2 years…

So, let’s start with the biggest news in my life: very soon I won’t be working anymore at my current job. Due to some unfortunate circumstances, the company I work for won’t be able to offer me a permanent contract and shortly I’ll be looking for a new job. I’m actually already finishing my new cv and updating my LinkedIn!

I’m really sad knowing I won’t be working with the wonderful people I have shared the last 2 years at the office (really thank you guys if any of you is reading this 😉 ), but I’m also quite excited at all the possible challenges I can go against with all the experience I have now. 😀

I hope I can surprise you all with an amazing new job in my next post… Meanwhile let’s see what I have been up to lately!

Guess what game has reached the incredible number of 100.000 downloads… Yes, yes, you have probably guessed right… Mr Penguin!!!

Screenshot directly taken from Google Play 😎

This an unbelievable accomplishment we didn’t expect when, almost 3 years ago, we decided to publish this little game. Thanks to everyone who downloaded it, specially to those of you who didn’t do it by mistake thinking this game was in fact another one 😀

However, this is just something fun from the past, let’s look at present fun stuff.

I kept playing around with the Basketball VR idea and, after many minor upgrades, I ended integrating the use of the phone’s camera into the game.

Playing on the street looked like this.

It ended being a cool experiment, but it wasn’t as fun as I expected so I decided to leave the game as just a nice learning VR exercise. This way I could play around with other projects.

And talking about other projects leads us to: ARMS 64. This was the result to the participation of David, Ferran and me (Apes ‘n’ Spells team reunited!) in the Low Rez Jam 2017.

A boxing game yeah!

We had a really good time working with the resolution limitations of the game jam and we think we ended with something pretty cool for the time we had and how busy we were. 😀

You can play the game jam version on its itch.io page. It might not be a full-tested and polished product (as it usually happens with jam games),  although the punches feel pretty satisfting when you get a hit on your opponent! We might do an update soon if we get some time to work on it.

And well, besides those projects and work, I did plenty of things since my last post. I didn’t have much holidays in Summer, but I could still arrange a week long visit to Mallorca in August and a 3-day trip to Zurich in late September. I had a blast in both places and they were, each in its way, really great experiences. Warning though: Prepare your wallet if you want to visit Zurich, everything is as beautiful as expensive. And everything was really beautiful! 😀

Getting lost in Mallorca’s beaches was great. Look at the freaking water!

We actually walked up there all the way from Zurich’s lake. Worth the effort though!

Lots of stuff happened and there are many things more I would like to share (my PC died and made me proud of being one of those people with backups for example xD), but this post is big enough already. So I will just recommend you to play the (not so new) Zelda game, because it is still just mindblowing amazing, and the Summoner book series, that recently had its third book published and makes a quite enjoyable read. 🙂

Hope you are all having a great time too and that I can write a new post with good news very soon! Oh, and happy Halloween and “Castanyada” by the way! 😀

BANANALICIOUS!

Portfolio page

Apes ‘n’ Spells is here! This is the monkey related game I was already working on December.

After almost 5 months of (not at all) hard work, David, Ferran and I published a playable prototype of this killing fruits adventure. You should remember David from Mr Penguin and many other projects we have shared and Ferran is another cool work mate who just learned Unity with us for this crazy fun development.

As I said on my last post, we did this for fun and we shared a lot of laughs, but we ended wanting to add lot of stuff and development was getting no end. We decided we wanted to at least make a playable demo to show to everyone and then we would decide how we would continue.

Take a look at some of the images from the development process.

So… we recently published the demo on Google Play and even if it was still really rough (it doesn’t even have a trailer, you have to watch the how to play game on the store to understand anything), our friends liked some things of the game. Although we have a good base to continue building the game and we got some feedback, we decide to take a pause so everyone could go back to their own projects and ideas for a while before deciding if we want to continue.

 

For instance, aside from gamedev (that VR basketball game is still waiting for me) I would like to think a bit about making some small machine learning project at home. I would like to use knowledge from my job on some different field. A nice example would be style transfer CNNs, which I recently was able to run on my GPU at home.

 

Chicago skyline + Starry night typical style transfer example

It works more or less with anything, even a picture of my face!

