BeautiFun Games

Nihilumbra available at Gaming For Good.

Now you can get Nihilumbra (and also the great Spanish indie Unepic) at Gaming For Good An Athene's initiative where all the money from sold games goes directly to the NGO Save the Children!

Vía @BeautiFunGames

Ernesto, a different RPG, will get a commercial release.

Back in December I had the chance to play Daniel Benmergui's Storyteller, a game where your goal is to freely craft your own stories, only limited by having a certain set of characters and objects that you should handle in order to reach a conclusion. Definitely Storytelling has a lot of potential, it's quite innovative, but also very complex from the development side. Daniel is working really hard create a streamlined experience through the different situations that player has to face. Recently Daniel announced on Storyteller's webpage:

"It happened that recently I decided to take a week to make a small game and thus "Ernesto RPG" was born. After releasing it into the wild, I realized that there might be upsides to turning it into a tiny commercial game:

It will take my designer mind off of Storyteller for a while, allowing me to go back to it from a different perspective.

Releasing commercially means Ernesto will have to go through the same releasing pipeline that Storyteller will have to go through; by then, I will be more experienced. Ernesto reminded me how I felt when I started with Storyteller.

I have been in a very good mood since I started it."

Ernesto is Daniel's side project, a free pixelated click-based RPG where you guide the destiny of an explorer through dungeons filled with unexpected dangers, but also with power-ups to help you to survive. The game is pretty addictive, and Daniel is improving it up to the point he said it will be released commercially. Give it a chance if you have some free time, is really addicting!

Vía @JesusFabre

Pokemon Evoas. A promising fan-made Pokémon Game.

From now and then we see some fan-made games based on very well known franchises. Today we have Pokémon Evoas, as the author, th3sharkk says:

"Evoas makes a lot of changes to the standard pokemon gameplay formula, with a focus on making battles more strategic and exciting."

The game is not only using the trademark Pokémon, it also takes art and sound assets from it. So that means Nintendo may take down the project any time... let's see. Meanwhile you can give it a try here.

Vía @truguers

Watermelon Games' RPB Project Y due to release in March 2014.

If you haven't heard about Watermelon Games, maybe if I tell you about Pier Solar it would be more familiar to you. The Canadian studio is now about to release their next title for the Sega Mega Drive, under the name Project Y there are lots of passion from developers and also many fans, who invested and helped to shape the game into its present form. The gameplay is a mixture between a Beat'em all with RPG elements (what they call an RPB). Recently has been some controversy since some people accused them of getting too much inspiration from Streets of Rage, but they quickly denied such suppositions. They said the influences on Project Y were very diverse and they aren't going after cloning any classic title.

Here is the game context, taken from the game's site:

"ProjectY takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, set in an Asian high-tech metropolis. The last survivors of the nuclear war are divided into several classes, where the most powerful have the others by the balls. This has divided the governing bodies into several fractions, where ethnic mafias and a corrupt corporation are just a few of them! As you can see, this story is filled with many possible scenarios. It will demand lots of exploring and several playthroughs to get everything out of it."

Vía @BeautiFunGames

Impressive concept arts released after WARHAMMER: Age of Reckoning gets closed.

Sadly Warhammer Online servers were shutdown last December 18th, slightly more than five years left many gamers with a deep feeling of losing. As a tribute, Youtube user warhammerbp has created this amazing video, where you can contemplate its huge worlds, majestic creatures, and massive battles.

Also, one of the game artists called daaken, who worked on the title since 2007, posted many of the artworks he did for the game on his website, you can find them here:

Via @desgastada

Random stuff of the week:

Take it as a reward for reaching to the end of the post.

Vía @AniolAlcaraz

This week we sit down with Pol, another of the four BeautiFun Games founders, to talk about his life and career as a gamer and also as game programmer. Welcome and hope you enjoy.

Jesús Fabre: How it all started?

Pol Urós: I love games since I was a really young kid. Up to the point that I wanted to create them even before I knew how they were made. Didn't know in which position I should aspire to work at, but later in High School I discovered I was good at Maths, Algebra and Physics, while, on the other hand, I was disastrous with with all things art-related. So I decided I wanted to be a programmer (I also enjoy to give some hints and feedback on game design issues to the team here at BeautiFun, though). Ultimately, that was the motivation to start studying Computer Science.

