Showing posts with label Nihilumbra. Show all posts
BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries Ep.11
Nihilumbra for Wii U official presentation in Madrid.
via @BeautiFunGames
Last Thursday Nintendo flew us to their Showroom in Madrid to present the upcoming version of Nihilumbra for Wii U. Kevin and Aniol introduced the game to many of journalists who were curious about the new features of this release and also the story of our studio. Aside of the technical improvements we added to the PC version, the game for Wii U will have two main new features:
- An asymmetric 2-players cooperative mode.
- Improved controls: The hybrid control mode (analog dpad with buttons and touchscreen). The Wii U GamePad makes this version the most complete to date.
Another World: Rotoscoping & Interview Eric Chahi
via @JesusFabreIn this feature documentary Eric Chahi brings us back in time to the early 90's, when he created the classic Another World (one of the titles that inspired Nihilumbra). The piece is totally worth to see, especially if you are curious about the technical intricacies behind and the cultural influences present in the game.
The huge phenomenon behind Twitch plays Pokemon.
via @truguers
Around the 12th of February an anonymous Twitch user managed to stream the first generation Pokemon game on his Twitch TV channel. But for everyone's surprise, he wasn't the only one who could control the game, since he binded the controls to the stream common chat so anyone attending the stream could participate. Now is when things go crazy up to the point of having around 120.000 users playing the game at a given time (and at least 738.000 have played in total for now). The owner of the stream is moderating the game to avoid trolls, but in general it seems everything goes quite smooth and the community is very cooperative.
The game already generated several memes, like the Helix Fossil one. Due to having so many people trying to control the game, there was an specific item that was constantly kept vainly selected, the so called Helix Fossil. This constant action of consulting that precise item created a wide range of stories and jokes among the community, treating it like it was a holy deity, which the player uses for guidance. The community jokes that the true goal in the game switched to accomplish the usage of that Helix Fossil item in the proper place, that is to revive ancient fossil Pokemon Omanyte, once you get to Cinnabar Island.
Hunting Anubis is a single/multiplayer combat flight sim focusing on near future drone warfare. Currently in a free, open Beta period. Dogfight enemies fully autonomous or remotely manned in the endless fight for the skies of the 21st century.
Here you can download the beta for Windows, Mac or Linxu.
Here you can download the beta for Windows, Mac or Linxu.
Orihaus :: Design, Code, Modeling, Graphics, Enviroments.
Lhasa Mencur :: Music, Audio.
Aliceffekt :: Additional Modeling and Map Design.
Henk Boom and Renaud Bédard :: Waiting For Horus base Code.
A video with every NES game start screen in alphabetical order.
via @JesusFabre
Aside of the logical nostalgic feelings this video will arouse in many old-school gamers, I find really interesting to see how the games were presented twenty to thirty years ago: the music, the aesthetics (logo, colors, shapes, etc).
Here you can check out our previous issue of BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries.
Tag :
aniol,
Another world,
eric chahi,
helix fossil,
hunting anubis,
kevin,
Madrid,
making of,
meme,
Nihilumbra,
nintendo,
plays,
pokemon,
presentation,
twitch,
Wii U,
The BeautiFun Team Stories - Lourdes Nicolich (Artist) Part II/II
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.
Jesús: What did you enjoy the most learning at the 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.
Jesús: I see you are quite perfectionist and are rather curious personality, right?
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.
Jesús: And what happened after the university? Did you finally started make videogames?
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!
Jesús: How was your experience with the Video-game Masters Degree?
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.
Jesús: What can you tell us about the game you developed at the Master, "Once Upon a Night"?
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.
Jesús: How did you met the different components of BeautiFun Games?
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!
Jesús: What were the key factors for defining the artistic aspect of Nihilumbra?
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.
Jesús: Are you especially proud of something in particular in the artistic aspect of the game?
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.
And now we are finishing the interview, can you tell me a good quality of each member of the team, and a good and a bad quality of yourself?
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.
Jesús: Thinking about the near future, what can you tell us about Megamagic?
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.
Tag :
artist,
beautifun,
games,
lourdes,
masters,
Megamagic,
nicolich,
Nihilumbra,
once upon a night,
videogame,
BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries Ep.9
Some of the most noteworthy topics we recently discovered.
Nihilumbra will be at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
We are happy to announce that Nihilumbra will be exhibited at the MWC 2014 held in Barcelona from 24th to 27th of February. We are one of the companies part of the Entrepreneurs and Professional Apps Developers Association from Catalonia (ACA / Catalunya Apps), so every visitor will be able to play it at ACA's stand. Feel welcome to pass by and check out our game!
Via @AniolAlcaraz
Mushroom 11 is more than a post-apocalyptic physics-based puzzle game.
Mushroom 11 is a very particular puzzle game that started its development at Global Game Jam 2012. That edition had Ouroboros as a theme, so Itay Keren came up with a heavy-physics based puzzle game. Mushroom 11 features a blob that can grow, but it keps its amount of mass constant when it has reactions with other materials and substances. The player has the hability to shape and split/joint parts of the blob and cut it into different parts to get over the challenges each level presents.
