Gamepolis has come!

At last Gamepolis has started.

For those of you who don't know it, it's an event about independent game development organized in Malaga that will take place from today until Sunday. The program is shown next:

Unfortunately, as it seems that the scope is basically national, everything is in Spanish. However, I'll try to bring the most interesting events and conferences to this blog. Due to work, I'm going to miss some of the earliest conferences, but from 4.00 p.m. I expect to be there. Today, I'm particularly interested in the 7.00 p.m. session on Quick Game Development, a workshop where we'll learn to use Unity in order to create games as quick as possible.

I'll keep you posted on my impressions. Keep connected!

Yes, first games are horrible!

Hi all!

Remember when I said in one my first posts that first games could be shitty games? Ok, that's true, but I had not any tangible proof. This video will clarify, in a quite hilarious way, what I meant with that. 

Remember again: scope down and start with very simple games! I think it's one of the best pieces of advice any newcomer to the games world could be given. 

See you!

On Art: Some Characters

Hi all!

I have the pleasure to introduce you some of the characters that will give life to my game-to-be. I don't want to spoil the story, so I cannot tell you what these characters are or the role they will play in the game, but at least you'll get a grasp on how the game might look like in the end, in terms of the characters at least.

Remember what you know up to now about the game. It will be a simple (simplicity is our friend when we are beginning), 2D platform game with these characters (among others). As I mentioned in this post, I strongly advocate that videogames should play a more important role in society, meaning that they should target beyond pure entertainment. But how do I plan to bring such 'added value'? Well, you'll have to wait!

Technically, these characters have been designed using Inkscape. This open-source application let you create vector graphics, and then you can turn them into pixel-based, raster graphics (e.g. converting to .png). There is a good comparison here between these two graphics styles, but let's say for the moment that for a first game, raster graphics (a.k.a bitmaps) are better as they are natively supported by any graphics library (such as SFML) and you need no additional coding to use them. These characters have been designed by Manuela, and I'm really thankful for having her to help me (I'm not that good at art design...).

So that's all for now. Hopefully I'll be able to show a short video soon with one of these characters walking and jumping.

See you!