Leonidax

It’s already a month since I started to work in Sm4rt Studios, which is a new videogame company in Mexico. I have started a new way of life, in this month have happened a bunch of things and I have learned a lot. I have been working with a videogame engine called Gamebryo LightSpeed from the Emergent company and without a doubt it has speeded up the production of our videogame, however for a programmer like me, it has been a challenging task, because I am more used to code than to check some boxes, give some parameters and write just a few lines of code… my knowledge in computer programming has helped me out in understandig this black box than in producing code, but the game has some technological challenges that the team and me will have to solve…

Another black box for me is the PhysX, I have been working with it and you have only to give a few parameters when you are creating the models in 3dmax and you only have to export it by using the gamebryo scripts to get it working into your game… the result is really impresive, but at the same time it’s fuzzy, because one would like to understand how PhysX is doing all this, I think that I would need to work a lot more with the SDK in order to get a better understanding of it.

Talking a bit more about what we have done in this month with our videogame, we have achived to create the first prototype, which we have called Botball Zero, it is the result of our first software development iteration. I can not give you more details about it, but if you want to know more about the videogame you can see the videos in YouTube, where Gustavo Chapela is uploding some videos to document the creation of his game company called Sm4rt Games Studio.

Other thing that I have to mention is that the team has grown from 4 people to 10 in less than a month, we just moved from our last office and now we are in process of integration with another game company called Pystech Labs, which is produccing a game called Broken Reality Online.

Nowadays if you enter to Lucas Arts site you will not see a lot of original titles, it’s funny because in the beginnings of Lucasfilm Games, the developers didn’t even had the opportunity to use Star Wars titles for their games, so they had to be more creative and create totally new concepts and stories. David Fox even says that in their first game Atari didn’t even allow to credit the programmers and game designers for the games they created so they used to introduce Easter eggs or hide their names in the graphics of the games or even to put photographs of them in the game manuals.

I think that Lucasfilm not allowing to create Star Wars game ended in some of the best Adventure Games I have ever played, one of the guys that changed the game industry was Ron Gilbert with Maniac Mansion Game and the Game Engine SCUMM,  which a few games later would allow to create one of the best games I have ever played.

I started to use computers by playing games and one of the most important games that made a really big impact when I was a kid was The Secret of Monkey Island.

I really admire Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman. Ron Gilbert is the one behind the SCUMM engine and Monkey Island, but I think that Tim Schafer is the most original of the three, he worked on Monkey Island and he also designed the Day of the Tentacle together with Dave Grossman, Full Throttel, Grim Fandango (also one of my favorites) and Psyconauts, I really hope to work with him one day.

A few weeks ago I saw the Ron Gilbert’s keynote speak that he gave at PAX on YouTube and it really inspired me, if you have some time I would recommend anyone to watch it.  Ron Gilbert is now working on Death Spank, Tim Shaffer just released Brütal Legend and Dave Grossman is working in Tales of Monkey Island.

I tried to write some of the things that Ron Gilbert mention on his keynote and here is the quote:

“Surround your self with people smarter than you and push your self and challenges everything that you know and believe. If you ever find your self comfortable, content with what you are doing, then you’r not pushing hard enough, we should always live in a state of discomfort and fear about what are we making and creating, because it means your trying something new and different , making something unique and special.“

If you want to hear more about the games that this great game designers are producing you usually can find a lot of news about them in Mix ‘n Mojo , you also can see a full speach from David Fox about The Early Years of Lucas Arts.