VGAFIB

Posted on by
Reply

VGAFIB is the acronym for the Video Games Association of the Facultat d’Informàtica de Barcelona. If we have to highlight and thank something from our years in the university it would the people we’ve met. And in VGAFIB we found the most awesome people. We entered the association 4 years ago (when we started our degrees) because we wanted to make games and this seemed the perfect place to learn and practice.

Since then a lot of things have happened, but to point out the most important ones, we want to remark the yearly and expected tournments during FestaFIB; Barcelona Game Jam, an event where you have to make a game in 48hours, and also the introductory courses in game programming using Unity that we taught.

       

But an association is not just about which activities you offer to the public, it’s also about what it’s done during each day by its members: parties, afternoons playing all kind of games: video games and a lot of board games, watching the E3 conferences, discussions about the new games trying to understand each one of its intrinsics…

So if you want to learn a lot about game development or just want to meet people with the same interests as you, come to VGAFIB’s headquarter in Omega building, door 104 and you won’t regret it!

Bugs and hacks

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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!

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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!

Moebii heads the 3HM Award!

Posted on by
1

This week we’ve worked a lot (and haven’t slept much) in order to finish and improve some of the flawly aspects of the original idea to head Moebii to the newly created Three headed monkey Awards

 

An open-world that links with these Möbius-shaped worlds has been created giving more immersion to the story and to Moebii’s world.

       

 

We have introduced 6 game modes based on the initial puzzle of coloured cubes in a Möbius strip: reach some objectives, make combos, get points given a time, mix cubes in your inventory to get a given colour,…

    

 

Also bosses have appeared to destroy and plunge in absolut obscurity the world abosrbing all colours:

If you like our idea and want to support our work you can vote Moebii here