When I was a kid, I also remember how badly I felt when I asked a Nintendo 64 for Christmas and the Three Wise Men forgot aboutit, until they brought it year later. I remember I didn't ask them for anything else, only that, such a traumatic disappointment! To say the truth, I think my parents were a bit worried when they saw how much time I spent with games during my childhood. When I started my studies, they didn't truly believe game development was going to be something I could make a living of... but it slowly changed when they started seeing how big this industry is.

The first console I had was a portable one, more concretely a Game Boy, the classic white and thick model, on which I remember having invested neverending hours playing with Super Mario Land 1 and 3. I also played a lot the first Pokémon, up the extent that the cartridge's battery ended up draining. So I lost my savegame with all the Pokemons in the team at maximum level. Schoolmates told me I was the best player around, but it was not a matter of skill, but dedication and steadiness. Loved the stats and leveling system, also how to customize the attacks in order to find the ones that suit your character the best.

J: If it was during school season, I wonder how things were when holidays came.

P: I spent long summers with a Super Nintendo at my uncle's place, in a small village close to Barcelona called Sant Estevede Sesrovires. I have fond memories of Super Bomberman, a game with a great campaign, but what really shined on its own there was its four-people battle mode! I loved U.N. Squadron, a game so difficult that my uncle and me ended memorizing each and every pixel until we beated it. Remarkable games were also Aladdin, Looney Tunes and Magical Quest: Starring Mickey Mouse. But aside of arcade and platform games, I was a hardcore fan of RPG with deep stories like Terranigma, Tales of Phantasia, Secret of Evermore, Illusion of Time and Secret of Mana.

But if there is a gaming platform that has truly left a mark on me, it has been Nintendo 64. When I finally had it in my hands, together with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, it marked a watershed in the way I saw games could deliver real magic, allowing me to enter immersive fantasy worlds and defy my logic with really intricate puzzles. I came back from school with the one and only goal of playing so hard I could get to the next dungeon. Until one day I ended it and I was so sad, perhaps this is a bit weird, but I hardly could cope with the idea of knowing there was nothing new to see in that game. It wasn't until I played TLOZ: OOT Master Quest when I got the chance to somehow relive that feeling, but I got stucked in the third dungeon. There was no way to progress for me, and at the same time I prohibited myself to look into guides, I wanted to solve the riddles by myself.

J: Games were pretty hard at the time, for how long did you keep that "all by myself" policy?

P: Well, later on, I started to use guides with games like the ones from Final Fantasy series, but in general I always tried to beat the games the hard way, without extra help, the feeling of satisfaction is much more intense, even if you didn't get to the end of the game, you know that everything you accomplished is only thanks to your own effort, and that feeling was (and still is) priceless.

J: Could you tell me more about your experiences with the Nintendo 64?

P: One of the best memories I keep about the N64, comes from the time when I played Mario 64 along with my father, who was a die-hard fan of 3D movies (as Toy Story, I remember it was the big thing at the time), for him it was unbelievable to see that world in movement. It was like interacting inside one of those movies worlds. I cannot forget to mention two great shooters, Goldeneye 007 and Duke Nukem 64 also a fighting game, Fighters Destiny, loved to play those games with my friends. For a more indivualistic experience aside of Zelda games, Quest 64 (Holy Magic Century is the name of the european version of the game) was another RPG I rented for innumerous times (I'm sure I could have bought the original game with all that money).

J: We talked about consoles, but now you play mostly PC games. When and how that started?

P: I never had a PC until I entered the University, before that I always had a Mac since my father was a Mac lover. He works in graphic design and I always inherited his machine when it was getting outdated. Due to this, I learned English by playing Mac games, at the time it was really strange to find a Spanish translation available for a Mac game. Monkey Island, Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis were two of those.

So when I entered the University I started using only the PC to both program and play games, I think is the best choice. I didn't abandon game consoles, had the Gamecube and the Wii, but they will never substitute the PC as a gaming platform. I love RPG, MMORPG, MOBA and strategy games. Some of my favourites are LoL, World of Warcraft, and I have always been a huge fan of Blizzard games. In Diablo II I played a lot with friends, shared our discoveries in the game, in Starcraft 2 reached Diamond league, now I'm starting to play Hearthstone (that looks fenomenal by the way)... I remember my love for Blizzard started in the early nineties, when I started playing a Warcraft demo from a CD included with a Mac Magazine my father had bought. That demo consisted of only two levels, but I ended playing them over and over, in all the possible ways you can ever imagine.

