Monthly Archives: May 2012

Bugs and hacks

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This post is due to “Dirty coding tricks” post from Gamasutra which we hardly recommend. Basically it’s about bugs seen during the game development of different games which had to be solved using (as its title states) dirty tricks.

During all this time we’ve also encountered some bizarre bugs. To point out some of them, one that caused gorgeous images was in Moebii’s level selector where in some cases the spawn of new cubes failed and then and exponential spawning of cubes started resulting in images like these:

Another weird bug, in this case, caused by Unity, when we upgraded Hungry Gows project from version 3.0 to 3.5 we realized that some of the transform matrixes of the objects weren’t imported correctly so they had what we supposed it was its initial value, making all these objects to be in a wrong position-rotation-scale. After searching in Internet without luck we randomly tried to address the problem thinking that it was due to a change in float representation so we made a short script which imposed all the values from the transform matrix of all the objects of the scenes to have at least 2 decimals. Luckily this worked out and we could save a lot of time avoiding having to change by hand all the values based on the original ones.

 

Crowdfunding and bundling

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When we first tried to find funding to bring Gow to iOS and Android we started by releasing the project in a crowdfunding website, 8-bit funding, and that helped us to find indiePub as our publisher. Nowadays, this kind of platforms have become a solution to finance big and small projects so we’ve decided to destine some of our income to help funding interesting projects from other developers. You can find which projects we’ve supported so far in our Kickstarter profile.

    

We’ve also want to mention another great initiative: the Humble Bundles. We bought some of them to give support to great games and greater developers, and we encourage everyone to use these kind of platforms to help and promote these new funding methods!

Because we may!

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We want to express our support to Because we may, a campaign to show that:

developers should have the freedom to price their games how they like, without interference from the online stores that sell the games.

and that’s why we are going to be offering our games at a 9001% discount over original price during this week!

You will find other amazing games endorsing this message here 

Dare to be Digital 2012 selection day

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Last week we went to London to show our project for Dare to be Digital 2012 to a group of judges from Sony, Jagex and BAFTA. The presentation was on Friday but we decided to go earlier to visit London, or at least we went with that thought as we ended finishing the presentation and practicing it from Wednesday until Friday in the apartment.

We worked a lot on it: we used Unity to make a small presentation with more interactivity than the standard PowerPoint or Prezi as we really wanted to stand out.  (You can download what we did here). We also made a small rehearsal with an inflatable club and a mop stick to demonstrate IsoChronous’ game mechanics. The presentation lasted 15 minutes and after that we had to answer 10 minutes of jury’s questions.

     

On Saturday we did a bit of tourism visiting Big Ben, Tate Musuem, St Paul’s Cathedral, Hyde Park, …

    

     

 

2nd UPC prize at 3 Headed Monkey Awards

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Yesterday it was the prize-giving for the 3 Headed Monkey Awards Contest in Caixa Fòrum. The event was headed by two prominent figures of the national digital market: Horacio from Social Point and Niko, creator of the well known and charismatic Cálico Electrónico.

The awards started with the interpretation of a very suitable composition for the name of the awards:

Then the two stated talks continued: Horacio explained how they started it all and a brief showcase of their projects and after that Niko presented Cálico Electrónico return to the Internets with its 4th season

   

And finally arrived what everyone was expecting: the prize-giving. There were three initial (soon you will discover why initial it’s used) categories: Audience’s prize (given to the game with more votes), UPC prize and best overall prize.

The Audience’s prize was for BeautiFun Games and theirs Nihilumbra obtaining the 20% of all the votes.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=uSmFAAYmJss

The UPC prize was closely disputed by Betty the Bee and Moebii but finally fell into Betty the Bee.

TrTrtrtrtrtrtrtr (it kinds of tries to be a drum roll) the Best overall prize was for the amazing job done by Hugging cactus team and entitled Forgotten Kodama

There was a special prize for the Expert gamer given to the person able to recognize the game and the scenes from the music that was played at the end of the event. If you want to see the level of the prize you can give it a try:

To sum up the awards, we find that the awards have been fairly deserved as we had stated when we first saw all the projects that the three winners should be: Betty the Bee, Nihilumbra on Audience’s and UPC prize and Forgotten Kodama for best game prize. We are very proud with our position as we weren’t expecting anything from a game done in just one week of hard work once having seen all the presented projects and the vast amount of work and love that is evidential on them. We also are amazed and happy for the good quality of projects and we hope watching more and more national teams doing even more gorgeous games. The prize-giving was very interesting and entertaining and we would like to finish thanking everyone that has made possible the competition and see you next year!