Fortunately, the game has been funded by Indie-Fund, here you can check out Jonathan Blow showcasing the title, that also is nominated to this year's IGF in the "Excellence in Design" category:
I recommend you to check out this interesting feature on Mushroom 11 and its developer we found at Gamasutra.
Via @JesusFabre
Paradise Lost: First Contact.
"In a remote desert, an unidentified object falls from the skies. A research organization known as G.E.R. has tracked and found the mysterious meteor: a capsule of organic material that brings an unknown life-form to our planet from the depths of space. Here begins the story of this impossible being, as it attempts to escape and survive on this strange, hostile world that we call home."
A brilliant presentation with superb pixel art works, a unique story that stepped us into the shoes of an alien plant being hunted by humans and a hollywood-style soundtrack. Paradise Lost took everybody by surprise, and in our case that surprise was even bigger when we discovered they were Spanish. Recently Suey and Aniol attended to a great talk by Enol Martínez, Asthree's pixel artist and animator, where he gave some really useful advices to other developers about how to manage a Kickstarter campaign. From BeautiFun Games we want to recommend you to follow Asthree's work, we are sure Paradise Lost: First Contact is going to be a great game, not only because the videos showed a good amount of innovative and fun ideas about its gameplay, also because Asthree team behind it are taking the project as a real labour of love.
Via @BeautiFunGames
Action Henk, fresh old school platforming from The Netherlands.
Action Henk by the Dutch indie studio Ragesquid is another recent discovery, I came to know about it when after reading a recommendation from Vlambeer's Rami Ismail on Twitter. The trailer you see below caught my eye, so decided to try out the build available online. The game made me remember some great moments from the nineties, it could have been a SEGA arcade game at the time. About the gameplay, it is a blend of games like Sonic, Motocross Maniacs, and Unirally, I think a competitive split-screen mode will add lots of fun, totally recommendable.
"Action Henk is a speed-running momentum platformer, played in a nostalgic toy world. Action Henk’s core gameplay is platforming as fast as you can. Run, Jump & Slide in this 2.5D platformer and reach the finish as fast as possible. The challenge is all about managing your momentum, acceleration and friction while racing through the levels. The goal for the player is provided in the form racing against pre-recorded replays that determine the time needed to reach medals for every level."
Via @JesusFabre
When you play piano and Tekken Tag Tournament 2 at the same time.
We have seen very curious ways to pay homage to videogames, being cosplay one of the most famous ones. Video-clips with images taken from videogames or even hardware hacks that transform console into portable machines, but recently we discovered something different, a guy who plays piano and at the same time fights his opponents in Tekken Tag Tournament 2:
Vía @truguers
Here you can check out our previous issue of BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries.
Tag :
2014,
action henk,
barcelona,
congress,
IGF,
Itay Karen,
lost,
mushroom 11,
mwc,
Nihilumbra,
paradise,
tekken piano,
BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries Ep.7
Nihilumbra available at Gaming For Good.
Now you can get Nihilumbra (and also the great Spanish indie Unepic) at Gaming For Good An Athene's initiative where all the money from sold games goes directly to the NGO Save the Children!
Vía @BeautiFunGames
Back in December I had the chance to play Daniel Benmergui's Storyteller, a game where your goal is to freely craft your own stories, only limited by having a certain set of characters and objects that you should handle in order to reach a conclusion. Definitely Storytelling has a lot of potential, it's quite innovative, but also very complex from the development side. Daniel is working really hard create a streamlined experience through the different situations that player has to face. Recently Daniel announced on Storyteller's webpage:
"It happened that recently I decided to take a week to make a small game and thus "Ernesto RPG" was born. After releasing it into the wild, I realized that there might be upsides to turning it into a tiny commercial game:
It will take my designer mind off of Storyteller for a while, allowing me to go back to it from a different perspective.
Releasing commercially means Ernesto will have to go through the same releasing pipeline that Storyteller will have to go through; by then, I will be more experienced. Ernesto reminded me how I felt when I started with Storyteller.
I have been in a very good mood since I started it."
Ernesto is Daniel's side project, a free pixelated click-based RPG where you guide the destiny of an explorer through dungeons filled with unexpected dangers, but also with power-ups to help you to survive. The game is pretty addictive, and Daniel is improving it up to the point he said it will be released commercially. Give it a chance if you have some free time, is really addicting!
Vía @JesusFabre
Pokemon Evoas. A promising fan-made Pokémon Game.
From now and then we see some fan-made games based on very well known franchises. Today we have Pokémon Evoas, as the author, th3sharkk says:
"Evoas makes a lot of changes to the standard pokemon gameplay formula, with a focus on making battles more strategic and exciting."
The game is not only using the trademark Pokémon, it also takes art and sound assets from it. So that means Nintendo may take down the project any time... let's see. Meanwhile you can give it a try here.
