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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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.  

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.

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.

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. 

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.

You can get in touch with Pol on Twitter, he is @daiflys

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.