Vortex Game Studios

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From August 29th. to August 31st., was held the fourth edition of SPJam, the biggest marathon of game development in the country, organized by Vortex Game Studios! 

This year's edition was held at PUC-SP, Campus Marquês de Paranaguá, in the west side of São Paulo city and had the valuable collaboration of 11 companies. 220 participants were distributed in 92 teams resulting in the production of 34 games. 

Besides providing an environment where creativity can be stimulated, the SPJam let developers meet peers, exchange experiences and get in touch with representatives of large companies such as Flux, Microsoft and Unity. 

The goal of the marathon is to stimulate the production of national games by indie development community and, of course, serve as a vast laboratory where developers can experiment new concepts that do not necessarily need to become a complete game immediately, but become part of a more elaborate idea, produced in the future. 

As in previous years, the SPJam 2014 counted with participants from various parts of the country, which proves that the event is consolidated in the calendar of events of national game development community.

There was also coverage of major Internet portals about the event. Sites like Kotaku, Administradores.com and Olhar Digital reported the event! 

Games and concepts created during SPJam 2014 can be found on the official event website at www.spjam.com.br.

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And here our new game to be released for free on the internet in the coming weeks!

[vortexstudios]

GAMES GAMES AND MORE GAMES!!

Hello everyone! Long time no see!

We were out for a good time working hard for this day, the day to announce the big news!

First, SPACE LANDER! The game is almost done, now with a very nice tutorial, achievements, leaderboard and lots of full 2D pixelated space challenges!

Now, for the first time in public, PALAVREADO (tentative title), different from Space Lander, Palavreado is a new interpretation of the classic crossword with lots of solo and online challenges! Soon for your Windows Phone 8, Windows 8, IOS and Android device!

Now for the first time, we are working on a porting of a game.

On last wednesday (3/7) few takers of the first to build this mobile game.

That's it! The Vortex Game Studios in partnership with TawStudios Entertainment is working to bring the hit game JELLY ESCAPE for mobile devices and consoles!

This is all about what we did in the last days, we will soon have more news! :D

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Last Week Global Game Jam Edition

Hello everyone, here is our very beautiful LAST WEEK GLOBAL GAME JAM EDITION!!!

For the third time we were at the event! And if you didn’t know the Global Game Jam is an annual global event where game developers got together to exchange ideas, nor sleep, eat poorly and in the time left, develop a game.

In every game jam we try to develop or technologies to use in game, not try to develop a game to be released on Steam in next week, like this, on the first GGJ we developed a game with procedural map generation (Dante’s Bureau), the second one we developed a game with mini games (Clownstrofobia), at GBJam planetary gravity simulation (Space Lander), and crafting at CampJam (Fabulous Coffee).

This year we tried to be adventurous! With a concept with different dimensions where you have to manipulate the reality to overcome the challenges.

The game idea is very simple, play the game in one reality (Dark World), but you need to access the another reallity (Light World) to find a different path or a hidden button to continue the game.

Yes, this is a very complex concept for a 48 hours game jam, from the beginning did not expect to have a game within this time, but wanted to be tested idea.

For this project we used Flash with a team of five, three in software development, one in world design and another one to the art.

And since we did not have the least idea how conseguri this effect “rip the realities”, we decided to develop everything from scratch. 

First separate the tasks for the programmers, one will develop the platform engine, another one will prepare the NPCs and player behavior and the last one will find how we will rip the realities.

Meanwhile, the worlds were designed.

And the animations were produced.

Well, after two days sleeping very little, eaten only when having time, too much coffee, no bath and a felled computer…

…but we make the idea work!! But as expected, we did not transform the idea into a playable prototype. But we do not care, we made in 48 hours something really complex and very cool :D

And not have to mention all the nice people :)

Even with all the challenges we see that a GameJam is just one big party :D

And you can “play” our concept here ^^

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So, what we did in last week?!

We are woking in two games to be released very soon, the first one is the Space Lander, we are working hard to make a very nice work on this game, now with achievements, leaderboard, sound effects, music and more than 20 stages!

Check a music test from Richie to the game :D

Reitano and Luiz Fernando did a very nice work to create some new planets to the game, and everything with the original Game Boy palett.

And we are working in a new game title for mobiles, yes, after 8 long years, we are working in a new game form mobiles, the last full working prototype was the Garden Warfare, (no, we aren't talking about the plants game xD).

Here a screen from Garden Warfare for devices with J2ME support.

Let's take a DeLorean to return to 2006, I'll talk a little about how hard was to develop mobile game :)

Develop games for mobile was very hard and very expensive, was need to draw lots of sprites and different softwares for different devices, not like today where we have Unity, Construct or many other nice game engines where you develop once and deploy to any platform with just one click! So, we closed this project and the VEM (Vortex Entertainment Mobile) program.

But, now we are back to mobile devices, and no, we aren't working in a new build of Garden Warfare, well, not yet, we are working in a casual game for Windows Phone 8, Windows 8, IOS, Android.

So, this is just a little about what we did last week :)

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50 posts! Yeah :D

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This is ground control to Major Tom!

[vortexstudios]

a bit of 2013

2013 was a very nice year, very hard too, but nice!

We started the year working in a serie of apps and games for education, we worked in more than 200 apps with a crazy deadline xD

That job was very hard and we never did so many debug in so little time xD we got some level ups there :)

Now let’s talk about cool games :D

First, SPJAM, this year the event was AWESOME!! Yes, now we are the biggest local game jam event in the world (our reference was the current Guinnes Book record), we even tried to go to the Guinnes Book :D

Every production was amazing this year, both analog and digital!

