Category: News

This year I went back to Next Games to join the Finnish Game Jam 18. My friends participated in the last Ludum Dare and were pretty hyped about doing it again together. The plan from the very beginning was to use Unity and try to get something as decent as the game from last year, which we were pretty happy about.

Seeing our current group had expanded a bit, with another coder, Nico (who worked with us at Remedy) and Kim, who was going to do some design, this time I decided to switch gears and help Áureo with art. I usually go solo for Ludum Dare, and I’ve been trying to improve my pixel art chops, so I thought this was a good enough challenge.

Both me and Aureo were a bit hyped about doing a platformer because Pedro Medeiros just posted a couple of tutorials and we thought it would be pretty fun to do some cool animation. From my side, I already had some experience with platformer animation (from my first LD entry) and with the new Unity 2D tools looked like a suitable genre.

As always in this kind of team project, this postmortem is written from my own experience and with the learnings I got from it.

Thanks to my friend Jasmin, I was able to participate in the Finnish Game Jam 17 at the Next Games site. It was really convenient because the office is really close to my place. I worked with Jasmin and Áureo at Remedy, and we had been talking of doing something together again. We were open to have other people on the site to join us, but our group seemed quite balanced (2 programmers, 1 concept artist and 1 UX/UI artist) so jammers opted for filling in other teams.

This is my personal postmortem, not the team one. I will focus mainly on my takeaways from this experience, not necessarily on the most important features.

This weekend I participated in Ludum Dare 36. During past couple of weeks, I invested some time preparing all the tools (and stocking my fridge) and making sure I had all bases covered during the jam. With a great experience in LD35 I was expecting this one to be even better. This edition will be a little different, because there won’t be ratings (I’m fine with that, although I like to be able to have some KPI about my performance).

The selected theme was Ancient Technology which I didn’t really like a lot, even though I got some interesting ideas. My second best choice was doing another puzzle game using the abacus mechanics, but in the end I opted for doing something around “writing” and the result is Decypher.

Back in April I took part of Ludum Dare 35, the game jam you can do comfortably from your own home. I didn’t really thought too much about it beforehand, just saw my friend Belen preparing for it and I decided to give it a try. It’s not my first Ludum Dare, so I had a clear idea of timelines and how to organise my time.

I set my expectations really low, my only objective was to do a puzzle game because it’s something I’ve been curious about lately. When the theme was released, the idea of mixing Triple Town with Werewolf came to mind really fast, so I open Unity and started to code furiously. 

I was able to release something which I was quite happy (without not too many hacks I believe): Crops of Carnage.

As I am writing this postmortem with the ratings already published, I can say that this was probably my most successful Ludum Dare in terms of score. The game was #68 in Innovation, #110 in Humor (probably because the male character is super funny), #131 in Fun (the score I am more proud of) and #189 Overall (best rank so far).

I am back in Barcelona for my summer holidays, but before chilling out for a couple of weeks I attended the unofficially called “Barcelona videogame week”: Hello World, Gamelab and Indie Developer Burger Awards. This year, Unai has been organizing a small technical track and bringing Mike Acton to Barcelona.

Unai asked me if I could give a talk there. I haven’t been in Supercell long enough to be able to talk about my experience there, and I was quite busy last month, so I started taking it my previous UI talk and tried to structure it much clearer and remove some sidetracking. Also, as the focus of the talks was native and C++ development, I tried to give also the view of somebody who has written its UI library.

I gave this talk in English (due to the request of some of the attendants) so if the video becomes available at some point I will share it here.

I made a talk in Freakend 2015. It is an event, organized this year by Diego, where a bunch of Spanish game developers get together in a cabin in the mountain to share experiences and enjoy good food and beers (and this year I brought some Finnish Salmari too).

I thought which topic could I use for my first talk, and I thought that dead mobile platforms, although fun, may be of less use than collecting some useful good UI practices I learned after working in that field for a while.

I gave the talk in Spanish (and there is a video of it), but all the slides (except the title) are in English.

I came to the gamejam with the idea of working with my coworker Joonas, who was going to do the art. I wanted to use this jam to put my Game Maker knowledge to a test, because I had been helping the kids and doing the tutorial with them previously but never really had to do a “real” project with it.

As soon as we saw the theme of the project was sport and the extra point was co-op, we had the same idea. Joonas had been talking me about wanting to do a game about roller derby for a while. Specially after seeing the movie Whip It. On Friday night I streamed the movie from Netflix and it was a great idea because I was instantly motivaded. I could easily foresee an Ultimate Team with the skater with their awesome looks.

After a couple of days of furiously coding in Game Maker (with some pause for coffee, food and helping some jammers with coding problems) this is the result. I am not 100% happy with the controls and some game stuff, but I have learned a lot about Game Maker by doing this jam game and putting my skills to the real test.

Download the game for Windows (10MB)