ForestIndieGames.com: Games

This is a compacted story about the games I have done through my life. Take a look if you want to know my work, and if you are a game developer, hopefully you could learn from it as well.

I have worked in a few relatively big projects (in scope), and lately I have started some smaller projects as per the explanation here. One way or another each game has taught me great things. It's true that I haven't explored the business side very much, for now I'm much more interested in making interesting games that people like, and that I really love to play and make.

So let's begin. Even when actually my first try was a Flash game when I was 13, my game development story began a few months later, when I discovered RPG Maker 2003.

(Don't worry, some are really small stories :P)

~ Forest ~

My first, most beloved game, is "Forest: La Leyenda de las Ocho Flamas", which can be translated to "Forest: The Legend of the Eight Flames". This was the very first project I started in RPG Maker 2003 (yes, I mean, the first File > New project), and I worked on it for a little more than 5 years.

I could make a full website only about this game, so I will only tell it was a RPG with dynamic fights similar to Super Mario RPG. It had a kind of classical story about magic, monsters, demons, and a hero (Forest) with an unknown past. He accidentally gets involved in a big adventure and starts knowing friends through his journey. I admit the story was not the most innovative, but it had some interesting secrets and plot twists that only a few people know :).

I iterated in the first phase of this game TONS of times, and added every possible feature I could create. So, unlike most RPG Maker 2003 games, it had a custom battle system, custom menu, custom equipment, day-night cycles, run, jump, bombs, customize the controls, breed and invoke dragons (kind of), swap characters, different kind of puzzles, and so on.

This was a project that I really loved, and since I was still growing while I was working on it, it was evolving together with me. Per my nickname it's obvious I feel very related with Forest (the character), it actually born from my nickname and then grew and became a full character independent from me to some point. The game itself represented the best I could make at that time, so it became a project deeply related with me and somehow it represented a lot of me as a person, that's why I felt really nervous when I was going to release my first demo, it was almost like go and make a survey to see how much people actually liked or disliked me.

So I released a demo (with the first phase I iterated many times), and thank God it had great acceptance in RPG Maker (Spanish-speaker) communities. Some people really enjoyed the game, even there was a guy who claimed publicly he was my fan (in his forum's signature :P). What I presented was not the complete version of my game, it was like 1/8 of what I was planning to make (maybe less). After the demo I created whole new character's graphics and added some cool shadow effects to the maps. However I never released a version with this improvements.

I don't host this game here because I used a lot of resources from Super Nintendo games, so I don't feel comfortable with uploading it since at this point it's not "socially acceptable" to have a serious game with content copyrighted by others... also because Forest has this ninja-style forehead protector (not identical to those in Naruto but heavily inspired on them xD, hey! I was a teenager and Naruto was not that popular then!). I must clarify the latest version of Forest (in some drawings I did recently) don't have the forehead protector anymore :P.

Why I stopped? besides the official story is kind of funny (I knew the girl that is my wife now :P), there were some technical difficulties in continuing with it. The custom battle system was really difficult to maintain and to debug, the characters' animations were very detailed and it would take really long for me to keep that quality for the other characters still not in the game. From my experience now I know it was going to be a nightmare.

Maybe some day I will take it and wrap it up with complete original resources and release it as a complete small game. Maybe I could try make a 3D reboot later... I don't know, for now it's fine for it to be my "dream game".

What I learnt from it: Actually, most of what I know about creating games: Storytelling, pixel art, animation, character design, a little of programming logic, (intuitive) game design, relate with a game development community, and surely a lot some of other things, but what I think were the most important are:

Iit's more difficult to decide what to not put in your game, than find what to add.
Understand what making a game actually takes and estimate the size of the projects I can work on.
The best way to keep working on a game is to really love it and, if possible, get obsessed with it ;) (I even made Forest emoticons for Messenger)

~ El CBTis de la Muerte ~

This was a RPG Maker 2003 game I started to make just for having fun with my friends, "CBTis" was our high school and the name of the game means something like "The Deadly CBTis". This was a really simple game with bad graphics and funny story about my friends and I. It was super fun to work on this game, at least at the beginning.

At some point we decided to make it an Action RPG game, so we missed the point, it wasn't simple anymore, its most appealing features were that it was really fun to work with it and that it had a funny story, making it an Action RPG was not going to reinforce those features. This happened at the same time I was working in "Forest", so I was still in the process of learning that sometimes it's better to stop adding features.

What I learnt from it: Not all the games need to have innovative gameplay, it depends on the experience the game is expected to transmit to the players.

~ EduSoft ~

This is a game I did with some friends for an innovation contest in high school. I worked on this using RPG Maker XP, so I took advantage of the experience I had in RPG Maker 2003 but actually created a very different game (it was a point-and-click, far from a common RPG Maker game). This game was supposed to be an educational game for small kids, focused in basic maths, colors, and English language.