J: To end this first part of the interview. As a gamer and a developer, what do you think about the evolution of game industry? Is there something that worries you at the moment?

P: Nowadays I have some friends who talk to me kind of worried about Free to Play games and how successful this model is becoming in contrast with the traditional one where you have a to pay only once for a game and then get the full experience. I don't see Freemium model as evil, it's simply other way to do things. Certainly is not the kind of model I want to work on as a developer at the moment though, but I respect as long as it is being well done and the player is respected (in addition, i play a lot of free to play games! Hearthstone being one of them). In the end, I feel it's good to have different models trying to make their way in the industry, gamers will have more choices and each will end up choosing the one that best fit to them.

J: I believe freemium games are, among other things, a response from the industry to avoid piracy and maximize revenues. Even with some of them, such as Clash of Clans and Candy Crush Saga, we can see how many people really play games, usually much more than official sales figures say.

P: Well, you cannot pirate them in the traditional way, but there are ways to "hack" them and artificially modify some accounts to have super-high stats (some of them thanks to items you normally have to pay for) or simply making fake inapp purchases, so in the end the game will be unfair to the ones who are playing in a correct way. But i also think that this "hacks" are going to slowly dissapear cause the experience for the ones who pay is not fair, and i can see companies investing in security to avoid this scenarios.

J: Yes, recently I read Rockstar punished this behaviour in GTA Online. There were even players who made real money out of their hacks.

P: I remember Kevin telling us a really bizarre situation: In GTA Online, a user bought game money with real money, and other user stole it from him in the middle of the game. As it was an assault, in the middle of the street. There was a big controversy surrounding this kind of situations.

Continues soon in Part II.

Other interviews: Aniol Alcaraz (Producer and programmer)

Click to read the part I of this interview.

In this second turn of the interview, and as it is usual in the series, Pol talks about his professional story.

Pol: When I was at high school I aspired to be part of the development process of a videogame. Programming is something I have always been interested in, and on the other hand I'm really bad at drawing. So I chose to study a Videogame Development Masters Degree after finishing my Bachelor in Computer Science. There I met Kevin, Aniol and Lourdes, with whom I founded BeautiFun Games.

Jesús: About the Masters, what was the most important stuff you learned there? Did you studied anything related to game development before, during your degree?

P: I had learned a considerable amount of stuff on game development during my degree, thanks to a subject that was focused on that matter, by chance the teacher was also the Masters director. They taught us how to create a game engine using low level APIs, like DirectX and OpenGL. That was useful to understand how things worked from the inside, but not so convenient if we wanted to create and publish our own games in around six months. Now most people use third-party engines, like Unity, Unreal Engine, GameMaker, etc. Perhaps the most important experience I carry on from the course was to have met really enthusiastic and hard-working people, and of course having released a full game! The Creature was the result of a lot of effort from Kevin as well as the rest of our team.

J: What can you tell me about The Creature?

P: The game was very complete, with twenty levels, a lot of features, several final bosses, secrets, also we implemented a mechanism in which you could unlock a parallel level as you progressed... I'm quite proud of it.

We also had problems during the project, since one of our team members decided to give up and abandoned the Master, and consequently the project, just when the final months of the development were starting. So we were only two programmers left, David Gallardo and me, we both became very good friends. Kevin, aside of designing the game, also did character design, and also we had Andreu Farré and Lluc Romaní (who also found a job before finishing the project) that were modelers. I remember the last day of the project, when we were due to deliver the alpha version of the game. I went to bed at 11 in the morning! It was quite simple, if I didn't finish the project nobody would do, so I slept 4 hours and then went to class to showcase the work...I almost fell asleep that afternoon. When I look at the game now, have to say it has aged quite well, but will always have the limitations of being a students project.

J: How did you lived the transition from the Masters Degree to kickstart BeautiFun Games?

