BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries Ep.8
PAD: Professional Associated Developers.
This week we attended the presentation of the Professional Associated Developers association in Barcelona. PAD is a non lucrative, open, active, inclusive, horizontal and transparent organization with the goal of fulfilling the real needs of the independent (indie) video game developer. Its goals are:
- Promote the cooperation between companies.
- Promote the video game industry and associates by participating in international events.
- Organize a Developers Congress Bridge between media and associates.
- Help associates find quality counsel in business management.
- Establish cooperation agreements with organizations from other sectors, public and private organizations, universities and other specialized educational centres.
BeautiFun Games is one of the 40 founding partners, we believe that PAD will definitely improve our relationships with the institutions and also help us to strengthen and be closer to the Spanish indie scene.
Vía @BeautiFunGames
Serena released for free on Steam.
Serena is a free adventure game that Senscape released with the help of other 40 collaborators.
How long has it been? A man sits in a distant getaway cabin waiting for his wife Serena. Where is she? Things in the cabin evoke memories, and the husband comes to a disturbing realization...
This short point-and-click adventure is the result of a massive collaborative effort between dozens of fans and designers of adventure games. Rallying to support the venerable genre and its passionate community, these developers have brought together a grim and highly detailed horror story in what is the largest, possibly even the first, game project of its kind. Talents include crew from renowned indie companies Senscape, CBE Software, Infamous Quests, Digital Media Workshop, Guys from Andromeda, and many more.But Serena has a reason to exist, and it is basically something nobody ever did before. It is a game made to unite the community around adventure games genre.
Vía @JesusFabre
Some awesome film and music resources from the 80's.
Do you like the Eighties? here at BeautiFun we love everything related to pop-culture, comics, music, films from that era, so we couldn't do less than share with you this recent film project Marcos found on Kickstarter. It's called Kung Fury:
Thanks to this film we discovered its musician, Mitch Murder, a true wizard who captures the spirit of the 80s in their albums. Check out his site:
Do you want to know some more 80s music, also movies, radio, and artists in general? then here you have one of the ultimate resources online. Check out NewRetro Wave, updated with more and more content every month!
Vía @sueythelaw
SUPERHOT, a breath of fresh air into FPS mechanics.
This pasts week we have been talking about this game, SUPERHOT was born out of the 7DFPS movement, where a nice bunch of developers met to create FPS games that innovated in some aspect (gameplay, aesthetics). What could happen if we took a regular FPS, but tuned it to make the time to progress in the same measure our character moves?
This conversation came to the table because our friend Jordi, from Deconstructeam, invited Kevin to participate on this interesting discussion about game design, check it out but remember its in Spanish!
The Floor is Jelly is out!
Our friend Ramón Nafria announced this week on Videoshock that this funny and curious indie platformer is out, check out the trailer:
We haven't tried it yet, but at least after reading the description on their site, it seems promising:
Who hasn't dreamt, at some point, of filling a pool full of jello and swimming in it? In some of us, that dream never died. Some of us kept dreaming: what if the whole street was jello? Or the continent? The world!? The Floor is Jelly posits a universe made of jello, made purely for one's own amusement. No longer need we look to our walls and our floors and sigh, "How solid! How sadly immalleable! How I wish for a world consisting only of Non-Newtonian fluids!" That world has arrived, via the dark magic of videogames, as The Floor is Jelly.
Tag :
adventure,
agustin cordes,
associated,
developers,
floor is jelly,
kung fury,
mitch,
murder,
newretrowave,
PAD,
professional,
senscape,
serena,
steam,
superhot,
The BeautiFun Team Stories - Pol Urós (Programmer) Part II
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.
The BeautiFun Team Stories - Pol Urós (Programmer) - Part I / II
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.
This week we sit down with Pol, another of the four BeautiFun Games founders, to talk about his life and career as a gamer and also as game programmer. Welcome and hope you enjoy.
Jesús Fabre: How it all started?
Pol Urós: I love games since I was a really young kid. Up to the point that I wanted to create them even before I knew how they were made. Didn't know in which position I should aspire to work at, but later in High School I discovered I was good at Maths, Algebra and Physics, while, on the other hand, I was disastrous with with all things art-related. So I decided I wanted to be a programmer (I also enjoy to give some hints and feedback on game design issues to the team here at BeautiFun, though). Ultimately, that was the motivation to start studying Computer Science.
When I was a kid, I also remember how badly I felt when I asked a Nintendo 64 for Christmas and the Three Wise Men forgot aboutit, until they brought it year later. I remember I didn't ask them for anything else, only that, such a traumatic disappointment! To say the truth, I think my parents were a bit worried when they saw how much time I spent with games during my childhood. When I started my studies, they didn't truly believe game development was going to be something I could make a living of... but it slowly changed when they started seeing how big this industry is.
The first console I had was a portable one, more concretely a Game Boy, the classic white and thick model, on which I remember having invested neverending hours playing with Super Mario Land 1 and 3. I also played a lot the first Pokémon, up the extent that the cartridge's battery ended up draining. So I lost my savegame with all the Pokemons in the team at maximum level. Schoolmates told me I was the best player around, but it was not a matter of skill, but dedication and steadiness. Loved the stats and leveling system, also how to customize the attacks in order to find the ones that suit your character the best.
J: If it was during school season, I wonder how things were when holidays came.