Vía @truguers
If you haven't heard about Watermelon Games, maybe if I tell you about Pier Solar it would be more familiar to you. The Canadian studio is now about to release their next title for the Sega Mega Drive, under the name Project Y there are lots of passion from developers and also many fans, who invested and helped to shape the game into its present form. The gameplay is a mixture between a Beat'em all with RPG elements (what they call an RPB). Recently has been some controversy since some people accused them of getting too much inspiration from Streets of Rage, but they quickly denied such suppositions. They said the influences on Project Y were very diverse and they aren't going after cloning any classic title.
Here is the game context, taken from the game's site:
"ProjectY takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, set in an Asian high-tech metropolis. The last survivors of the nuclear war are divided into several classes, where the most powerful have the others by the balls. This has divided the governing bodies into several fractions, where ethnic mafias and a corrupt corporation are just a few of them! As you can see, this story is filled with many possible scenarios. It will demand lots of exploring and several playthroughs to get everything out of it."
Vía @BeautiFunGames
Impressive concept arts released after WARHAMMER: Age of Reckoning gets closed.
Sadly Warhammer Online servers were shutdown last December 18th, slightly more than five years left many gamers with a deep feeling of losing. As a tribute, Youtube user warhammerbp has created this amazing video, where you can contemplate its huge worlds, majestic creatures, and massive battles.
Also, one of the game artists called daaken, who worked on the title since 2007, posted many of the artworks he did for the game on his website, you can find them here:
Via @desgastada
Random stuff of the week:
Take it as a reward for reaching to the end of the post.
Vía @AniolAlcaraz
Here you can check out our previous issue of BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries.
Here you can check out our previous issue of BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries.
Tag :
athene,
daaken,
daniel benmergui,
ernesto,
evoas,
fan-made,
games,
gaming for good,
homage,
Nihilumbra,
online,
pokemon,
Project Y,
rpg,
storyteller,
warhammer,
watermelon,
BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries Ep.5
Daily Royale meets Nihilumbra
We start the New Year not only with renewed energies but also with memorable discounts. Repeating our best Nihilumbra discount to date with the 70% off deal you can enjoy at Daily Royale, the brand new platform kickstarted by the folks from Indie Royale. Consider the deal will be over in few hours or maybe less since the number of keys is limited (around 200 at the moment).
Cuphead, or how a run and gun videogame could have looked like in 1930s.
We cannot deny about how much we loved the aesthetics from Cuphead. It's game mechanics rely on gun and run mixed with fighting, and the creators are the two brothers team StudioMDHR (Studio Moldenhauer). They are working hard to take us right to the cartoon animation series from the 1930s. As they told Joystiq, their main influences are the works from Fleischer Studios, "old Disney" and particularly artists like Mickey Mouse co-creator Ub Iwerks, Grim Natwick (Betty Boop) and Willard Bowsky (Popeye)). Late this year we will hopefully have the chance of playing Cuphead.Via Kevin.
Cloudface.
This platformer, developed Futurebeard, goes in the vein of Earthworm Jim and Wario Land evokes fun, cuteness and absurd humour in equal parts. I discovered it last month of August thanks to this TIGSource thread, and since then the game has constantly improved, now you can try for yourself thanks to its pre-alpha demo available on IndieDB.
Via Jesús
Internet Archive puts classic 70s and 80s games online.
"Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library offering free universal access to books, movies & music, as well as 376 billion archived web pages."
That is the current definition of Internet Archives, but it won't take too long until it will be updated to also describe they preserve digital copies of videogames too. From now, you can already enjoy a very respectable amount of titles from six of the first consoles thanks to an emulator. From Atari 2600 to SEGA SG-1000. Surely we will see more games and systems coming in the future.
Via Jesús
A tech demo that could revolutionize how FPS puzzlers can be in the future.
Objectively, when a team of students comes up with a proof of concept like this and the world reacts with half a million views of their video in three days, you can expect some important is going on. Recently we have seen FPS games experimenting with object resizing, like Steve Swink's Scale, but this technology goes a step further, since we not only can resize objects manually, it takes our distance to them into consideration (how big or small they are on the screen) to calculate the "new object physic properties" once you are manipulating it. We will keep an eye on Pillow Castle's Youtube channel, since they said some more videos will be published in the future as the development moves to full production.
Music as a vehicle for creativity.
Have you ever wondered how important music is for an artist as a tool? it's not only useful to get inspiration from it, also to unleash its rage and free the contained emotions and frustrations... and ultimately, peace. Thanks to Jordi, our artist, for pointing us to this brief but intense piece of animation by David Besnier.
Via Jordi
Here you can check out our previous issue of BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries.
Tag :
animation,
cloudface,
cuphead,
david besnier,
disney,
earthworm,
futurebeard,
indie royale,
internet archive,
king,
lion,
museum,
Nihilumbra,
pillow castle,
preservation,
sale,
steam,
studioMDHR,
tech demo,
Nihilumbra 1.3 update is up and running!