P: After the Master, we started having meetings between several students with the intention of creating a game, this was after doing a first prototype that had potential but needed more dedication, then Aniol came up with the idea of using his savings to create a studio and turn our passion into paid work. As for the rest of the team, for me that movement was kind of surprising, but not so much, since I knew Aniol was a great poker and Magic player. I was following his progresses and knew he had a remarkable success in both worlds. I was also playing Magic and decided to try my luck in the poker scene and see how much I could make too. So I was playing regularly during one year, and especially very hard for one month. The result after all were around 10.000 euros. It was engaging since I started from the bottom with no investment at all, and step by step I saw how I was rising more money only with my effort. But once I made those 10.000 I thought it was enough for me, it took a lot of time and I didn't wanted to keep doing that for the rest of my life. So I focused completely on game programming.

J: And when you started BeautiFun, do you remember how the idea of Nihilumbra emerged?

P: I remember Kevin sit down with us one day and presented the idea of developing a game for mobile devices, something that was more mature than everything that can be found on the market at the time. Something that had nothing to do with the casual Angry Birds model everybody was trying to imitate. At the time (early 2011) there was nothing similar on mobile. We all agreed and then we embarked on a really hard but thriving adventure, the game took us significantly more time than we expected to be finished. I remember we were really tired after fourteen months of development, Aniol worked many days until really late in the morning, testing the game again and again. We wanted to polish it to the last detail.

J: Now I would like to know something about your day to day routine, how do you work best?

P: I believe my case is not very common in this business, I use to work some days at home, especially when I need to focus on something that depends exclusively on myself, and also I concentrate much more when I'm alone. Other days I go to the office because I need to work hand to hand with another members of the team, or when we have meetings and we talk about common important issues.

J: What have you learned during this first years in the industry?

P: The most important thing I have learned, and perhaps the most obvious one, is teamwork. Working in a team is a technical challenge, but it also demands from you to have a high degree of empathy towards others. In the end we all are here to make great games that can allow us to earn enough money to make a living out of it. If someday we get rich it would be great, but that is not the main goal here.

J: Can you tell us some details about the complexity in the programming when you are working in a team?

P: I try to put special attention in creating a code that will be as clear as possible for others to understand. Also, as our projects are more directed by the artistic and design aspect than the purely technical aspect, we try to make tools for the designers and artists to use during the development. In this way we put a lot of effort in creating those tools, but it pays off, since they don't need any technical knowledge and can start doing their job faster.

J: I would like to know what are the things you like the most about the other members of the team.

P: Aniol is a very straightforward guy. When he says things to others he goes right to the point, that's something good because he know what he wants to say. Also he is a great programmer.

Kevin has a lot of good ideas, he is always thinking about new ways to improve our games design, and also how to make our life easier by writing a lot of useful documentation. In addition, he is always supervising our progresses to see if we are doing things as he tought they should in accordance with the design document.

Lourdes helps us to focus, and he is always attentive to how we organize things, when something is not working well she is the first who goes out and try to put some order acting as a mediator.

Marcos is a really good programmer, he has adapted really fast to the rhythm of the rest of team. Is very active and interested in how to learn more and more things about programming in general, and to improve our project in particular.

Jordi is really talented, and he's working very hard in Megamagic character designs. He complements Lourdes' work perfectly.

Jesús is a very motivated and passionated guy, he wants to learn a lot and always he's proposing changes and improvements to our team.

J: What would be a good and a bad attribute of yourself?

P: A remarkable flaw of mine is that I use to feel really bad and frustrated when things don't come out as I expected. And a virtue is that I'm quite calm, very much able to think everything in order to find the best solution, also I use to inspire this calmness in the people around me when problems emerge.

J: And finally, what can you tell us about Megamagic?

P: I have to say I love the project, perhaps it's a bit ambitious for our small team, but we are all more experienced than when we started and also love challenges. The characters are looking great, very emphatic, and about the gameplay, I believe all the fans of the RPG and strategy genres will thoroughly enjoy it. I'm looking forward to see how it evolves and what people thinks about it.

You can get in touch with Pol on Twitter, he is @daiflys

Other interviews:
-Aniol Alcaraz (Producer and programmer).

PAD: Professional Associated Developers.

