The date on this post is a lie. This blog didn’t exist in 2009! I wrote this in 2015 as a little easter egg, with some early story of team-iso and what we were doing before IsoChronous, Gow, and our other games.

We met in our first year of Computer Engineering in the UPC university, in Barcelona, and we knew we wanted to make games. We were learning the basics of C++ at our programming class, but we needed more than that, so we began our research. This is a good opportunity to thank our awesome programming teacher, Jordi Petit, as well as the people we met in VGAFIB (the VideoGames Association at the Faculty of Informatics of Barcelona), who helped us with the bases to get started.

Our first project (that we never finished) was a 2D platformer written in C++ on top of our own simple engine using the SDL library. This is an early screenshot of our first project ever: A ball with a face that could roll around and jump (and even wall jump!).

I remember we would meet every Wednesday to brainstorm ideas for the game, and we managed to come up with a somehow defined project. If I had to describe its mechanics now, it basically was Trine, but at that time Trine didn’t exist. Not even indie games were a thing back then! This is some conceptual art of our first prototype:

Of course, the actual playable game didn’t look nearly as good as that, but at some point we even managed to have a nicely drawn main character, and a small robo-helper that would follow him around!

Certainly, the ground, background and everything else was still plain colored and the physics of that square box would misbehave in every possible way… But this already took us several months of work! From that experience, though, we got lots of learnings that we would use in our forthcoming game: IsoClinous.