Due to the Steam sales, now there's a lot of people playing Nihilumbra and some strange bugs have started to be reported on Steam's forums. We've been listening to the community and we have solved as many as we could. So, here's the v1.3 update of the game!
Nihilumbra 1.3 changelist:
- Fixed a common default screen resolution problem.
- Fixed a strange bug with the default application language.
- Fixed a deadlock at the Ash Desert Void level, caused by application running at low FPS.
- Various fixes with Chinese and Spanish languages.
We hope to have the game updated on the rest of platforms (Desura, Gamersgate, etc) during the next few days.
We wish that this update will improve your experience playing Nihilumbra.
Happy New Year,
BeautiFun Games.
Nihilumbra: The Choice of the Community
Few weeks ago we got an email from our Steam contact. Good news! they selected Nihilumbra to participate at their Steam Sales' Community Choice by Dec. 30th. To say the truth Nihilumbra numbers were pretty discrete during the first couple of months on Steam, so we held high hopes on these Christmas Steam sales. Once they started we decided to set a 30% discount, but that wasn't enough to make the deal hunters to come closer and discover our work... sadly, our daily numbers kept more or less the same.
That situation went on with no major changes, until today! the competition to call for more votes was on fire! and after many long hours of work and faith, encouraging people around to vote us for that Community Choice spot, we've finally managed to be the most voted game! but, guess what! that spot on Steam main page and 70% discount suddenly made us climb to be the 6th best selling game during a few hours today, that was something completely unexpected! jaw-dropping I would say!
Seriously, we really want to thank you, readers, bloggers, journos, youtubers, fellow developers... thanks for your support all this time, we are really proud of having you being part of our community, our dear BeautiFans. Because without you we won't be there today, between mostly AAA games, or competing head to head with indie projects made by industry veterans, like Outlast. You allowed Nihilumbra to be discovered by many people and helped this small studio to get a step further.
Today is an memorable day for us, we take a strong step into 2014 !
Thanks and have a great 2014!
BeautiFun Games.
NOTE: As our game designer Kevin just tweeted this morning, with yesterday's sales, we recovered the investment of making this HD version of Nihilumbra.
NOTE: As our game designer Kevin just tweeted this morning, with yesterday's sales, we recovered the investment of making this HD version of Nihilumbra.
Merry Christmas from BeautiFun Games! (surprise inside!)
From the whole BeautiFun Games team, we all wish you a Happy Christmas and the best for this upcoming year!
We send a huge THANK YOU for the support you all gave to us along this year. Hope you enjoy what we are preparing for 2014!
Now here is our surprise: you can purchase our Nihilumbra with a 75% discount at GreenMan Gaming, so go for it! you won't find more awesomeness for less money!
BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries Ep.3
Nihilumbra nominated for Best Indie Platformer of 2013 at IndieDB.
Thanks to your votes we passed the first stage of the IndieDB Indie GOTY 2013 competition! now we are only ten candidates in the "Platformer" category and things are getting much harder. Great games like Rogue Legacy will be hard to beat, but we will try as hard as we can! so if you think Nihilumbra still deserves your support, we encourage you to go to the contest page and vote us for a last time. Remember there is no limit for the number of games you can support, so you can vote all the candidates in each category.
Via Aniol.
Win a key for your favourite PC game thanks to this Allkeyshop.
AllKeyShop.com, a comparison site for CD Key Digital Download Stores has teamed up with us to offer an exclusive promo for all of you BeautiFans! It consists of the typical rafflecopter widget that asks you to do some stuff to get more points, so you have more chances to win the code.The winner will win a free CD key of the PC Game you choose (to select the game you want to win, you have to go to the page of the game on their site and paste it on the first field of the widget).
Also, if you want to participate in a couple of Nihilumbra giveaways, we have one running at Hardcoregamer.com (4 copies) and another at Akihabara Blues (5 copies).
Bilbao's Fun & Serious Game Festival 2013 video.
The full video of the Fun & Serious Game Festival Ceremony is now available, there Nihilumbra won the Best Independent Game of 2013 Award. You can go to minute 45 to see Kevin on stage picking up the price for BeautiFunners glory! He thanked everyone for the recognition and also dedicated encouraging words to other hardworking indie devs!
Via Aniol.
Some great guidelines about how Unity works as a company.
Unity is a company that not only knows how to create a great product used by tons of developers around the world (we are among them), they also know how to create a product like this they have to develop an efficient and comfortable company culture. Recently their 4th employee Aras Pranckevičius shared this presentation called "Lightweight Chaos For Distributed Teams", that he prepared for his lecture at BuildStuffLT 2013 (Lithuania). It's worth a read, as it explains how Unity grew and evolved as a company along its 12 years of existence. Oh, 12 years developing the same product, can you imagine a game that could take that long to develop? (Duke Nukem Forever doesn't counts ;) maybe it can be compared with online games like EVE or WOW, since they are more conceived as services... Now Unity has aproximately 320 people spread along 17 offices, that's impressive numbers in terms of scalability! The document gives details about their philosophy, how to manage human relationships in the company, the tools they use to handle remote work, and many other stuff you game developers may find really useful, etc.
