Colossorama & The Future Beyond
I've been planning to write a new blog post for the past two months. However, as the amount of new tasks, events and things to do kept piling up, breaks in order to write this new blog post became far apart and few. But at least, here's a quick recap post about everything that's been going on during these past two months!
Let’s start by the highlight. By the end of August, my longtime friend Jose “Moski” Sanchez and I teamed up to participate in Ludum Dare 36. The last time we had teamed up in order to develop a game under a strict time limit was over two years ago for the Indie Game Maker Contest 2014 where we ended up creating The Farming One in RPG Maker. We scored quite highly in the contest which left us the will to develop new and more projects.
During the following years, while we were studying for new and in-depth skills we often tried to participate in various other Game Jams. However, we were never able to properly finish a project with the same polish as The Farming One had. As much as we knew we had skills to develop it we would always ended up hitting a wall at the end of the tunnel.
Fast forward to Ludum Dare 36 and Colossorama is born during the 72-hour jam (at that time, under the appropriate title Colossorama 36). Colossorama is a hack-and-slash arcade game made in Unity where you play as a gladiator and must use an arsenal of different weapons and items to slay enemy gladiators. Each of these has a different set of stats and attributes which, depending on the player's strategy, can determine the outcome of each wave. The more gladiator heads you decapitate, the bigger your high-score and bragging rights. The game is totally available for free and playable online over at itch.io. Multiple trusted sources say you should definitely give it a try. 😉
Developing Colossorama was a great and refreshing experience, and the whole time-based challenge helped us develop and solidify ideas that we probably wouldn't otherwise have done. We got a pretty decent game at the end too! The highs and lows of the development process during the jam period were listed over at our post-mortem. We even learned how to properly write post-mortems!
The best part of the whole experience though, was being able to showcase the game to others - most of which developers. Beyond the feedback we received in our Ludum Dare page during Feedback Friends, I also had the chance to showcase the game for us here in Portugal at Game Dev Camp and in one of the many Game Dev Meets. The feedback we received from those who played the game helped us solidify the game further and gave us tips on what we should focus more next time.
Beyond Colossorama, the routine has been pretty much the same. I have been trying to expand my range of presence at events with Game Dev Camp last month as well as Pixels Camp and Lisbon Games Conference earlier this month in order to listen to more talks and network with the frequent people (meanwhile also forging new connections with people I hadn't had the chance before).
What has been mostly filling my schedule however has been my return to university which has been proving to be more challenging and more work-intensive that last year. One of my current focus has been this semester's university project. Having recently finished Colossorama I want to take the opportunity and develop a game with more detail and feedback put into it during the development process. Although there's still only some prototype progress in it, I believe the final product will be another great game (Moski's helping on it too as well!)
(Everything on this screenshot is meant to be a prototype. The final art style and mechanics are still miles ahead!)
Since the amount of projects will start increasing during the upcoming months I also took the moment to finally publish my Projects Page here in the blog. Right now it's still a bit lack lusting, but with all the energy and ambition coming from current projects I'm sure it will start becoming more diverse and filled soon. I promise the same thing will happen with these posts too and that there won't be another four-month gap between each other! Hope you stick around!