Furthermore,  I would like to spend some time on other projects or hobbies like drawing. I’m thinking about improving my technique so I can draw cooler things, because right now drawing cartoon monkeys is probably my limit XD
It would be nice to make some new t-shirt design with better drawings. I will have to practice a bit and not just doodle things without any reason.

Even if they are cool, I have probably spent too much time on Snapchat drawings and not enough practicing with a pencil….

I hope the pause will also help with my incoming German final exams, and with my summer holidays planning.

I feel like long posts are becoming my default post length, but I feel more comfortable writing like this (maybe since I started working?). Hope you don’t mind.

Have a good spring end and even a better summer start! 😀

Many starts, few endings.

4 months since my last post already! Time sure flies if you don’t have a clear objective.
This time I can’t show you any clear advance as I have been starting and trying lots of ideas without finishing them. However, let’s see what I have been doing.

First of all I want to share some of the beautiful and stressful experiences I had on this time which include: going to “las festas de Tura” in Olot with my basketball team, moving to the new office at work, driving to Madrid to visit my brother, getting my wisdom tooth removed, painting my house,getting injured playing basketball, start using and studying Deep Learning at work (dark magic CNNs basically), flying to London to visit the city and a friend, celebrating three weddings with my brother (one of them being a Klingon one) and Christmas!

Me walking my brother’s dog around Madrid on the left and enjoying (like a child) seeing dinosaurs at London’s Nature Museum on the right.

Now that I think about it, it is not surprising at all I didn’t have much time for developing or much else! 😀

Even if I can’t show any finished project, there are still some little cool things I did:

My first horrible creations with MagicaVoxel. XD

Inspired by that last basketball creation, I decided to make some simple basketball game and I ended making a VR one.

More like a little demo than a game though.

It was really fun and I really want to keep adding things until it’s a real game, but…

Some cooler idea came along and stopped the VR game: making a game with some of my coworkers! Working as a team on our free time is so much fun. We accept that we don’t have a lot of time in our hands with our jobs and the rest of our lives going on, but it’s great to spend some time on our crazy ideas and work on something together just for laughs sake and seeing what comes out of it.

It’s not a secret, but I don’t want to ruin the surprise so I will only show this for now:

Monkey related game? You will have to wait to know 🙂

So Merry Christmas (a bit late) and best wishes for everyone’s New Year!!!!

PUBLISHED TANKS, AGAIN!

Yes, that’s right! I published Voxel Tanks: Security Breach on Google Play with some new controls!

While I was thinking on what could be my next project, I decided to push a little more the development of Voxel Tanks for a mobile version and I did a lot of other awesome stuff.

That’s me showing you Granada’s cathedral from the Alhambra!

My trip to Málaga and Granada at the south of Spain would be the greatest thing in my vacation, but I also enjoyed having so much free time after that long. Drawing, video editing, watching movies and tv shows I had no time for before (like the great surprise that Stranger Things was), a little bit of partying and a lot of meeting with friends.

Everything gave me a lot of energy to go back to daily routine and I hope I can transform this energy into some surprise to show you!
Hope you all had a great summer too! 😀

PUBLISHED TANKS!

Portfolio page

Finally! After more than 6 months I can finally say again I have published a game!!! I had some ups and downs, but I made it.

As I said on my last post, developing while working has been a difficult challenge and that has made publishing the project a much more rewarding experience. Although it made me always go slower than expected: specially after I didn’t get into the 3HMA finalists (as I expected with that teaser really).

But that is all in the past and now I have a better published game than what I previously showed and I will present it to the Indie Developer Burger Awards, which are some really fun awards I have known for a couple of years. I will probably be discarded on the first round again, but I always wanted to participate since I went to the awards ceremony for the first time. In any case it will be a nice experience for sure. 😀

(PS: I got nominated to the worst game award, I had a blast on the awards ceremony and then I didn’t win the worst game award!)

And after this “big effort”, I think I will rest from gamedev for at least a month or so. I want to draw again, read some stuff, practice as a Dungeon Master, edit some videos, think on new ideas for games and in general give more attention to some other hobbies for a while. I should also do more exercises to work on healing my injured knee. 😛
I’ll try to keep you posted about anything interesting anyway! 🙂

PS: Like this:

Me (on the bubble) with some friends.