This week we attended the presentation of the Professional Associated Developers association in Barcelona. PAD is a non lucrative, open, active, inclusive, horizontal and transparent organization with the goal of fulfilling the real needs of the independent (indie) video game developer. Its goals are:

Promote the cooperation between companies.
Promote the video game industry and associates by participating in international events.
Organize a Developers Congress Bridge between media and associates.
Help associates find quality counsel in business management.
Establish cooperation agreements with organizations from other sectors, public and private organizations, universities and other specialized educational centres.

BeautiFun Games is one of the 40 founding partners, we believe that PAD will definitely improve our relationships with the institutions and also help us to strengthen and be closer to the Spanish indie scene.

Vía @BeautiFunGames

Serena released for free on Steam.

Serena is an adventure game that Senscape released with the help of other 40 collaborators for free.

How long has it been? A man sits in a distant getaway cabin waiting for his wife Serena. Where is she? Things in the cabin evoke memories, and the husband comes to a disturbing realization...

This short point-and-click adventure is the result of a massive collaborative effort between dozens of fans and designers of adventure games. Rallying to support the venerable genre and its passionate community, these developers have brought together a grim and highly detailed horror story in what is the largest, possibly even the first, game project of its kind. Talents include crew from renowned indie companies Senscape, CBE Software, Infamous Quests, Digital Media Workshop, Guys from Andromeda, and many more.

But Serena has a reason to exist, and it is basically something nobody ever did before. It is a game made to unite the community around adventure games genre.

Vía @JesusFabre

Some awesome film and music resources from the 80's.

Do you like the Eighties? here at BeautiFun we love everything related to pop-culture, comics, music, films from that era, so we couldn't do less than share with you this recent film project Marcos found on Kickstarter. It's called Kung Fury:

Thanks to this film we discovered its musician, Mitch Murder, a true wizard who captures the spirit of the 80s in their albums. Check out his site:

Do you want to know some more 80s music, also movies, radio, and artists in general? then here you have one of the ultimate resources online. Check out NewRetro Wave, updated with more and more content every month!

Vía @sueythelaw

SUPERHOT, a breath of fresh air into FPS mechanics.

This pasts week we have been talking about this game, SUPERHOT was born out of the 7DFPS movement, where a nice bunch of developers met to create FPS games that innovated in some aspect (gameplay, aesthetics). What could happen if we took a regular FPS, but tuned it to make the time to progress in the same measure our character moves?

This conversation came to the table because our friend Jordi, from Deconstructeam, invited Kevin to participate on this interesting discussion about game design, check it out but remember its in Spanish!

Vía @JesusFabre

The Floor is Jelly is out!

Our friend Ramón Nafria announced this week on Videoshock that this funny and curious indie platformer is out, check out the trailer:

We haven't tried it yet, but at least after reading the description on their site, it seems promising:

Who hasn't dreamt, at some point, of filling a pool full of jello and swimming in it? In some of us, that dream never died. Some of us kept dreaming: what if the whole street was jello? Or the continent? The world!? The Floor is Jelly posits a universe made of jello, made purely for one's own amusement. No longer need we look to our walls and our floors and sigh, "How solid! How sadly immalleable! How I wish for a world consisting only of Non-Newtonian fluids!" That world has arrived, via the dark magic of videogames, as The Floor is Jelly.

Vía @Naeval

Here you can check out our previous issue of BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries.

This week we start our interview to Lourdes Nicolich, artist and co-founder of our studio. In this first part you will know more about her gaming background. Her life with games is really intense and she also has a great memory, so be prepared for a travel back in time!

Lourdes: Almost could say I literally was born surrounded by video games. My parents loved them since the very beginning, even before they married they were absolutely fascinated with the first arcade machines. So before I was born they already had played Pong and Space Invaders arcades, then bought a Coleco-Vision!

As I was growing up I found out they had bought an Amiga and an arcade cabinet. My father installed some kind of connectors on it that allowed me to play Amiga games like if it was an arcade. I remember it was on that Amiga computer and with those arcade joysticks where I beated the first Prince of Persia!

We also had an MSX that worked with a cassette tape. Each game we wanted to play on it took a really long time to load! Many times the game would hang during the process, so my father, with infinite patience, had to use a screwdriver to try to re-adjust the cassette and plug it again.

