Ludomancy

Today was my last working day as Gameloft Argentina’s Programmer Lead.

I decided to pursue my own projects for a while, and gave myself a new path to walk.

Gameloft Buenos Aires was opened 3 years ago, and at that time we were 6 guys crammed into a tiny office. Now the studio boasts more than 300 people. Being the lead of programmers of such a large studio was a scary task. But every moment I spent there is always going to be a fond memory to me. And I can’t believe how much I grew during these years, both professionally and personally.

Contrary to what usually happens, I’m not leaving the company resentful or sick. Gameloft treated me in a special way and I was really happy doing my job. But happiness is about the search for a better happiness, and that’s why I made this choice.

I start this new stage feeling full of love. Then I know it’s going to be good. Expect plenty of stuff from Ludomancy.

I’m going indie for some time.

We’ve started a contest here in Argentina in the spirit of TIGSource competitions: It’s called “CODEAR: Banner Games!” and it consists of making a game in 600×90 max in a month.

The contest is open to whoever wants to participate, though it will all be handled in spanish.

This contest is part of CODEAR, a local initiative to push regional indie & hobbyist developers to do cool stuff and show it to the world.

You can find more info about the contest here.

TIGSource started a wacky development competition in which you had to pick a game name from a random name-generating website and make something playable with it.

Thus started Secret of Software 64.

Even though it feels a little bit like Grow, and tends to bias toward an adventure game, it was not my intention. I was pursuing gameplay about experimentation and exploration of concepts instead of physical spaces. But the time I spent in the game was not enough to achieve this…

I only came up with the concrete idea for this game three days before the deadline, which implied that I had to crunch to make it. I’m happy I managed, but I’m not satisfied with the results. There were many things I wanted to try, balance and reveal but didn’t have the chance.

Good news is that this game is the beginning of something new…

Credits:
Danc for the Tyrian graphics.

• I found only a handful of sessions interesting. I no longer feel they are worth the bloated amount of money charged for them.
• I am eager to meet up with people from TIGSource.
• I’m going to watch Petri Purho picking up at least one prize for Crayon Physics.

I am putting a lot of expectations on this GDC…surprise me, developers!

This game is my submission for TIG Source Interactive Fiction Challenge.

Update: It came up fourth! With no less than 10 votes!

My intention was to reduce the spatial navigation and move into a “mood” axis instead. In this game, your character gets into a situation in which he cannot know where he is or where he is going. He can’t even use his tactile sense.

The character is actually moving in a space, but the options available to him are governed by his state of mind (calm, desperate, out of control).

This is a hacked-up experiment, so it’s far from perfect. And I don’t have a cat.

Here is the link.

Credits from Flickr:
Manouevres - Colinette Jitterbug
arclients - Cat in the sky
ginsnob - Happy Holidays!
antmoose - danger balcony

Credit for the basic story:
Julio Cortázar - “No se culpe a nadie”

May these holidays be short on you.

Last november we had our 5th edition of the argentine GDC: EVA.

The quality of the lectures was the best in all of the editions, boasted international speakers, and we had many companies interested in sponsoring the event to get exposure.

My talk this year was about “The New Gameplay”. Even though I was unsure at the moment of the call for presentations what I meant to talk about, I discovered during my lecture that I was trying to touch the heart of the argentine developer to push it away from the rotting dream of making huge blockbusters or Monkey Island. I don’t think I was able to bring down that ghost, but based on the feedback of my talk I can say that most people felt that I stirred something inside. I’m happy.

Another event we have during EVA is a gamedev contest called CODEAR (click for the games), which I’ve been helping organize since its inception four years ago. It’s meant to be a showcase for hobbyists and startups, as a way of giving them the motivation to finish what they are doing.
The contest sparks a very warm feeling on me as the participants talk about their games and show the audience how they play for a bit. I think it’s love.

My conclusion for this EVA is that we are finally starting to mature as an industry, after many years of stumbling in the dark.

All we need now is to lure more people into joining us so we can solve our urgent need of talented professionals and reach critical-mass, so we can jump to the next level…

I know we will.

Everybody seems to be posting about their scariest moments in gaming because there’s something called Halloween in the north in which people do cosplay and beg around for candies and stuff, all of which I find pretty scary, culturally speaking, because we don’t have anything like that here in Argentina.

So some of my scariest moments:

Elvira: The Game
Featuring a big-breasted character I didn’t know before I played the game. It also featured extraordinary loading times and diskette switching (Amiga platform). And death. Sudden, unexpected death. Trial-and-error death. I was horrified each time I tried to get a sequence right. Then I had to insert disk 3 and then 4 to try again.

System Shock 2
While being near the end of the game, one of the scariest things ever happened. My quicksave got screwed up. Now I’m not going to keep savings like an accountant, I assume the games are going to take care of the backups. Well the save slot got broken, and when I realized that I was not going to get it back, I saw my whole System Shock-life passing through my eyes…not again!

I lost 80% of my bank account during the 2001 crisis in Argentina
I had my savings of three years of work on Bank Boston. Naively, I accepted the suggestion of my twisted Account Advisor to put them on a low-risk investment fund. Big mistake. The crisis kicked in and I was unable to withdraw money for two years, and afterwards it was worth less than 20% of my initial deposit.

Conclusion: saving and fear go hand in hand…

What’s the difference between literature and philosophy?

At the core, philosophical works have a truth value. It is true, or false, or something in between. This core value can be measured and proven to be false. Literature, on the other hand, can be measured by its truth, but it’s not its core value.

Researching psychology in the hopes of creating a simplified model for Shrink, I discovered myself building wacky theories on how the human psyche may work that would make Freud come back to life so he can die again. If he measured their truth value, that is.

Games are not valued by their truth (in fact, most people still believe they should be measured by how “fun” they are). But like in literature, you may find a grain of truth in them.

This, I believe, is the ultimate goal to games: to make other realities in which you can find yourself.

A very simple puzzle-tactics game prototype. Click on the screenshot to play.

It’s a pretty conventional game at its core, but I was longing for the feeling of making something that works and can be played with. I’m having a hard time finding the mindshare needed to get the rest of the prototypes to make sense, so here I crafted this little game.

The initial intent was for it to be a strategy game in the vein of Advance Wars, but without the ability to move the units. After simplification after simplification (lots of iterations!), it ended up being a puzzle version of Desktop Defender.

Doing interesting levels for this thing is not trivial, and the ones right there are more samples than challenges right now, though non logic-centered people find them challenging anyway.

The graphics of the game are modified versions of Tyrian sprites that Danc, from Lost Garden, released a while ago.

I’m going to keep updating it every now and then. You can find the sources (Java) in Starwave’s Google SVN

…and into the lab:

Right now, Starwave (picture above) is the one currently giving me game design headaches. It’ll be done when I get sick of it.

Stuff to do afterwards:

• A bomb-disarming game. I have to think how NOT to make it too logic based
• An emotional prediction game. I hope it’s not as tough to crack as Shrink
• A Marriage-esque game about life choices. This one is already started and looking promising
• Single Screen RPG. The evolution of Hunter RPG

If you had to pick one of the above to do next…which one would you choose?

So little time, so much to do. Is there someone out there willing to pay me to do this crap full time?

I thought so.