Thursday! Let’s see what stuff I’ve discovered this week.

HootSuite

HootSuite.com It’s a useful service for yourself or your business to manage the several Social Networks that we use constantly. It can replicate the same posts in all of them, manage the followers and comments, and see what they are saying about you in every network at once. I use it for both personal and Gamenific spheres.

Concurso INOVApps

comunicacoes.gov.br/concurso-inovapps Brazilian only. É um concurso que o Ministério das Comunicações que está interessado em promover apps e jogos móveis. Serão 25 ganhadores nas duas categorias. Eu estou pensando seriamente em participar.

26 melhores sites brasileiros sobre desenvolvimento de jogos

https:://producaodejogos.com/os-26-melhores-sites-brasileiros-sobre-desenvolvimento-de-jogos Brazilian only. A great compilation of 26 Brazilian sites about game development. There is a mix of associations, indie devs, and general discussion. Great source of material and a good networking opportunity.

Yesterday I played Witcher Adventure (still in Beta) again, this time I could play for a little longer. I am participating in the Beta program, to give the developers the much feedback as we can. The game is a digital implementation of the homonymous board game, launched by Fantasy Flight Games.

First and foremost, the beta label means that: the game is incomplete. The main mechanics are working, the graphics are there, but there are many details missing, things that you will notice when you try it.

I am particularly interested in the game because my next game, project Vaults Inc(EDIT 2021: not available anymore), can learn a lot from it.

Visuals

Visuals are great. The game is really pretty and follows almost exactly the board game. There are also several similarities to Blizzard’s HeartStone by giving a plain card game a 3D vivid feeling. In the visual aspect, its a 10.

Story

Witcher Adventure do not have a fixed story. Instead each player will have a mission and submissions during the match. Even being a very mechanic driven strategy game, the story elements work amazingly well. It is better than other games that just include some generic and irrelevant context.

Multiplayer

The beta is all about the multiplayer aspect. The initial menu options are all very straightforward because the game has no other options to offer. Because there was not many players invited to the beta (at least I suppose), for several moments that I entered in the game lobby looking for a companion I was alone there.

The whole lobby feature is lacking a lot of robustness. It just says that there is or isn’t people waiting to play with you, nothing else. It could be strengthened by looking into Valve’s Alien Swarm, because they are similar in terms of important variables: number of players and scenario/match duration players voted for. The “waiting for other players to join” feels so lonely.

Bugs

The current game is full of bugs. It’s a bit unfair, because most games are full of bugs. In an action driven game, all the bugs are generally forgotten seconds later because the player’s attention is needed again But in the case of a strategy, turn-based, very slow paced games, the logic is pretty exposed. You can see and analyze quite precisely the output of a given command.

In Witcher Adventure, the forum is full of minor bugs, but there are a couple of critical ones, in which the whole match is compromised. The most critical ones were related to network. ALL of my plays stooped due to a player’s network problem. Yep, I could not go to a single match to the end…

I want to play it more (if there is any people online to do so)!

I’m not dead. Neither is the blog. I’m going to —poorly- explain why.

I’m just very focused on other projects, like my own new company Gamenific. It is, for now, an informal company, but I am investing more and more time and money, and energy into it. The Gamenific blog, that I write, is getting much more updated than this one.

My main day job is also requiring loads of time. Especially at the beginning of the year, when I was responsible for implementing an Online Booking tool in the company, was very demanding. I was working 16 hours a day. No social life was allowed. I cannot stress enough that it is very counterproductive: working that much for long periods is very tiring. Tired minds do not think properly and make constantly wrong decisions. One after the other.

But now things are normal again.

World Cup is here. It will officially start this Thursday and Rio de Janeiro, one of the hosting cities, is upside down. The transport is the worst, not only it is operating at overcapacity, but also the worker unions are taking the advantage of the situation to start constant strikes to raise salaries. The population is a hostage.