As I said, in this game I collaborated with some friends. One of them is @exeivier_mex, he is now a full time graphic designer working hard to live from his art and get some recognition on his work. This is the first time I worked with someone in charge of a particular part of the game, and I must say that it's great to hand over some responsibilities being sure that whatever the other person will do, will be great.

What I learnt from it: You can know how to do everything if you want, but it will be really hard to make it better than what you could make collaborating with some talented people.

~ In class games ~

These might be the least relevant of my games, however there's a lesson to learn from them. In a class (in Computer Systems Engineering career) we were requested to make 3 games through the semester:
1. At the beginning of the course we learned some of the basic Java classes for drawing, and made a game with those basic tools. I created a game with a similar feel to a touch-based game (however we were making desktop games). In the game there was a ball falling and you needed to draw a lines with your mouse to make the ball bounce and arrive to a goal point. I used a redrawing bug in my favor to add enemy balls which could erase part of the line you drew. It was fun!

2. Then we learned OpenGL and created a game with basic shapes, some simple textures and a very limited scope. We created our second game with it (this time we were in teams). The game was a Star Fox imitation in which you control a spacecraft similar to an Arwing and needed to destroy a bunch of asteroids for a few minutes, to finally face a Domo head as a final boss. It was actually really cool.

3. Finally we learned GL Scene, a wrapper for OpenGL which provided great features for using animated 3D models, bitmap based terrains, trees, collisions, lights, controllers, and so on. We made a racing game. We added a big terrain and added car models, then we added randomized trees to the track and created a cool mini-map to see were the other player was. The cars could shot fire balls to try to stop the other. It was a two player game that could be played with joysticks.

There was a kind of non-official competition to see who could make the best game. Some friends of mine called this "Graphication Race". If I remember correctly, the first two phases my team and I were the winners (as per the guys who named the contest), however I have no doubts that the final phase our game was a TOTAL FLOP.

Why was that? how could the other simpler games be better? Well, there were multiple reasons why the racing game failed, but the main brutal failure was that it was an unbalanced multiplayer game, once one car was winning the race it was almost impossible for the other to pass it.

What I learnt from it: The idea and game design is much more important than the technology you use. Another lesson was that multiplayer games need a lot of effort to balance them. Balance is essential to make the matches interesting for all the players, those losing but also those winning!

~ Xololitos ~

After Forest (the game :P), this is the game where I spent more time, I will try to keep the story short but, this project taught me really lots of important lessons. I worked in this with multiple friends and even recruited some guys from earlier semesters from my university.
This was a virtual pet for Windows made in Microsoft WPF (Silverlight for desktop). The idea started as a virtual pet / assistant for desktop, something like a fusion between a Tamagotchi and the Office Clip assistant, however it had multiple phases and transformations.

It went from a simple PC gadget to a kind of video game with social integration. Some of the first changes we made was to remove the "utilities" from the pet, nobody wanted the pet to have a unit converter or a file organizer. We added pet customization, minigames, multiple pet types, then we added evolution and variations between each evolution, then accessories and clothes, Facebook and Twitter integration, a kind of Xolo-Meme generator, then a house to have all your Xololitos, a hotel that could take care of your pet for you, a lot of animations, we even created internal software to help generating C# code required by the animations. We also created its website and some web services to save the user configuration online, we even added a lot of encryption and security...

Now I see it was crazy, we were expecting to make huge profit from a freemium business model, we were expecting tons of users but we were developing almost in isolation, a few people knew about the project, we were not showing almost anything, we were not getting feedback! Somehow we were expecting to do a little marketing after the game release and it was going to become viral and explode as a huge success. All the previously mentioned decisions, additions, removals, etc. were based on the reaction that what we thought people was going to have!

So, as you could guess, it was a commercial failure, but don't get me wrong, I really loved this game, enjoyed to work on it and I feel really proud of a lot of nice things we did there. Actually being the founder and leader of this game was a major factor to get my current job in software development.

I already mentioned some of the main failures, so let's jump to the lessons learned:
What I learnt from it:

The essential experience. The root cause for all the errors in this project was that the essential experience was not well defined. What it a Windows gadget? what is a social network plugin? was it a game? what is about raising your pet? have a lot of pets? have all the variations of all the pets?... I still don't know the answer! If you don't know what is the essential experience your game must provide, you will be making incorrect decisions for sure.
Be strong and accept to throw away some code. During Xololitos development the big bang of the mobile games market was happening, but we had a lot of code for desktop! a lot of classes and animations in WPF; nothing of that could be easily exported to Android, and we didn't have as much experience in Java as we had in C#. Now I think that Xololitos could have had decent success in mobile, we just needed to accept there was a lot of code to throw away.
Choose your tools carefully. WPF is NOT a technology optimized to make games, once Xololitos started to mutate into a video game this became a problem. Performance was not the best, game cycles were hard to control, animations were impossible to export, and so on.
Market. I still don't have much experience on this to be honest, but I definitely learned that you cannot guess accurately how your market actually is, you can't just sit down and analyze it based on blog articles and internet research, you need to be brave, go out, show your work, and get feedback. Otherwise you can be investing a lot of hard work in useless things.
Whatever you sell, you must believe it worth its price. Xololitos was growing in a Startup-like environment, we were really worried about making some money, and at that time Zynga was growing incredibly so we got influenced by their way to see the market (at least our impression of it). In a nutshell we were looking for any ways to hook our players, we were not thinking in provide any real value for them, just hook them, and well, that is as stupid as paradoxical!... yes, I feel ashamed for that :\... it may work for some big companies, but it will eventually collapse.