P: I spent long summers with a Super Nintendo at my uncle's place, in a small village close to Barcelona called Sant Estevede Sesrovires. I have fond memories of Super Bomberman, a game with a great campaign, but what really shined on its own there was its four-people battle mode! I loved U.N. Squadron, a game so difficult that my uncle and me ended memorizing each and every pixel until we beated it. Remarkable games were also Aladdin, Looney Tunes and Magical Quest: Starring Mickey Mouse. But aside of arcade and platform games, I was a hardcore fan of RPG with deep stories like Terranigma, Tales of Phantasia, Secret of Evermore, Illusion of Time and Secret of Mana.
But if there is a gaming platform that has truly left a mark on me, it has been Nintendo 64. When I finally had it in my hands, together with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, it marked a watershed in the way I saw games could deliver real magic, allowing me to enter immersive fantasy worlds and defy my logic with really intricate puzzles. I came back from school with the one and only goal of playing so hard I could get to the next dungeon. Until one day I ended it and I was so sad, perhaps this is a bit weird, but I hardly could cope with the idea of knowing there was nothing new to see in that game. It wasn't until I played TLOZ: OOT Master Quest when I got the chance to somehow relive that feeling, but I got stucked in the third dungeon. There was no way to progress for me, and at the same time I prohibited myself to look into guides, I wanted to solve the riddles by myself.
J: Games were pretty hard at the time, for how long did you keep that "all by myself" policy?
P: Well, later on, I started to use guides with games like the ones from Final Fantasy series, but in general I always tried to beat the games the hard way, without extra help, the feeling of satisfaction is much more intense, even if you didn't get to the end of the game, you know that everything you accomplished is only thanks to your own effort, and that feeling was (and still is) priceless.
J: Could you tell me more about your experiences with the Nintendo 64?
P: One of the best memories I keep about the N64, comes from the time when I played Mario 64 along with my father, who was a die-hard fan of 3D movies (as Toy Story, I remember it was the big thing at the time), for him it was unbelievable to see that world in movement. It was like interacting inside one of those movies worlds. I cannot forget to mention two great shooters, Goldeneye 007 and Duke Nukem 64 also a fighting game, Fighters Destiny, loved to play those games with my friends. For a more indivualistic experience aside of Zelda games, Quest 64 (Holy Magic Century is the name of the european version of the game) was another RPG I rented for innumerous times (I'm sure I could have bought the original game with all that money).
J: We talked about consoles, but now you play mostly PC games. When and how that started?
P: I never had a PC until I entered the University, before that I always had a Mac since my father was a Mac lover. He works in graphic design and I always inherited his machine when it was getting outdated. Due to this, I learned English by playing Mac games, at the time it was really strange to find a Spanish translation available for a Mac game. Monkey Island, Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis were two of those.
So when I entered the University I started using only the PC to both program and play games, I think is the best choice. I didn't abandon game consoles, had the Gamecube and the Wii, but they will never substitute the PC as a gaming platform. I love RPG, MMORPG, MOBA and strategy games. Some of my favourites are LoL, World of Warcraft, and I have always been a huge fan of Blizzard games. In Diablo II I played a lot with friends, shared our discoveries in the game, in Starcraft 2 reached Diamond league, now I'm starting to play Hearthstone (that looks fenomenal by the way)... I remember my love for Blizzard started in the early nineties, when I started playing a Warcraft demo from a CD included with a Mac Magazine my father had bought. That demo consisted of only two levels, but I ended playing them over and over, in all the possible ways you can ever imagine.
J: To end this first part of the interview. As a gamer and a developer, what do you think about the evolution of game industry? Is there something that worries you at the moment?
P: Nowadays I have some friends who talk to me kind of worried about Free to Play games and how successful this model is becoming in contrast with the traditional one where you have a to pay only once for a game and then get the full experience. I don't see Freemium model as evil, it's simply other way to do things. Certainly is not the kind of model I want to work on as a developer at the moment though, but I respect as long as it is being well done and the player is respected (in addition, i play a lot of free to play games! Hearthstone being one of them). In the end, I feel it's good to have different models trying to make their way in the industry, gamers will have more choices and each will end up choosing the one that best fit to them.
J: I believe freemium games are, among other things, a response from the industry to avoid piracy and maximize revenues. Even with some of them, such as Clash of Clans and Candy Crush Saga, we can see how many people really play games, usually much more than official sales figures say.
P: Well, you cannot pirate them in the traditional way, but there are ways to "hack" them and artificially modify some accounts to have super-high stats (some of them thanks to items you normally have to pay for) or simply making fake inapp purchases, so in the end the game will be unfair to the ones who are playing in a correct way. But i also think that this "hacks" are going to slowly dissapear cause the experience for the ones who pay is not fair, and i can see companies investing in security to avoid this scenarios.
J: Yes, recently I read Rockstar punished this behaviour in GTA Online. There were even players who made real money out of their hacks.
P: I remember Kevin telling us a really bizarre situation: In GTA Online, a user bought game money with real money, and other user stole it from him in the middle of the game. As it was an assault, in the middle of the street. There was a big controversy surrounding this kind of situations.
Continues in Part II.
Other interviews:
Aniol Alcaraz (Producer and programmer)
You can get in touch with Pol on Twitter, he is @daiflys
Other interviews:
Aniol Alcaraz (Producer and programmer)
Tag :
arcade,
BeautiFun Games,
co-founder,
game boy,
nintendo 64,
ocarina of time,
platformer,
pol,
Programmer,
rpg,
super mario land,
super nintendo,
urós,
zelda,
