November 7. The GameBCN began. The ultimate videogames incubation initiative in Barcelona, Spain. And CORSEGAMES won a spot to participate. I’ll be posting my experiences from my position of Art Director during the following 4 months every weekend in my blog, along with development commentary on our upcoming mobile videogame: TOWER REVENGE.
It’s kind of difficult to make this brief, but here it goes:
This project began as a very vague idea 2 years ago, something about a mobile multiplayer tower defense. Fall of 2012, Mateo Pereira, Gonzalo Orts and me shook hands for the very first time at a Starbucks in Passeig de Gracia. How could we ever imagine that over a year later we would be working hard on our videogame at the Starbucks in the lobby of the Marriot Hotel in sunny and techy San Francisco, when we were selected to assist the Chartboost University and GDC to learn from the pros and improve our videogame, now named Tower Revenge. Yet another year later, present time: (no more starbucks, I swear this is not an ad) here we are working even harder at the 22@ district in our beautiful Barcelona, the city that got 2 argentinians, 1 venezuelan, 1 colombian and 2 locals to meet and start a big dream: to become videogame developers.
Yes, I think I did it. Kept it brief (and slighly epic). 2 years and the dream that won’t die. Our team has changed over the years and we wear multiple “hats” and exchange them constantly. As of this new challenge we are: Gonzalo “Buche” Orts (Game Designer), Mateo “Teo” Pereira (Producer/Marketing), Diana Pérez (Programer), Alex Chimeno (Programer), Alejandro “Kuma” Aylagas (Artist) and myself, Adolfo “Adox” Roig (Art Direction).
At the office. From left to right: Alex, Diana, Mateo (feet), Kuma
TOWER REVENGE is the answer to a videogame genre that hasn’t really changed at all over its many years of existence. First envisioned by our game designer, Gonzalo “Buche” Orts, it’s now each team member’s focus to update this formula for today’s standards in gaming, technology and lifestyle.
We are working on the first multiplayer turn-based mobile tower defense game. This obviously needs to be explained, but since we’re currently in the process of improving our game design, I’ll leave it for another entry in this series of posts. For now, watch the trailer we made in San Francisco at the end of the Chartboost University:
Our dream is being boosted by the GameBCN project. An initiative by Incubio, la Caixa Capital Risk, Barcelona Activa, Ajuntament de Barcelona and the Generalitat de Catalunya. It’s purpose is to help new videogame development teams to become solid studios and launch their current project to the market. Quoting their objectives from their website:
- Create an entrepreneurship program that can serve as an European benchmark.
- Promote the creation and development of new companies with a global vision.
- Attract talent to develop their entrepreneurial activity in Barcelona and Catalunya.
- Generate benchmarks of international success in entrepreneurship.
To achieve this they’re providing us with mentorship, talks from the pros, a wonderful new office space to work at and the opportunity to present our videogame to international investors at the end of the initiative 4 months duration.
CORSEGAMES was among the 8 teams picked from an application pool of over 40 others. We are both very proud and humbly thankful!
The main goal for all teams is to make a stunning presentation at Demo Day in march 2015, where 3 teams will be selected, given funding and accelerated for another 8 months. This is a big competition. And demo day is the light in the horizon.
This weekThis is all happening at the brand new Media-Tic building in the 22@ technological district. It’s an amazing piece of architecture, you should check out the details at it’s wikipedia page.
First we went to meet our new workplace. I have to say the offices are fantastic! They’re a bit like the ones that get showcased in The Cool Hunter , spaces made for people, for human beings, not working machines. Since the moment you step out of the elevator you feel you’re in a creative place, not the usual jail-feeling offices. Even though they’re new and mostly empty, you can feel the energy of new exciting things happening!
The decoration is really simple: a light green color here and there (but enough to break from the gray office standard), circuit-like patterns on the floor. The offices don’t have walls, but all glass and wood panels for divisions. It’s like a creative mini mall. The kitchen/lunch space is open and resembles an after-hour bar, with tall tables and chairs. It’s not hidden in a small back room like most offices, which reasures the design philoshpy around this place: there’s no shame on the fact that people here eat! because we are persons.
And then there’s the central “garden”, which is a big open space in a central shaft in the building. We’re lucky to be on the 2nd floor since is the only one with access to it.
We’re sharing office space with other 2 teams. I have to say I still haven’t gotten the opportunity to sit and talk with other teams’ members but I’m definitely looking forward to. We had a small icebreaker on wednesday. We played guessing other members’ prefered videogame genres and then videogame mimic with groups of scrambled team members. We made Portal.
The first (social) contact
The first talks with industry pro’s also took place. We were visited and given an amazing lecture by videogame director Raul Herrero from Barcelona based studio Digital Legends. Then came Ramón Nafria, ace indie developer who gave us his wisdom from all of his experiences over the years within the industry. And lastly we had an excellent hybrid technical-marketing talk from Omnidrone’s Lead Programmer Miquel Angel Garcias.
Attending to master classes!
On a more technical level, this week was all about setting up. Even thought we have all this energy to start working right away, it would be a waste if we did it without a plan and looking forward a little bit. We worked on the game design, redefining it thoroughly. Mainly making it faster and more dynamic. But as I mentioned before, this will be a topic for future entries. All I can say is that game designing is a huge ordeal, but one that I love. It’s intricacies and how you have to crash-test ideas constantly is both grueling and fascinating. If successful, game design results in people enjoying themselves with the experience you created for them. This is my life’s passion.
As for the art department, since we’re switching over to 3D graphics (from Cocos 2DX engine to Unity 3D) we now have the task of revamping the whole videogame artistic style. It shouldn’t prove too much of a hassle since nowadays engines support 3D toon shaders. And the original 2D sprites were made with 3D render of models, foreseeing that this change might happen in the future.
We still have a lot to test and define thought. Here’s a sneak peek:
The earliests of WIP’s (Work in Progress). New floating island maps!
And since we’re kind of “starting over” again, I’m also managing the art department’s file handling, organizing folder structure, creating naming rules, sharing and sync systems with Google Drive between team members’ computers.
By the way, I’m training Kuma, the newcomer artist! He works at the office only on the morning shift. He’s learning incredibly fast and we’re super happy that he joined CORSEGAMES.
So that’s it for this first entry! It was a bit lenghty since there were many things to be explained. Expect the others to be a little bit shorter and less general, getting in-depth analysis over individual subjects about our game, but also keeping a “dev’s diary” style of updates about the development progress.
Thanks to all the team behind GameBCN, to Simon, Pere, everyone at Incubio and Barcelona Activa, thank you! Here we go!
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😀