Something curious I strongly remember is each and every title screen from each of the games we played at the time. Since I was a small kid, I unconsciously received the influence of my mother's passion for crafts and drawing. Always got astonished looking at those pixel art screens, they made my imagination ran free! One of the most memorable title screens for me was the one from Mad Mix Game, a Spanish game inspired by Pac Man. In that cover it seemed like the character was getting its own life and he wanted to jump out of the screen.

Another games I fondly hark back to are:

Mickey's Runaway Zoo, an educational game I played while riding a train.

Rodland, a beat'em up I played along with my sister. Remember we crafted really cool cooperative strategies to kill all the enemies around, and we finally beated the game, it was quite hard, especially because we couldn't save our progress and, once we died, we had to restart everything again from the very beginning.

Cannot forget to mention Silk Worm, a side-scroller shooter starred by a heavy armed Jeep and a helicopter were my mother and I spent countless hours playing co-op mode, obsessed with the idea of getting further and futher without being killed.

I was fascinated with Flashback, especially watching its introductory sequences. It was awe-inspiring to see how with so few polygons the game could transmit you a lot of feelings.

Jesús: So your family was a key factor in your gaming life. Could you explain a bit more about your gaming habits with them?

L: Yes, I used to play a lot with my parents back then, and I still do it nowadays when I visit them. My father was the one who started this hobby for video games and then my mother got really passionated too. My father loves pinball games and also plays FIFA from now and then. Lately he is pouring many hours into GTA Online with my sister and her boyfriend when they all come out of work. My mother loves platformers like Mario, puzzle games, and adventure titles like Zelda.

J: I see you love Mario games, I would like to know your opinion about how well Mario has aged since the first game came out.

L: I think they have kept the essence of what makes Mario an excellent platformer. And at the same time they have innovated in their playability. For example Mario Galaxy produced me a really exciting vertigo feeling. I also enjoy a lot when we play four people at the same time in any of the last Mario games (New Super Mario Bros Wii and the likes).

J: Here I asked Lourdes if she had tried that Nintendo Land mini-game called Luigi's Ghost Mansion with her family and friends. I had played it and really think it was bringing something new to the typical multiplayer gaming experience with the usage of the Wii U GamePad controller.

L: That kind of gameplay is not so innovative, it looks really similar to what had been implemented for Pac-Man Vs., a mini-game launched in 2003 that was included as part of Namco's R: Racing Evolution. Three players were controlling ghosts, that could only view a limited part of the map, and the fourth player was Pac-Man, that was controlled using the Game Boy Advance handheld. Pac-Man's goal is the classic one, to eat all the pills and also defeat ghosts on its way before he could be captured.

So there was a clear similarity between both games, and that's not something that should surprise us, since the game designer was nothing less than Shigeru Miyamoto himself!

J: I see you mainly played consoles during the last 20 years, can you tell me about the story of the different consoles you had?

L: Yes, the Amiga, as happened with all the other 16 bit computers, was dethroned by the PCs and my father was looking for the next big thing to give us for Christmas, it had to be something we could all play in the living room. He researched a bit and finally bought a Super Nintendo, he liked the graphics and the kind of games it offered at the time (1992).

Then we started renting Super Nintendo games, one each week, on a constant basis. So we easily ended making a great friendship with the owners of our closest video club, a couple around the same age of my parents that didn't take too long in adding us to their VIP clients list. That privilege allowed one day to be one of the first to try Donkey Kong Country, a game that my father was curious about after reading some magazine reports. He sent me to rent the game and as soon as I came back home I started playing, and couldn't stop! My father came back from work and when he saw the game he was astonished, petrified. He saw the whole evolution of videogames, and he couldn't believe that the Super Nintendo was able to handle those character animations, beautiful and detailed scenarios, that music, the smooth and responsive control... that was an instant buy for him (and me too).

Another really curious anecdote happened the day my father connected the console to our Hi-Fi system and started recording the game music. He asked me to play some games without being killed (so we had no FX in the audio), so he could record the music of each level to listen to it at anytime. We loved to listening to that music during travels or simply at home. That also created a great culture of listening to game scores in all the family. For example, recently I enjoyed very much the Castlevania: Lords of Shadows soundtrack.