Bubble Football, a totally recommended experience. You will sweat a lot, but you will laugh even more! A fantastic afternoon for sure!

Slowly developing, but developing!

Hi! Sorry for not posting in so long in the first place! I am having a really hard time working on gamedev (or any creative work in fact) after working all day on my job and some other things…
But, even if it’s difficult, I am still doing it and with the 3 Headed Monkey Awards as a goal I managed to keep developing the tank game I revealed on my previous post.
It’s not finished yet but I advanced enough to feel confident enough to participate in the 3HMA competition, which means I had to make a video. So here is the first teaser of “Voxel Tanks: Security Breach”!

I will the first to admit that it feels rushed and both the video and the game need a lot of work, but making this and participating have given me new energy for working on the game to finish it for this spring as the competition rules ask 😀

The most important parts of the game are already working and need some minor tweaking only, so if I am able to keep up with implementing the levels I have designed I am sure I will have something interesting for the endline!

However I will try to not only do the minimum and work more time than what I have been doing until now… Let’s hope my will is strong enough!!!

2015 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 650 times in 2015. If it were a cable car, it would take about 11 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

I will try my best to keep this up in 2016! Happy new year!!! 😀

Finally a job

It’s been too long since my last post for how many things have happened in this time!

First of all, the game jams topic. The first was the JS48 -Episode 1 Game Jam that resulted in a little web game called Super Toaster Shooter.

As usual, you can learn more about it on its project page.

Then, neither David or I had the chance to participate on the King game jam because we were not elected D: So there isn’t much I can explain about that, but I am waiting for the people who participated to publish their games to see what I missed!

And last but not least, my biggest announcement for today (which I already spoiled in the title) is that I am currently working. Finally! I found, or they found me depending on the point of view, a job in Serimag Media! I have been working there for over a week already and I am really happy about how things are going so far. I will have to learn more about machine learning, image processing techniques and other interesting topics that I saw at class for some cool projects the company does. 😀
Although this is great news for me, it might be bad for the blog as it isn’t a gamedev job I won’t be sharing much about it and I will have to make an extra effort to keep making stuff that has place here.

However, don’t worry too much as I am already working in my next game! Even if I don’t know when it will be finished, I hope it won’t be too long until you can see something in action. For now though you will have to satisfy your curiosity just with this:

Is it clear it is a tank? xD

Small news

You can see now in its portfolio page my last small project. A really simple snake game, but for Game Boy Advance!

Snake Advance possible box art?

I discovered some tutorials on how to program for the Game Boy Advance and decided to give it a try with the most simple thing I could think of. The game works perfectly on PC emulators, but I expect to test it on a console with a flashcard really soon. 😀

Some other not related news are the couple of Game Jams I have signed up for: the first episode of the JS 48 and the first Barcelona’s King Game Jam.

Game Jams Logos

I hope some fun games and experiences will come out of those two Jams! Although I also hope I will be accepted in the King Game Jam first because it has a selection process…

Finally I’ll show you another drawing I made:

This drawing was also thought as a t-shirt design from the beginning.

After a Dragon Ball Super episode, I felt like drawing Goku and this was the result. As usual you can find it on RedBubble.

Summer ended

And with it I also finished The Wise Man’s Fear, The Colour of Magic, Bioshock Infinite and the first season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. All of them amazing works! 😀

I also enjoyed many fantastic experiences this summer like the Badalona’s Salting or the Manresa’s festival, which was super amazing!

End of the Manresa’s correfoc. The picture only gives you an idea of how great the correfoc was!

But well, let’s see some finished projects too! Let’s start by my new raylib game: Super Red Rope Puzzles.

Cover image of the game.

As you might know from the previous post it is a simple puzzle game I made to practice level design and I think it is quite fun with 25 different levels and two difficulties for each level. Try it if you are looking for a challenge! 😛

And the other project I recently finished is Onevione Noob!. You can download and play with the print and play version of the game I uploaded ^^

Cover image of the game.

You can see more about those two projects in their own pages of the portfolio or in my itch.io page. Because if you have pressed any of the two game links you will have noticed how I decided to use this webpage to upload my games too. What do you think about this?