Back to Gamenific:

My plan is to make this company my life. If all goes right, it will become my main source of income in the next year, maybe two. And at this point, I plan to make it a full-day job.

Being a one-man company is not easy. By far. The amount of work that it takes is enormous. Secondary administrative tasks, like blogging, contacting new contractors, marketing, and making strategic plans… are very demanding. I wish I have someone to share the burden. But I am not complaining. On the contrary, it is very fun. Is hard and I love it.

I will keep Gamenific news in the Gamenific blog as much as possible, keeping this blog more as a personal view, especially related to programming, video games, and cinema. Eventually, I address some political or economical matters.

In Brazil, national elections are coming. I think it will be the subject of some texts in the near future.

Ludum Dare! The famous indie game competition has just ended and I once again locked me out of the world for 3 days to design, program,

In this edition, the theme was “Beneath the Surface”. In comparison with other editions, a very easy theme because it defines only the thematic aspect of the game. Most of games can be adapted to fit the theme, from shooters, strategy games, platformers. It is much harder when it restricts the mechanics of the game, like “10 Seconds” from Ludum Dare 27.

In my case, even with an easy theme, I face a lot of difficulty to design the game. I know that Ludum Dare audience is mainly indie designers with very little experience and they appreciate mostly popular action game genres, like platformer, top-down adventures and first-person shooters. But it was definitively not what I wanted in this edition. With an easy theme, I wanted to innovate in the mechanics.

In Brazil, the competition started Friday by 10pm. It is generally a good thing, because we are tired from work and it is close to sleeping time. Because the openness we got from the theme, I faced a lot of difficulty on designing, because designing requires restricting yourself. I only closed the final mechanics by Saturday lunch, 12 hours after the competition start.

Vaults Inc

Vaults Inc is a turn based strategy game. It is like a city building, but underground: you build a bunker from a post-nuclear-war universe. Imagine Fallout’s vaults. I wanted to grab a little of its universe, especially the visuals and humor.

Each turn the player have to build a new block in the bunker. Each block can increase or decrease or Income, Money, Fame or Population. The strategy comes from the interaction that each new block generates: Landfill decreases Fame is placed next to a residential block; slaughterhouse generates more income if placed next to a restaurant; fancy restaurant decreases fame is other fancy restaurants are built. Timing and Location are crucial.

Bigger bunkers means bigger problems: the more you grow, your fame and income start to go down. The game has typically 50 turns and the player have to reach the biggest population possible.“The most complete Fallout-Bunker-Simulator. Learn it for a future not that improbable”

Play it online for free (EDIT 2021: not available anymore)

The post was originally on blog.Gamenific.com

Yesterday I watched the Free to Play movie, produced by Valve. I can be only seeing inside the Steam gaming platform. I’ve never knew that it has video player functionalities.

Without any further due, the verdict: very boring.

The film is about video gaming as an sport, particularly about Dota 2. It tells 3 parallel stories of players that will participate into the biggest tournament ever. The prize would be one million dollars for the winner. At the time, it was, but light years, the biggest prize in history.

The 3 main characters are not particularly captivating. They are portrayed as nerds that are taking a lot of pressure by family members to work or study instead invest the whole time into gaming. The characters keep saying that they are motivated and determined to win. But that is all. You see that they are facing difficult situations, but nothing different from a teenagers entering into adulthood: what should I do with my life?

Despite the fact that the announcement alone of a such big prize created a huge repercussion on the internet gaming community and media, the tournament is poorly described. During the whole film, I was never sure what was going on in the competition.

But one thing it was very impressive the CG scenes that describe some parts of the matches in the competition. I believe that Valve CG animators entered in action. They were short but very, very well done.

The bottom line is that this film is, in fact, a propaganda about video game as an sport and the Valve game Dota. It repeatedly say that this competition was a milestone and it might actually be the case. But even being free to watch, Free to Play is not worthy.