Via Jesús.
Do you know what a patent troll is?
Thanks to this article by our friends at Indie-o-rama some of us recently learned that there are companies who dedicate their time and effort to patent ideas used in game development that never put into practice, they never create a game or an IT system with them. So what they do to be profitable is look for other companies who create commercial products and may have implemented the same thing, totally ignoring that this pattern/procedure was already patented, and then sue them. Turns out that usually this kind of companies and their lawyers always aimed at big firms, but they are starting to shoot at small indies like recently happened with Bad Pug Games. Take a closer look here at this GamePolitics.com's article if you want to know more.
The Most Viewed Youtube Gaming Videos of 2013
Recently Kotaku posted an article about the most viewed gaming videos on Youtube this year. It has a little bit of everything, we can see a mixture of big games like BattleField 4 and indie games like Minecraft, also there is a big contrast between youtuber homemade videos (i.e. PewdiePie's) with super elaborated trailers (League of Legends). It's remarkable how a video of an RPG Game like Mad Father is on 3rd place just after GTA V and the PS4 tech demo with almost more than 27 million views. That helps us developers to see how important the figure of the youtuber is becoming to raise awareness of humble but carefully made indie projects.
Youtube, copyright and BeautiFun Games titles.
Recently there has been certain discussion about how Youtube treats copyrighted content, You can read some details here. Seems it has to do with some changes on the Youtube data robot that analyses inappropriate use of third-party content. We at BeautiFun Games wanted to clearly state that anyone can make use of our games with streaming purposes and monetize the views they get from them. Read our note here.
The "Empty Force" Master tries to invoke the powers of the Void in Barcelona.
Empty Force is a term used in martial arts to denote the expression of force without making physical contact. Whether or not this force actually exists is the subject of debate in the martial arts community.
Jukka Lampila, known as Master of this mysterious mental technique called Empty Force came to Barcelona a few days ago, and guess what? yes! you've nailed it! it has been since proved that his power is not so effective here in our region. If you don't believe us, go check it out in the video below:
We have a simple explanation for this missfunctionality of Jukka's powers. Firstly, he was close to our studio's energy influence area, where we concentrate the our secret HVMG (Humongous Void Matter Generator). Empty Force, logically, doesn't have anything to do against our HVMG. So, since there can only be one, Jukka's energy got absorved by ours, quite simple.
As we are sure Jukka doesn't know how to get rid of the Void Energy, we will send a copy of Nihilumbra his way and recommend him to beat Void mode. Its almost impossible puzzles will train his mind and make his powers more resistant.
Via Kevin.
Tag :
2013,
allkeyshop,
award,
best platformer,
copyright,
empty force,
fun & serious,
guidelines,
indiedb,
jukka lampila,
Nihilumbra,
patent,
promo,
trolls,
unity,
youtube,
Nihilumbra Post-mortem: Escapando desde el Vacío al PC [Spanish]
Nihilumbra: Escapando desde el Vacío al PC.
NOTE: This is a translation from our Nihilumbra PC launch port-mortem. To read the original version of this article on Gamasutra, you can follow this link.
Nihilumbra, como puede que sepas, es un juego indie de plataformas y puzzles donde juegas en el papel de Born, un ente creado a partir del Vacío, una enorme masa de antimateria. El juego comienza cuando consigues liberarte de las garras del Vacío y comienzas a viajar por el mundo, lleno de dificultades, intentando reunir conocimiento y experiencia para ser alguien al final.
Lo que puede que no sepas es que esto es exactamente lo mismo que hemos vivido en BeautiFun Games, nuestro pequeño estudio.
En nuestro caso, también nacimos de la nada y entramos en la industria del videojuego con un claro objetivo: lanzar nuestro primer juego sin morir en el intento.
Esto es exactamente lo que quiero compartir con vosotros: la historia de lo que hicimos, cómo funcionó, en lo que acertamos, en qué fallamos, y lo que aprendimos a lo largo del proceso.
Nuestro primer paso fue diseñar el juego de acuerdo a nuestras necesidades, nuestra estrategia y nuestra filosofía. Como los jugones nerds y puristas que somos, buscábamos un camino que nos permitiera ganar el dinero suficiente para hacer un segundo juego sin caer en algunas prácticas de monetización que últimamente son muy frecuentes en los videojuegos y que simplemente no queríamos adoptar.
Para intentar conseguir este objetivo decidimos lanzar nuestro primer juego en iOS, ya que consideramos que era lo más seguro: en iOS puedes publicar todo lo que quieras (mientras que no tenga contenido sexual), y en cambio en las consolas necesitas la aprobación de otros antes de poder publicar tu juego en ellas. En iOS estábamos seguros de que, al final, podríamos llegar a una determinada audiencia.
