Gregzilla Games

Link to Part I/II.

With videogames I discovered a new medium that was really special and thrilling, they let me choose my own path and take control of a character in amazing fantasy worlds! I started thinking about how much I would love to be able of creating those universes someday.

As I was telling you before, when I was between 8 and 10 years-old  I played Super Nintendo games like Donkey Kong Country or Aladdin. Those, aside of being really funny, had a superb art that inspired my drawings a lot by the time. Also I loved drawing landscapes of the nature, I had to be good at it, since some schoolmates accused me of copying/cheating because they didn't believe I could be able to paint them all by myself. 

So I continued painting by pure hobby and inspiration, all of this followed by passion of someday becoming a game artist. I learned some Corel Draw in my free time and wrote short fairytales, that I also illustrated. You may think I studied arts since very young, but I got a little bit misguided and did a human-sciences bachelor in high school. But afterwards I was quite strongly determined to go after my dream of being an artist and with a lot of effort I passed the entrance test for Fine Arts University.

I loved animation subject, the teacher was Josep María Blanco, a brilliant professional. Also natural drawing inspired by human models was something I deeply enjoyed. Thanks to graphic design I reinforced my critical sense about texts styles, paragraphs, etc. I also remember how much I critizised some games that didn't take care of those issues. 

Yeah, I think we all are quite perfectionists at BeatutiFun Games. As a proof, in Nihilumbra you can see the smooth and well-finished texts of the game, the typography is really carefully selected for each language. But I'm still learning to be satisfied with a certain degree of perfection, because all the extremes are bad.

Not really, its a bit weird because, in spite I focused on learning everything I thought could be useful to make games, but somehow lost track and I ended up working in the graphic design area for web,  multimedia applications and advertising. After working during a stint on several companies, I was wondering what happened with my passion for doing art for videogames. And what a coincidence that one day I received a letter from the University where they informed about a videogame Masters Degree. That was a true temptation and the only thing that kept me back from signing up was the really high price. But my parents ended up convincing me, they told me that it could be paid in installments and, combining their help with some money that I earned working, we managed to pay it; so there I went, learning how to do art for videogames!

I started the course thinking absolutely in positive, trying to learn as much as possible, especially about the technical side of how video games were made, that was amazing for me. And also the technological side was my weakest point in my curriculum after I did my Fine Arts studies. Also I enjoyed very much attending conferences by industry professionals who came around to share their experience with us. There I had also the chance to meet great people, with the same tastes than me, and as a consequence of this, some of us ended up founding BeautiFun Games.

It was a game we based on experimentation, trying out different ideas each member of the group had. The game aesthetics were very important, since we had two worlds, the dreamy and the nightmarish, it was a challenge to keep the art of each world different and related at the same time. I got the idea of how to change the appearance of the environment from dreamy to nightmarish and vice-versa from watching a seaweed that reacted by hiding when it was touched. The programmers played with the shaders to try to change the textures progressively and in a stylized way. It was quite a complex project for beginners like us, when we tought a problem/bug was solved, another issue emerged somewhere else. Also I found fascinating how things were done internally in our game, we learned a lot from other commercial games and how they solved those problems. As an example, I remember we studied Alan Wake and how it used the flashlight in each position and situation, and also how commercial games tried to avoid or dissimulate tiling. 

I met Aniol because we shared the same passion about game development process. We were both curious about all the aspects needed, since our goal was to be able to make a complete game. In fact  I was the first person who encouraged Aniol it would be a great idea to create a videogame company, he liked it and after the Masters Degree he surprised everyone from our group with the company creation purposal, and finally here we are!

I clearly remember when Kevin and Aniol came one day with several game ideas, and then Kevin explained the idea of Nihilumbra. I started to imagine many things about how that world would be, the amazing journey the player would live. He had the monsters design very clear in his mind and I quickly shaped in my mind the main aspect for the landscapes. The world Kevin had in mind at the beginning was designed to emphasize the use of the paintings, so it lacked colors, the characters were silhouettes, quite Limbo-esque. But I thought that the player should be able to feel the inmensity of the world like Born feels it, and also perceive colors, at least a bit, in some way, so I suggested the usage of expressiveness and plasticity of painting to illustrate the scenarios. Born is a character that begins his existence at the beginning of the game. He is not capable of fully understanding the world that surrounds him. He’s especially fascinated with the colors that he finds, but he can’t really assimilate them properly, like he was colorblind. I thought that we could represent that giving the colors a special importance in the backgrounds while keeping them desaturated, so every world Born visits is somehow pervaded with the predominant color of that world (blue with frozen cliffs, green with the living forest, etc). I took Kevin’s initial idea and developed it so the art fitted with Born, the story and the atmosphere. In the following images you can see a few concept arts Kevin showed to the team to start thinking about how the game should look like.

I loved that I didn't need to change a lot of things we did on the original Photoshop concepts to what was finally included in the final game (textures, etc). This is something I really appreciate and I thank our dear programmers because they did a great effort to make it possible.

Aniol is very analitic and persevering, loves to look at things from every possible aspect.

Pol is a really patient guy, I remember that I loved the particle, weather and special effects he did at Nihilumbra. He is also good at estimating the time that a technical task will take.

Kevin is always in the journey of self-improvement, he plays tons of games to analyze them and try to learn from their good and bad design choices.

Suey is a really down to Earth guy and always loves to work the extra mile, improving the performance of the game code. 

Jordi is a very passionate guy, super perfectionist and critic with his own work (also with others' work, but always auto-critic himself first). I like how he likes to learn new things by himself and love the day to day routine, when we share thoughts and cooperate the best we can.

Jesús is very perservering, love how he likes to learn from everything and also very good talking and getting to know people. 

And about me, I can say some of my virtues are I'm persevering and also put tons of effort into making everything as perfect as possible. Those virtues can turn into weak points when they go too far, so I try to learn to say "stop improving something that's already very good", and also while most of the time I'm optimistic and cheerful, I have to control my bad-temper from time to time.

Megamagic story is not as abstract and philosophical as Nihilumbra’s, also at an artistic level it presents a lot of new challenges. My work on the game is focused on environments and backgrounds, in this case the game is really happy and colourful. Conceptually I like how crazy it is, the mixture of very different cultural influences, films, cartoons, comics, etc. I really love the freedom I have to create things from my own imagination.