Maybe I could tell a couple more, but I think that's enough :).

~ Union ~

This is a game I did for my girlfriend (now wife) as a gift for our 5th anniversary as a couple (awww :3). You probably won't see this game ever because it's a love story about my wife and I, so I don't want to upload it anywhere xD. What I can tell is that it is a platformer where you can switch between two characters with different attack types (short and long distance).

What I learnt from it: Well basically I learned IGMaker. This software was created by Enterbrain, and it's cool once you understand how to use it. It's a shame it's not supported really well... Oh! I also learned there's a way to compress .wav audio files to be much smaller without actually changing its format to mp3 or ogg, a lot of quality is lost but it's a good trick when you are forced to use .wav (yeah, IGMaker forces you to use it :\ ).

~ Defender Blender ~

So after being talking a lot about how badly I wanted to make games, a friend of mine just got tired of hear me and suggested to make a contest between him, another friend, and me. The winner would be the one with the best game after 1 month of development. Even when I noticed immediately my friends where not going to make their games, that was the motivation I needed to start making games in Unity.

The game is something like a tower defense mixed with a side-scroller platforms game. To make this game I used multiple Mega Man resources, especially from Mega Man X3 and Mega Man Zero, in this way I was able to focus in the game rules and mechanics. You can read more about Defender Blender in this blog and you can actually play it from your browser.

Sometimes I think I could continue working on it, write a better story (obviously the current story is just a placeholder), use original graphics and music. The original game design has multiple levels and new abilities, so I think it can be interesting, however I haven't decided if I should continue working on it since it actually accomplished its purpose (work for me as an introduction to Unity).

What I learnt from it: Obviously Unity basics. And a lot of things I'm still learning, especially about the indie scene: where to ask for feedback, when, and how. I learned it's not trivial to find other developers just looking to improve and help each other, the world is full of game developers with much more interest in promote their games wherever they can... I don't blame them, but I would like to know a bigger community with a more cooperative (and a less commercial) spirit, as it was the RPG Maker community for me some years ago.

~ Burn and Run Kamikaze Heroes ~

This game started this blog! It is a game created for the Global Game Jam 2015 which theme was "What do we do now?". In the game you are a bunch of matches in a dark labyrinth, the only way to find the way out is by burning some matches, sacrificing them to take the others to the exit.

We relate the theme to this game due to the uncertainty you feel in most of the game, and because that's what we thought the little matches would say each other while watching the torch... everybody knows what to do, but nobody wants to be the one...

What I learnt from it: Game jams are just awesome, it was a really fun and great experience, and we felt really proud of our little game. However there's one thing we missed, I went together with a friend (@lal0l) and we decided to work together. We didn't relate very much with other people there, so we missed a great opportunity to know other developers and know who they are and what they know to do.

~ Jumpjutsu ~

This is a game in progress, Jumpjutsu born as a little branch from Ascendam as an effort to playtest thoroughly the wall jump mechanic in the former. Ascendam was planned to be a single-player game with strong story elements and wall-jump-labyrinth based mechanics (I think that's the best way I can describe it). Even when I didn't notice at the beginning, it transformed into Jumpjutsu.

Jumpjutsu is a multiplayer game centered in timing and adrenaline! I hope to make this a fun game to spend a good time with friends :). It was quite a big change, the only thing I'm keeping from Ascendam is the wall-jump mechanics.

Let's see what I can learn from it!

~ Shaman Defender ~

I did this game in the Global Game Jam 2016, which theme was "Ritual". It was a little inspired in Patapon but the core gameplay was actually quite different. It is a tower defense, were the tower is you village at the center of the screen, and enemies come from different predefined paths to attack it. The player must use combinations (shaman dances) to summon magical attacks on the roads and stop the enemies.

What I learnt from it: Going alone to a GGJ is great! Also I learned some nice Unity things. You can read more in this entry.

Play it here!

OK, so... if you did read the full story, I must say I'm amazed. Now you know my work, and certainly know a lot of me. Feel free to contact me if you want to discuss about games creation, in case you want feedback for your games, or anything else you think I could help, I even could talk more about any of these games LOL.

If you just scrolled down...

TL;DR, I have created a few games and I have learned important lessons from most of them.

To be continued...