Además, el aspecto narrativo era algo realmente importante para nosotros, por lo que trabajé en una simple pero profunda historia basada en la filosofía. ¿Por qué hicimos un juego filosófico? Simplemente porque pensé que encajaría mejor con la mecánica de puzzles. Ambas cosas, la filosofía y los juegos de puzzles, tratan sobre lo mismo: sobre las preguntas, no las respuestas. Sin embargo, pensamos que mientras algunas personas podrían disfrutar de una historia con cierta elaboración detrás, otras podrían pensar que es algo inútil para un juego de puzzles, así que decidí dejar en un segundo plano todo el aspecto narrativo de Nihilumbra. Así, los jugadores curiosos podrían seguir la historia, mientras que aquellos que simplemente buscaban una aproximación más inmediata a la resolución de puzzles no tendrían que molestarse en seguirla. Pero... ¿quién sería el narrador? Los jugadores de iOS normalmente juegan durante breves sesiones de entre 5 y 15 minutos. Por esto, necesitaba que los textos fueran repetitivos, claros y los suficientemente testarudos para que los jugadores pudiesen entender la historia incluso si jugaban durante cinco minutos cada dos semanas, por ello decidí que el narrador fuera el monólogo interno del protagonista (aunque esto nunca es mencionado en el juego). Cuando el peligro es mayor o el protagonista está asustado entonces hay más textos, y son más pesimistas, y cuando las cosas van bien, los textos tienen más confianza y son menos frecuentes.
Muy bien, pero, ¿Qué pasa con las mecánicas del juego? Los jugadores de iOS, normalmente, son menos experimentados que los de otras plataformas más dedicadas al juego. Por otra parte, nosotros no somos un estudio famoso, no teníamos títulos en el mercado, ni amigos en la prensa o en la industria, y básicamente nadie sabía de donde habíamos salido. La única forma en la que podríamos ganar visibilidad era a través del juego propiamente, y para ello no podíamos permitirnos perder jugadores debido a que el juego no fuera lo suficientemente accesible. La premisa era: si alguien quiere probar Nihilumbra, han de ser capaces de disfrutarlo, incluso si no tienen experiencia previa con videojuegos.
Esa es la razón por la que los niveles de Nihilumbra tienen una curva de dificultad muy asequible, con una forma orgánica de introducir nuevas habilidades y combinarlas; todo para mantener los elementos simples y claros. Los tutoriales del juego, por ejemplo, fueron creados de acuerdo a esto. El jugador es teletransportado a un lugar seguro, donde puede experimentar con sus nuevas habilidades antes de volver al mundo real y enfrentar los verdaderos peligros de nuevo.
Pero todo lo anterior no era suficiente. Para asegurarnos de que el juego fuera realmente accesible para todos usamos un sistema de pantallas estáticas, en lugar de una cámara con scroll, exactamente como se hizo en Abe’s Oddysee, Heart of Darkness o el primer Prince of Persia. De esta forma, los jugadores podrían ver siempre los puzzles uno por uno, enfocando sus esfuerzos en resolverlos antes de ir a la siguiente pantalla, y olvidándose rápidamente de las pantallas previas.
Pero aún había un problema. Nosotros somos jugadores realmente entusiasmados (yo me pasé el primer Sonic cuando tenía tres años; mis padres no sabían si yo era un genio o un bicho raro (y aún a día de hoy siguen sin saberlo)) de forma que no queríamos que nuestro juego fuera tan fácil. Pero... no podíamos hacer la campaña más larga porque nos estábamos quedando sin dinero, necesitábamos lanzarlo lo antes posible y, por otro lado, no queríamos que los jugadores menos expertos se quedasen sin completar la historia principal. Por esto es por lo que un día llegué con la idea de crear el Modo Vacío. (ALERTA SPOILER!)
El mismo juego te dice al llegar al final:
Eres libre, por fin. (créditos)
El Vacío nunca más te perseguirá. Pero en realidad no eres totalmente libre. El mundo ha quedado destruido por tu culpa y eso quedará en tu conciencia, a menos que lo arregles. Tu deber ahora es eliminar el Vacío del mundo. Sólo entonces serás realmente libre.
Esto significa que técnicamente ya eres libre, pero también soportas una carga. Al haber completado el juego puedes irte y jugar otros juegos, pero dejarás el mundo de Nihilumbra destruído. Si quieres limpiar tu conciencia, eso depende de ti. A partir de ahora, depende de ti si quieres acabar el juego o no, y enfrentarte al verdadero reto. En otras palabras: Yo, como diseñador, intentaré hacer el juego tan difícil como pueda y tú, como jugador, tendrás que ser más listo que yo para superar los niveles del Modo Vacío, ya que no te ayudaré como ya hice durante el modo historia.
Este nuevo modo lo arreglaba todo. Ahora, los jugadores inexpertos serían capaces de ver la historia completa y salir después con una sonrisa; por otra parte, los jugadores más experimentados encontraban un enorme desafío en el modo Vacío, donde el verdadero juego de puzzles comienza. Convertir la campaña completa en un tutorial que te prepara para enfrentarte a un juego mayor, más duro, no podía ir mal (realmente nos quedamos sorprendidos cuando comenzamos a recibir correos de personas que superaban el Modo Vacío sin ser jugadores expertos). ¡Incluso creamos una recompensa original al final del Modo Vacío que consiste en un nuevo idioma para el juego!
