Showing posts with label BeautiFun Games. Show all posts
The BeautiFun Team Stories - Lourdes Nicolich (Artist) Part I/II
This week we start our interview to Lourdes Nicolich, artist and co-founder of our studio. In this first part you will know more about her gaming background. Her life with games is really intense and she also has a great memory, so be prepared for an amazing travel back in time!
Lourdes: Almost could say I literally was born surrounded by video games. My parents loved them since the very beginning, even before they married they were absolutely fascinated with the first arcade machines. So before I was born they already had played Pong and Space Invaders arcades, then bought a Coleco-Vision!
As I was growing up I found out they had bought an Amiga and an arcade cabinet. My father installed some kind of connectors on it that allowed me to play Amiga games like if it was an arcade. I remember it was on that Amiga computer and with those arcade joysticks where I beated the first Prince of Persia!
We also had an MSX that worked with a cassette tape. Each game we wanted to play on it took a really long time to load! Many times the game would hang during the process, so my father, with infinite patience, had to use a screwdriver to try to re-adjust the cassette and plug it again.
Something curious I strongly remember is each and every title screen from each of the games we played at the time. Since I was a small kid, I unconsciously received the influence of my mother's passion for crafts and drawing. Always got astonished looking at those pixel art screens, they made my imagination ran free! One of the most memorable title screens for me was the one from Mad Mix Game, a Spanish game inspired by Pac Man. In that cover it seemed like the character was getting its own life and he wanted to jump out of the screen.
Another games I fondly hark back to are:
- Mickey's Runaway Zoo, an educational game I played while riding a train.
- Rodland, a beat'em up I played along with my sister. Remember we crafted really cool cooperative strategies to kill all the enemies around, and we finally beated the game, it was quite hard, especially because we couldn't save our progress and, once we died, we had to restart everything again from the very beginning.
- Cannot forget to mention Silk Worm, a side-scroller shooter starred by a heavy armed Jeep and a helicopter were my mother and I spent countless hours playing co-op mode, obsessed with the idea of getting further and futher without being killed.
- I was fascinated with Flashback, especially watching its introductory sequences. It was awe-inspiring to see how with so few polygons the game could transmit you a lot of feelings.
Jesús: So your family was a key factor in your gaming life. Could you explain a bit more about your gaming habits with them?
L: Yes, I used to play a lot with my parents back then, and I still do it nowadays when I visit them. My father was the one who started this hobby for video games and then my mother got really passionated too. My father loves pinball games and also plays FIFA from now and then. Lately he is pouring many hours into GTA Online with my sister and her boyfriend when they all come out of work. My mother loves platformers like Mario, puzzle games, and adventure titles like Zelda.
J: I see you love Mario games, I would like to know your opinion about how well Mario has aged since the first game came out.
L: I think they have kept the essence of what makes Mario an excellent platformer. And at the same time they have innovated in their playability. For example Mario Galaxy produced me a really exciting vertigo feeling. I also enjoy a lot when we play four people at the same time in any of the last Mario games (New Super Mario Bros Wii and the likes).
J: Here I asked Lourdes if she had tried that Nintendo Land mini-game called Luigi's Ghost Mansion with her family and friends. I had played it and really think it was bringing something new to the typical multiplayer gaming experience with the usage of the Wii U GamePad controller.
L: That kind of gameplay is not so innovative, it looks really similar to what had been implemented for Pac-Man Vs., a mini-game launched in 2003 that was included as part of Namco's R: Racing Evolution. Three players were controlling ghosts, that could only view a limited part of the map, and the fourth player was Pac-Man, that was controlled using the Game Boy Advance handheld. Pac-Man's goal is the classic one, to eat all the pills and also defeat ghosts on its way before he could be captured.
So there was a clear similarity between both games, and that's not something that should surprise us, since the game designer was nothing less than Shigeru Miyamoto himself!
J: I see you mainly played consoles during the last 20 years, can you tell me about the story of the different consoles you had?
L: Yes, the Amiga, as happened with all the other 16 bit computers, was dethroned by the PCs and my father was looking for the next big thing to give us for Christmas, it had to be something we could all play in the living room. He researched a bit and finally bought a Super Nintendo, he liked the graphics and the kind of games it offered at the time (1992).
