Superhero or full time developer

Posted on November 23, 2023 by Antonio Dominguez

As I said in my last post here, a lot of things have changed since our little feline boss came hand in hand with this blog. When someone is out of touch with the videogame world, is so difficult to tell how much work is needed to build any kind of videogame from scratch, but those who tried at least once knows that even the most simple game can be a challenge for a sole developer. Unfortunately we belong to a group of crazy people who prefers to put their souls and their minds in impossible projects without expecting anything in return.

But at the end of the day we need to go out of our wonderful word of art, code and melodies to pay some bills or to attend our duties. In this scenario, it’s hard to keep your hobbies, even more if it’s as time consuming as videogame development, but is it viable to do it as a full time job?

A normal life by day and a secret one by night!

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Ludum Dare 32 - Post Mortem

Posted on May 6, 2023 by Sergio Barrio

Once again, I took part on Ludum Dare more than 2 weeks ago now.

The game I made is called CurseMan, and you can play it right here.

It involves a man whose only means of defense consist of expelling gianormous inults and curses in the form of comic-style speech bubbles.

Curses that can kill and destroy enemies!

PLAY!

This LD32 was a bit weird for me, but as always, it was really motivating and fullfilling. Let’s recap in detail how it went, shall we? 🙂

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Going mobile: expanding your game’s horizons

Posted on November 17, 2023 by Sergio Barrio

Let’s say you managed to build and release a game of your own. Maybe your game runs on desktop platforms or it may even be an HTML5 game. It does not matter. You are probably getting a few people to play it and they are enjoying it a lot. That’s great, congratulations on that, I really mean it.

But maybe you are starting to hear a little voice in your head. A not so loud but persistent little voice that keeps saying the same thing: you should port your game to mobile platforms and start getting thousands of new players every day. And of course it’s a tempting idea. Everybody is doing it nowadays and it seems that it is the real easy way to make a lot of money while you get a straight shot to fame and success, right?

Well, it may not be as easy as you may think, and I won’t lie about your chances, but one thing is sure: mobile platforms are the place to be for most indie developers, and you probably want to get a piece of the action as well.

For this reason I’m going to give you some advice on how to accomplish just that. Let’s get on with it!

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Choosing the right tools for the job

Posted on November 3, 2023 by Sergio Barrio

Building a game is hard work, we all know that. On this tough process you are going to need any help you can get, and for this reason you have to do yourself a favour and use the right tools for the job.

By tools I mean, of course, a proper game engine or framework that suits your needs.

Yeah, yeah, I know what you are thinking: “but I’m a pro!, I don’t need nobody’s help on this!, I will build my own game engine from scratch, and it will completely rock the competition!”. Ok, that may be the case for you, Mr genius programmer, but for the rest of us mortals we can do fine by getting along using some of the best frameworks and game engines the great minds in the industry have developed and refined for us to use. You can keep your custom-made-and-slow-as-@$#* engine for yourself. Good luck with it.

Hey, I’m sorry, I didn’t want to be that rough with you. Come along, we are going to review a few things you may want to have in mind when choosing the engine that will make your dream game come true. Let’s roll.

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