Pero... ¿Cómo fueron las cosas tras lanzar el juego en iOS?
Todo fue simplemente bien.
Lanzamos el juego en iOS con una campaña de marketing realmente pobre (la mayoría de indies no somos realmente buenos en márketing), pero comenzaron a ocurrir grandes cosas. Ganamos un premio en una TV y radio local (Programa Generaciò Digital de TV3), fuimos premiados como el juego del año en varias webs, teníamos un metascore de 86, una media de calificaciones de usuarios de cinco estrellas en el App Store, aparecimos en una lista de los mejores juegos de 2012 de Apple, ganamos un “indie prize” en una Casual Connect, el premio de Mejor Diseño de Juego en la pasada Gamelab de Barcelona...
Todo iba genial. Parecía que nuestros pequeños trucos funcionaron perfectamente. Los no jugadores encontraron el juego interesante y accesible y por otra parte los expertos estaban disfrutando del Modo Vacío. Incluso recibimos un correo de un señor que compró el juego para su nieto y acabó jugándolo él también (nos dijo que era el primer videojuego que jugaba en su vida!), y yo ayudé a una mujer del otro lado del mundo a pasarse el Modo Vacío a través de emails, todo porque me insistía en que realmente quería superarlo (y finalmente lo hizo).
Estábamos totalmente felices y optimistas, por lo que decidimos crear una versión de Nihilumbra que fuera más grande, mejor, más molona, que sería lanzada para PC, Linux y Mac. Nuestro objetivo fue crear el juego que Nihilumbra hubiera sido si lo hubiésemos desarrollado para ordenadores desde el principio. Los estándares de calidad de PC eran más altos, de forma que tuvimos que mejorar muchos aspectos del juego para hacer una conversión digna.
Invertimos un año en crear esta versión: remasterizamos toda la banda sonora para que sonara de forma inmejorable, añadimos efectos climáticos, una galería de arte, reemplazamos todas las texturas del juego original por otras en HD, añadimos nuevos idiomas, logros, rediseñamos los menús, adaptamos los controles, mejoramos el sistema de partículas... Lo más duro fue adaptar el juego a las pantallas panorámicas y evitar usar los marcos negros en los laterales. Debido a que Nihilumbra tenía pantallas estáticas, todo el diseño de niveles se comprometió cuando hicimos que estas fueran más anchas; por ello tuvimos que modificar todos los niveles para asegurarnos de que con este redimensionamiento los puzzles no se echaran a perder.
También añadimos un narrador con una voz realmente profunda y seria que leía los textos del juego. Es algo que realmente se nota en la atmósfera general y aporta valor a la experiencia, pero considerando que esto no estaba en el juego original decidimos darle a los jugadores la oportunidad de desactivarla en el menú de opciones.
Después de un año (y de una pasarlo realmente mal en Greenlight), la versión de PC estuvo terminada. Creímos que a la gente le iba a encantar porque era bastante mejor que la original pero… como fué la cosa cuando lanzamos el juego en PC?
Muchas cosas fueron mal.
Primer problema! Existe un estigma contra los juegos de iOS que hace que algunas personas los odien automáticamente sin necesidad de jugarlos. Es totalmente cierto que hay algunos juegos bastante malos en ese mercado que hacen que la gente no confíe en este tipo de juegos para móviles, pero también es un serio problema que algunas personas nos prejuzguen sin tener en cuenta el esfuerzo y el tiempo que hemos invertido en crear una genial nueva versión del juego.
Segundo problema! Algunas personas odian al narrador. Hay muchos jugadores a quienes les encanta, pero otros simplemente no pueden soportarlo. Dicen que habla muy lento, que es molesto y anticlimático, o que no añade nada adicional al juego ya que está repitiendo constantemente los textos ya escritos en el fondo del escenario. Se nos ha castigado bastante por haber añadido esta característica, lo cual es bastante triste teniendo en cuenta que añadimos la opción de silenciarlo.
Tercer problema! El Modo Vacío a veces pasa inadvertido. Debido a que viene tras los créditos, algunos jugadores dejan el juego antes de probarlo, o piensan que es un modo extra en lugar de parte de la experiencia. Por esta razón algunos análisis dicen que el juego es muy fácil y corto. Tal vez parte del error esté en haberlo llamado simplemente “Modo” desde el principio.
Cuarto problema! La dificultad del Modo Vacío es demasiado alta! Lo cual es totalmente cierto. El Modo Vacío es tan difícil como pude diseñarlo. Como expliqué antes, esta parte del juego fue diseñada para ser superada por jugadores que quisieran aceptar el reto. Tal y como los viejos juegos hacían. Mira por ejemplo Ghosts and Goblins: todo en el juego estaba diseñado para matarte, no para asustarte mientras esquivabas enemigos con movimientos estilosos hacia el final de la pantalla. Nunca conseguí acabar ese juego, pero no por eso va a dejar de ser uno de mis preferidos.
