helps us to focus, and he is always attentive to how we organize things, when something is not working well she is the first who goes out and try to put some order acting as a mediator.
Marcos is a really good programmer, he has adapted really fast to the rhythm of the rest of team. Is very active and interested in how to learn more and more things about programming in general, and to improve our project in particular.
Jordi is really talented, and he's working very hard in Megamagic character designs. He complements Lourdes' work perfectly.
Jesús is a very motivated and passionated guy, he wants to learn a lot and always he's proposing changes and improvements to our team.
J: What would be a good and a bad attribute of yourself?
P: A remarkable flaw of mine is that I use to feel really bad and frustrated when things don't come out as I expected. And a virtue is that I'm quite calm, very much able to think everything in order to find the best solution, also I use to inspire this calmness in the people around me when problems emerge.
J: And finally, what can you tell us about Megamagic?
P: I have to say I love the project, perhaps it's a bit ambitious for our small team, but we are all more experienced than when we started and also love challenges. The characters are looking great, very emphatic, and about the gameplay, I believe all the fans of the RPG and strategy genres will thoroughly enjoy it. I'm looking forward to see how it evolves and what people thinks about it.
