Show must go on

This is my new cellphone... that is my engine :)

Some Rokoban and Jumping Jack videos

Someone from nintendomax uploaded them recently on youtube. Thanks guys!

Jumping Jack in 3D

Have you ever stopped to think about the first videogame you ever played? I know there are hundreds of people out there answering that it is Super Mario Bros, Tetris or any other famous one. For me it is different. It has to be one of those stored in a cassete for our old ZX Spectrum 128k (wow!) I remember myself like 22 or something like that years ago entering into my old brother's room that January 6th, sitting there and playing it... for the first time. It is hard to believe that I still spend some time playing it in some emulators :)

So.. I looked for a remake. Althought I found some games based on it there wasn't any that keeped me entertained enought so I decided to do my own one :P. It started as a very easy task but then I realize I had to model the 10 hazards (oh... it is in 3d, sorry about that ^_^UU) and animate the main character.... bla, bla

Anyway, here it is! You can find it in the download section as usual or just after this paragraph. I hope you enjoy it as much as I am doing and if you have any suggestions don't hesitate to send them
PC version
WII version

PS: oh... yes... the DS version... I am sorry to say that the poor DS is not capable of moving the game well enought beyond the 5th level, so I decided not to publish it :( I would need a new set of graphics and I am not really sure I want to do that ^_^U

Rokoban updated

Althought I haven't been posting too much during this and last year I have been still working on something from time to time (not as much as I used to). Lots of improvements were added to the engine and in the meantine I was thinking that maybe I should create a new game to make some use of them. Well, creating a new game requires time so instead of that I decided to update my Rokoban using all these features. I also had the chance on one of my jobs to work pretty close to 3D max (as a tools programmer) which gave me the opportunity to learn lots of things about the program. That's why I decided to create also a new model for Roko, the main character.

I finished this version on December last year but I forgot to upload it. Well, not really. I didn't forgot I was just too lazy to do it. These are the new features added:
- New set of graphics for Wii and PC (I think the DS graphics were ok for the ds, but looked lame on my PC)
- Savegames (so now when you complete a level Rokoban will keep a record of it)
- Music and sound (finally, woo hoo!)
- Some memory leaks fixed

If you pay attention to the new character you'll see animation blending, skinning, texture animation in action :) Some other stuff I have been working on is not visible on the game. I have now a lot of debugging information that helps me a lot when I run the app in one of the platforms and I just receive a black screen (mainly asserts and memory leak detectors).

I think that's all :) Hope you enjoy it. You can find it in the downloads section as usually (there, on your right) or just here
PC
Wii
Nintendo DS

PRIXON: Time goes by... so slowly?

Damn! The new year has just began and this year I realize that I have something important to celebrate. It's been 10 years since I finished Prixon! I can't believe it has already been that long...

So let me write a little bit about this game and why it is so important for me ^_^ (no boring code stuff this time). Eleven years ago I was finishing my studies and getting ready for university. I still wasn't very clear about what I wanted to do, that's the problem when you have more than one hobby. By that time I was already involved on code stuff, but only in qbasic. I had tried to do something in C++ but those annoying pointers were being a hell for my mind in that time (:D)

I wanted to create videogames since years ago. The closer attemp I did was with click'n play... but that was more like creating a game while playing (I think Microsoft is planning to create something similar for the 360 now to compete against Sony's LBA). Then, exactly 11 years ago, on Christmas my brother brought to home a demo of a new videogames creator enviromment. It was called Div Games Studio. Div for the friends :D

The demos included on the game were really impressed and the language was quite intuitive, even it included a debugger. I was amazed. And I saw a big opportunity to do something big for the first time. After months testing the language and learning it I started a project called Chula GP (the name is also a long story) that would be renamed into Prixon a few days before finishing it.

I was working on Prixon for a little more than a year. Not fully dedicated because that year I had to study a lot for the exams we have to do before going to university. I use a lot of stuff in this game. For the first time I got contact with tiles, mode 7, music, graphic modes, palettes... and also for the first time I got in contact with 3d max (v4, in ms-dos ); yes, the models in the game where modelated in 3D, LOL, those are the worst models I have ever done in my life. Not that I am really proud of the code today, but the thing is that I finished what I wanted. No rewards except some people telling me that they loved it, which was enought.

I think that when I finished Prixon I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I have finally become a games developer. To be honest I don't know how to fell sometimes. This is a hard profession and sometimes you wish you had a bakery or a ranch in the middle of the forest :_) I am sure I am not the only one who fells like this LOL!

When I was about to finish the game I decided to create the official comic. That was very special also. It supposed the return of Cebolleto, Carateca and Topolino. For 3 years I was dedicated to my manga style and those characters were started to be forgotten. Prixon meant the end of my manga style (or should I say Toriyama style? :D) and the return to my old characters.

Guess that I owe a lot to DIV. By the way, last summer a new version of DIV was released called Gemix Studio, fully compatible with the old one without changing any line in the code (you just need to recompile) I decided to give it a try and get a version of Prixon running under Windows. Yes, you can find it here (source code included) but, be nice :P You have to look at this game like it is, the beginning into the games programming of a university starter ;)

Happy 10th anniversary Prixon!

PD: the sound doesn't work fine.

Free Radical Closes

From GamesIndustry

People who know me they know why I am posting this here. Free Radical means something to me specially since 6 months ago, when they played with me. But for some reason, these are bad news. And I am not happy for this. There were a lot of people in that studio I really wanted to work with.

It is very sad always to heard that an studio wich has made some wonderful games in the past closes its doors. As someone told me one day and I said to myself 6 months ago... "shit happens"

No resentments.

Rokoban Wii, 4th place in the Tehskeen Wii code competition

http://www.tehskeen.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=9775

All right, all right... I'll do my best for the drunken coders winter competition :P