Quinto problema! La historia es pretenciosa, aburrida y molesta a la gente cuando intentan jugar. De nuevo, es un problema que no debería de ser realmente importante, considerando que la narración está siempre en los fondos y no hay necesidad de leerlo si no quieres. En cualquier caso es curioso, teniendo en cuenta que la historia no ha cambiado en lo más mínimo.
Por todas estas razones, la versión de PC no está funcionando especialmente bien, y nos estaba costando entender por qué el juego estaba siendo disfrutado por tanta gente hace un año y justo ahora, con la versión de PC, parece que tiene tantos errores. Pero hemos descubierto algo que creemos que realmente tiene sentido...
No hemos recibido ni una queja de jugadores en las redes sociales. La verdad es que seguimos teniendo felicitaciones, muchos mensajes de agradecimiento por crear Nihilumbra, y en Twitter todo el mundo parece disfrutarlo. Además, nos hemos percatado de que el juego ha gustado mucho sobre todo a los blogs pequeños. Los únicos que no acababan de disfrutarlo eran las webs grandes y algunos grandes youtubers.
Por alguna razón, parecía que la gente que estaba pagando por jugar al juego estaba disfrutándolo mucho más que la gente que recibía los códigos de prensa.
¿Por qué ocurre esto?
Desde mi punto de vista, la clave para resolver este enigma reside en las diferencias entre la campaña de marketing que hicimos para la versión de iOS y la nueva.
Como comentaba, cuando lanzamos el juego en iOS hicimos un trabajo realmente malo a nivel de comunicación. Básicamente, intentamos enviar algunos correos manualmente a las webs más importantes, pero aquellos que publicaban un análisis del juego eran únicamente quienes estaban verdaderamente interesados.
Por otra parte, para la versión de PC enviamos una nota de prensa explicando la grandiosa recepción que había tenido el juego en su versión para iOS, los premios que ganamos y además repartimos muchísimos códigos de prensa. Básicamente hicimos todo que pudimos para que todas las webs tuvieran la posibilidad de cubrir el lanzamiento del juego. Esto significaba que Nihilumbra sería analizado por personas que previamente no tenían interés en él.
Y, como podéis deducir tras haber leído todo lo ya mencionado, nosotros no estábamos preparados para eso. Diseñé Nihilumbra para que cualquiera que estuviera interesado en él pudiera jugarlo y disfrutarlo, sin importar el género, edad o la experiencia, pero el juego no está diseñado para engancharte mientras lo juegas si no tienes una predisposición para disfrutarlo. Existen muchas formas de atraer la atención de los jugadores, como añadir explosiones, espectacularidad, sexo, misterios o diseñando un gameplay más frenético, pero nosotros no tenemos ninguna de estas cualidades en nuestro juego. Esto podría explicar por qué algunos de los analistas más importantes no consiguen conectar con él, ya que tienen muchísimos títulos que probar y no mucho tiempo para saborearlos completamente.
Nihilumbra está pensado para ser jugado lentamente, con interés y paciencia, por lo que creo que jugarlo a toda prisa podría tener como consecuencia una experiencia insatisfactoria y vacía.
Todo esto son sólo teorías, simple material de debate, pero si lo piensas seriamente las conjeturas cobran sentido cuando nos ponemos a investigar sobre el rumbo que los videojuegos están tomando. Fíjate en los más recientes juegos triple A y verás que compiten en espectacularidad, gráficos, temática, y muchos de ellos empiezan a volverse aburridos tras los primeros increíbles veinte minutos.
¿Es la prensa la que está llevando a la industria en esta dirección con la necesidad de conseguir notas cada vez más altas? ¿o es la masificación del mercado la que está acabando con parte de la paciencia que los jugadores dedican a cada juego? El hecho de que un análisis completo de un juego pueda ser sintetizado en un número nos prueba que hacer un juego que le agrade a la mayoría de la prensa es una clave prácticamente segura para garantizar el éxito.
En nuestro caso, diseñamos todo el juego pensando sólo en la experiencia del jugador, asumiendo que ellos querían jugarlo, y parecía funcionar perfectamente mientras estábamos en el mercado de iOS, pero el juego debería de estar preparado para capturar el interés de los jugadores a los que no les apetecía probarlo, porque esa es la actitud que algunos analistas lógica e inevitablemente tienen.
Como conclusión, quería resaltar que hemos aprendido que no es lo mismo hacer un buen juego que hacer un juego del que la gente quiera hablar. Tienes que hacer ambas cosas. Y eso es lo que haremos en el futuro.
Tag :
abe's oddysee,
adaptación,
análisis,
dificultad,
gamasutra,
Greenlight,
heart of darkness,
indie,
iOS,
juego casual,
marketing,
Nihilumbra,
PC,
port,
post-mortem,
premio,
prensa,
prince of persia,
youtubers,