Then we started renting Super Nintendo games, one each week, on a constant basis. So we easily ended making a great friendship with the owners of our closest video club, a couple around the same age of my parents that didn't take too long in adding us to their VIP clients list. That privilege allowed one day to be one of the first to try Donkey Kong Country, a game that my father was curious about after reading some magazine reports. He sent me to rent the game and as soon as I came back home I started playing, and couldn't stop! My father came back from work and when he saw the game he was astonished, petrified. He saw the whole evolution of videogames, and he couldn't believe that the Super Nintendo was able to handle those character animations, beautiful and detailed scenarios, that music, the smooth and responsive control... that was an instant buy for him (and me too).
Another really curious anecdote happened the day my father connected the console to our Hi-Fi system and started recording the game music. He asked me to play some games without being killed (so we had no FX in the audio), so he could record the music of each level to listen to it at anytime. We loved to listening to that music during travels or simply at home. That also created a great culture of listening to game scores in all the family. For example, recently I enjoyed very much the Castlevania: Lords of Shadows soundtrack.
As my father started collecting computers and consoles at a very young age, I was really lucky to be able to play pretty most of the systems available. We didn't buy all the consoles at launch, only the ones we really loved. We have been adquiring most of consoles followed by the one that offered the best games and stories. Since we got a Super Nintendo we were big fans of most of Nintendo titles, but also appreciate SEGA systems, games like Sonic or Ecco the Dolphin justify the purchase of a Megadrive or a Dreamcast.
J: Can you mention some games from the 90s that left you a strong mark?
L: From Nintendo 64 era I adore The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the story, the world, the depth in the gameplay, that beautiful music, it got me hooked. The game was full of surprises and mysteries, the hidden magic caves, the fairies... Was fascinated with the owl that magically teleported you to other areas of the game, Zora and the whale, the part when you meet Epona, the game is full of memorable details that really make up a superb experience.
Tomb Raider is another saga that I won't forget. I loved how Lara was depicted in the game, she was a mixture between an explorer and a warrior, and the game had also some sci-fi / mystic elements that fascinated me. Totally loved the challenges and puzzle resolutions Tomb Raider games always presented.
J: And during the last decade, which games have been the most significative for you?
L: I have been impressed by a few games to say the truth. First one would be Bioshock, where I loved that discovery feeling of exploring strange old worlds, the powers of plasmids was kind of magic and fascinating, a story that unraveled progressively. I was a bit afraid during the last part of the game, but my sister took control and she beated the game while I was watching and encouraging her. Something similar happened with the first Dead Space, but I also loved it!
Also, I cannot forget to mention the last two Rayman titles. Now I'm playing them both, when I get tired of Rayman Origins on the Wii I alternate with Rayman Legends on the PS3. The previous Rayman games (Rayman 1, 2 and 3, etc) were more adventure-oriented around a story (something like Zelda), and the last ones are more focused on pure old-school platformers, quite challenging and filled with tons of crazy fun!
J: As a player, how do you see the evolution of videogames and the state of the industry nowadays?
L: I have to admit I'm tired of those AAA games that aim to imitate films, to be more and more realistic while repeating the old gameplay formulas we all know.
But we still have some classic sagas like Mario, Rayman or Donkey Kong that, while keeping the same characters and mechanics, they are somehow fresh and still have the original high quality production values that made them so successful.
Now with us, the indies, things are really more diverse. Recently Jordi recommended me to play Deponia, Aniol told me about how cool Fez was. So I have to try them out! I'm used to play together with friends and family in the living room, so PC gaming is a bit of a problem for me. But somehow I will connect the PC to my TV, plug a controller and dedicate a good time to dive into the vast indie game catalog available.
Continues in Part II.
You can get in touch with Lourdes on Twitter, she is @llEvadne
Other interviews:
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)
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Nihilumbra's PC launch post-mortem
Hi Beautifans!
It's been a couple of weeks since we don't come up with some news! I guess that regularity is not something usual on indie dev teams. But don't worry, we haven't been precisely idle!
We are working on Megamagic, our new project, and at the same time we keep polishing and getting ready all Nihilumbra versions. Like the PC one that, a few days ago, got an update to version 1.2, containing the following improvements:
- New languages (KOR, JAP, CN, PL).