As my father started collecting computers and consoles at a very young age, I was really lucky to be able to play pretty most of the systems available. We didn't buy all the consoles at launch, only the ones we really loved. We have been adquiring most of consoles followed by the one that offered the best games and stories. Since we got a Super Nintendo we were big fans of most of Nintendo titles, but also appreciate SEGA systems, games like Sonic or Ecco the Dolphin justify the purchase of a Megadrive or a Dreamcast.

J: Can you mention some games from the 90s that left you a strong mark?

L: From Nintendo 64 era I adore The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the story, the world, the depth in the gameplay, that beautiful music, it got me hooked. The game was full of surprises and mysteries, the hidden magic caves, the fairies... Was fascinated with the owl that magically teleported you to other areas of the game, Zora and the whale, the part when you meet Epona, the game is full of memorable details that really make up a superb experience.

Tomb Raider is another saga that I won't forget. I loved how Lara was depicted in the game, she was a mixture between an explorer and a warrior, and the game had also some sci-fi / mystic elements that fascinated me. Totally loved the challenges and puzzle resolutions Tomb Raider games always presented.

J: And during the last decade, which games have been the most significative for you?

L: I have been impressed by a few games to say the truth. First one would be Bioshock, where I loved that discovery feeling of exploring strange old worlds, the powers of plasmids was kind of magic and fascinating, a story that unraveled progressively. I was a bit afraid during the last part of the game, but my sister took control and she beated the game while I was watching and encouraging her. Something similar happened with the first Dead Space, but I also loved it!

Also, I cannot forget to mention the last two Rayman titles. Now I'm playing them both, when I get tired of Rayman Origins on the Wii I alternate with Rayman Legends on the PS3. The previous Rayman games (Rayman 1, 2 and 3, etc) were more adventure-oriented around a story (something like Zelda), and the last ones are more focused on pure old-school platformers, quite challenging and filled with tons of crazy fun!

J: As a player, how do you see the evolution of videogames and the state of the industry nowadays?

L: I have to admit I'm tired of those AAA games that aim to imitate films, to be more and more realistic while repeating the old gameplay formulas we all know.

But we still have some classic sagas like Mario, Rayman or Donkey Kong that, while keeping the same characters and mechanics, they are somehow fresh and still have the original high quality production values that made them so successful.

Now with us, the indies, things are really more diverse. Recently Jordi recommended me to play Deponia, Aniol told me about how cool Fez was. So I have to try them out! I'm used to play together with friends and family in the living room, so PC gaming is a bit of a problem for me. But somehow I will connect the PC to my TV, plug a controller and dedicate a good time to dive into the vast indie game catalog available.

Continues soon in Part II.

You can get in touch with Lourdes on Twitter, she is @llEvadne

Other interviews:

Aniol Alcaraz (Producer and programmer)

Pol Urós (Programmer)

Some of the most noteworthy topics we recently discovered.

Nihilumbra will be at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

We are happy to announce that Nihilumbra will be exhibited at the MWC 2014 held in Barcelona from 24th to 27th of February. We are one of the companies part of the Entrepreneurs and Professional Apps Developers Association from Catalonia (ACA / Catalunya Apps), so every visitor will be able to play it at ACA's stand. Feel welcome to pass by and check out our game!

Via @AniolAlcaraz

Mushroom 11 is more than a post-apocalyptic physics-based puzzle game.

Mushroom 11 is a very particular puzzle game that started its development at Global Game Jam 2012. That edition had Ouroboros as a theme, so Itay Keren came up with a heavy-physics based puzzle game. Mushroom 11 features a blob that can grow, but it keps its amount of mass constant when it has reactions with other materials and substances. The player has the hability to shape and split/joint parts of the blob and cut it into different parts to get over the challenges each level presents.

Fortunately, the game has been funded by Indie-Fund, here you can check out Jonathan Blow showcasing the title, that also is nominated to this year's IGF in the "Excellence in Design" category:

I recommend you to check out this interesting feature on Mushroom 11 and its developer we found at Gamasutra.

Via @JesusFabre

Paradise Lost: First Contact.

"In a remote desert, an unidentified object falls from the skies. A research organization known as G.E.R. has tracked and found the mysterious meteor: a capsule of organic material that brings an unknown life-form to our planet from the depths of space. Here begins the story of this impossible being, as it attempts to escape and survive on this strange, hostile world that we call home."