And by the very first time!! National TV :D

You will not find a room with so many nice people like that!! :D

And if are you asking, yes, we are working in SPJam 2014 ;)

Let’s talk more about games!

We was accepted for PlayStation Incubation Program, YES!! WE WILL PROTOTYPE GAMES FOR SONY PLATFORM WITH A CHANCE TO PUBLISH THEN :D We are working on a game for the plarform, you can play the prototype version on our site :)

Very soon we will start to publish some art and 3D assets from the game on our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/vortexstudios.

This is just a little of 2013, but it was not only a nice year for us, some of our friends from Taw and Joymasher got the Greenlit to publish their game on Steam, now we can develop 2D games on Unity with no hacks and a lot of new consoles and games.

Now we are working in new great stuff for this year, very soon we will release the final build of Space Lander with achivements, leaderboard, some very hard stages and free-2-play, we are working in a mobile prototype for WP8, IOS and Android devices and waiting some awesome devkits ;D

Oh! We will revive the “Last Week” serie, every saturday we will post something about our job and projects :)

[vortexstudios]

Yes, 2013 is over, now we have a whole new year to create new great things! May all your days be bright! :D

-Photo by: AnimatorAR

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Português

O que acontece se juntarem 152 artistas Brasileiros que gostam de jogos e dar para cada um deles um Pokémon para desenharem? Bom, é isso mesmo que o pessoal da 2Minds Studios fizeram!

Com participação de todos os tipos de artistas, incluindo José Osmar (#057) e Leonardo Reitano (#082) aqui do estúdio da Vortex, além de outros artistas do cenário game do país, como Glauber Kotaki (Rogue Legacy), Danilo Dias (Oniken), Lucas Carvalho (Luke at the Stars) e muitos outros!

Quer saber mais?? Só entrar nesse link com todas as imagens e o poster em HD para impressão :D

http://www.behance.net/gallery/152-Brazilian-Artists-Pokedex-Project/12251957

English

What happens when you join 152 Brazilian artists who like games and give each of them a Pokémon to draw? Well, that's what the guys from 2Minds Studios did!

With the participation of all types of artists, including José Osmar (# 057) and Leonardo Reitano (# 082) from Vortex studios, and other artists from Brazilian game industry like Glauber Kotaki (Rogue Legacy), Danilo Dias (Oniken), Lucas Carvalho (Luke at the Stars) and many others!

Want to know more? Just check this link with all the pictures and poster to download if you like to print it :D

http://www.behance.net/gallery/152-Brazilian-Artists-Pokedex-Project/12251957

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[spjam]

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E ai pessoal!

Quem vai participar do evento TI no Vale no dia 15 de Dezembro na Unesp de São José dos Campos??

Para quem não sabe a Vortex Game Studios está dando apoio ao evento levando membros da equipe para participar do evento além levar alguns cartuchos de Atari personalizado ao estilo de como foi feito durante a SPJam 2012 e um livro para ser sorteado!

Para saber mais do evento visitem o site em: http://site-tinovale.rhcloud.com/

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Check out the Flea Ship, there many of them at the Dead Dog's worlds, you need to rescue all of them to enable all the power-ups and upgrades :D

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Hey! Here a (very) small preview from our new game Dead Dog in Space!! :D

[vortexstudios]

Hello everyone!

WE ARE BACK! After two weeks working in Expo SPJam, here we are again working with games!! YEY!!! :D

Question, who visited the expo at SESC Santana here in São Paulo?? The expo are going very nice with board games, card games, pc games and a art expo made with Atari 2600 cartridges!! (Don't worry, we didn't sacrifice any original or classic Atari game to produce the event. :p)

And look! There a arcade machine with some of the indie games too! You have any idea of how cool is play your game in a machine like this one?! YES! IT'S AWESOME!!

And check out how great the board and card games are!! Some teams had made a box for their game!! :)

You can find more photos from the SPJam and the expo in their Facebook page at fb.com/spgamejam and visit the expo, you'll like it ;D

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The SPJam Expo is here, yesterday we was updating the arcade controller.

Asai and Zé was working hard sending the SPJam games to the partners. We got some great games and as I know they loved some of them :D

We started to port the MONSTRO!!! to MoMinis engine too, and looks a very nice engine for mobile devices. Luiz Fernando was working in a gameplay update to add the new features like power ups, itens, achievements. :)

Reitano is doing a great job in a outsource project drawing cards... LOTS OF THEN!!! but everything is almos done, very soon he will join in MONSTRO!!! team too :D

AND TALKING ABOUT CARDS... The Pankration and another card game about meat are almost done!! YEY!! We are working in how we will distribute these games. We had no idea how hard is to find a place to print boxes here in Brazil, but, after a long research we found some nice places to print boxes and make custom dices. :)

I found some of Pankration test cards too, check how cool these cards are xD

Alexandre gave a little stop in Dead Dog development to finish another outsource project, but, everything is done! He did the last test yesterday with success and tomorrow he will return do our game :) We will start to post some screenshots of the games in development every week too :D On friday one of our development tablet briked, that was scary! We had to open the device to revive him ( we was out of potions :'( ), now he is fine :p hahaha :)

OH! Asai got a balloon :D hahaha xD