- Enhanced tutorial.
- Bug Fixes.
- Check your achievements in-game.
Also, last week, Kevin and Pol went to the Madrid Games Week, a huge event where the biggest companies presented their new consoles and games. But there was place for some indies as well! Our colleagues were showcasing Nihilumbra (amongst some other incredible games such as Kromaia, Gods Will be Watching, Candle or Extintion) to a lot of visitors who were curious and eager to play!
But today we want to share with you this article we published on Gamasutra. After reading Nihilumbra reviews and watching gameplays, we discovered that something was not right. We had a great reception with the iOS version, and a lot of people seemed to be enjoying the enhanced PC version as well, but we've started to see a considerable amount of critics that didn't like Nihilumbra at all. Why is this starting to happen now, one year after the game was released? What has changed? Is it the game, the audience or maybe the press?
Kevin wrote his thoughts about what could be the causes of all this. In this peculiar post-mortem Kevin explains some of the most relevant design choices he made, why the game is how it is and how this influenced on the community and press feedbacks that we've been receiving; remarking the differences from the iOS and the recent PC version. We hope the article can help some other developers who are in the same situation as we were, and also could be useful for anyone who plays the game and wants to understand some of its particularities (for example, why the first few hours of the game are quite easy or why the difficulty of the Void mode is too damn high).
We would love to read your opinions, so don't hesitate in commenting here or in the article itself!
Cheers!
BeautiFun Games
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A busy, but pleasant ride: Stops in Brazil, Ukraine and Steam!
Hey BeautiFans!
last two weeks have been quite busy for us with a couple of events and the Steam launch, now we have a bit of time to tell you about what we have been up to this later exciting times!
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| SBGames 2013 (Fuente: Arena IG) |
The first stop of our trip is Brazil and its SBGames 2013, one of the most important events focused on game development in Latin America. It took place from 16 to 18 October in São Paulo, and there was our community and PR guy, Jesús Fabre, that met some of the most interesting brazilian devs and gathered some feedback on Nihilumbra. Glauber Kotaki, pixel artist on the indie hit Rogue Legacy, praised the art quite a bit, and Saulo Camarotti and Beto Souza, from Behold Studios (creators of the amazing Knights of Pen and Paper and the upcoming Chroma Squad) loved the game mechanics and atmosphere. It was a great experience for us to be witnessing this "indie rennaissance" that is going on in Brazil right now, with games like Ninjin, Toren, Mr. Bree+ or Qasir Al-Wasat (the last two are struggling in Steam Greenlight,so if you like them, upvote!).
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| Some awesome devs discovering Nihilumbra: Glauber Kotaki (left) and Saulo Camarotti and Beto Souza (right). |
Our second stop is goes several thousands kilometers away from Brazil. No further than Kyiv (Ukraine), where Casual Connect was being celebrated.
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| Nihilumbra was showcased beside two great titles: The Inner World and a Knight to Remember. |
And there flew our colleagues Marcos Sueiro, one of our programmers, and Kevin Cerdà , our Creative Director and Nihilumbra's designer. Kevin did a speech about riding on sharks and living the indie adventure. He focused on how hard has been the labour of creating a and marketing Nihilumbra for iOS and the exhausting feat of getting out of Steam Greenlight.
Kevin and Marco's time at Casual Connect was fun as always but it was also really rewarding. They had the chance to meet with some great independent developers such as the guys from Studio Fizbin, who are the creators of The Inner World, Fishing Cactus with Algo-bot, Staal Media that brought a great flash game called A Knight to Remember, and a lot of other developers of awesome independent titles.
Both had the chance to have some serious conversations about videogame development while partying hard and wearing silly hats, as you can see in the pics. Bussiness is hard.
And finally, we cannot forget to mention how intense everything has been for us to launch our game on Steam. We are really thankful for all the attention we got from the press, from sites, youtubers and people supporting us on Twitter, Facebook, even in our new Nihilumbra page on Google Plus. We are learning a lot from everyone's feedback on Nihilumbra. That's why, in the future, we want to share our impressions and write up an article about all that we learned from the feedback on this conversion and the differences from mobile to PC/Linux/Mac audience, hope you like it!
Cheers!
BeautiFun Games.
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