A brilliant presentation with superb pixel art works, a unique story that stepped us into the shoes of an alien plant being hunted by humans and a hollywood-style soundtrack. Paradise Lost took everybody by surprise, and in our case that surprise was even bigger when we discovered they were Spanish. Recently Suey and Aniol attended to a great talk by Enol Martínez, Asthree's pixel artist and animator, where he gave some really useful advices to other developers about how to manage a Kickstarter campaign. From BeautiFun Games we want to recommend you to follow Asthree's work, we are sure Paradise Lost: First Contact is going to be a great game, not only because the videos showed a good amount of innovative and fun ideas about its gameplay, also because Asthree team behind it are taking the project as a real labour of love.

Via @BeautiFunGames

Action Henk, fresh old school platforming from The Netherlands.

Action Henk by the Dutch indie studio Ragesquid is another recent discovery, I came to know about it when after reading a recommendation from Vlambeer's Rami Ismail on Twitter. The trailer you see below caught my eye, so decided to try out the build available online. The game made me remember some great moments from the nineties, it could have been a SEGA arcade game at the time. About the gameplay, it is a blend of games like Sonic, Motocross Maniacs, and Unirally, I think a competitive split-screen mode will add lots of fun, totally recommendable.

"Action Henk is a speed-running momentum platformer, played in a nostalgic toy world. Action Henk’s core gameplay is platforming as fast as you can. Run, Jump & Slide in this 2.5D platformer and reach the finish as fast as possible. The challenge is all about managing your momentum, acceleration and friction while racing through the levels. The goal for the player is provided in the form racing against pre-recorded replays that determine the time needed to reach medals for every level."

Via @JesusFabre

When you play piano and Tekken Tag Tournament 2 at the same time.

We have seen very curious ways to pay homage to videogames, being cosplay one of the most famous ones. Video-clips with images taken from videogames or even hardware hacks that transform console into portable machines, but recently we discovered something different, a guy who plays piano and at the same time fights his opponents in Tekken Tag Tournament 2:

The TekkenPiano from Mc Cool on Vimeo.

Vía @truguers

Here you can check out our previous issue of BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries.

Galactic Princess: Lead your crew to the glory in this strategic survival set in Space.

You may already know Cecly as the developer of the original runner Too Many Me. A few days ago they launched their next project Galactic Princess on Kickstarter.

In this adventure you play as the captain of a smuggler spaceship who has to find a lost princess in order to restore the peace and rule in the universe. Train your crew, design and improve your crew, elaborate your strategy to fight other ships and find valuable resources. The game looks really promising, it is also asking for your support on Greenlight, here you have the trailer:

Via @Sueythelaw

Idle Thumbs, an insightful show about the game industry.

Idle Thumbs is a video game podcast made by game developers who work or are working on studios like Telltale Games, The Fullbright Company or Double Fine. The approach is very honest and analytic at the same time, also with a relaxing atmosphere and nice bits of humour. I find it quite worth to listen. Also take a look at Tone Control, a series of conversations with game developers hosted by Steve Gaynor.

Via @JesusFabre

Outerra: The seamless planet rendering engine.

Is incredible what this still in development engine can do:

3D planetary engine for seamless planet rendering from space down to the surface. Can use arbitrary resolution of elevation data, refining it to centimeter resolution using fractal algorithms.

Unlimited visibility, progressive download of data, procedural content generation.

Integrated vehicle and aircraft physics engines. Embedded web browser for web service integration and more.

Maybe you should check out the video below to convince yourself it is real, or even better, here you can download a demo that allows you to explore nothing less than a complete real scale planet Earth.

Via @truguers

Fac: Fru is probably one of the best gaming experiences made for Kinect.

During the past Global Game Jam thousands of games were developed following the theme "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are". Maybe one of the most clever games created was this prototype by Mattia Traverso and his team, you may better known Mattia from this game One and one Story, that was an IGF finalist in the student category in 2012. Take a look:

Via @JesusFabre

This is what we would call an impressive collection of Nintendo games and consoles.

No words can describe this amazing collection, only an image:

Via @AniolAlcaraz

Here you can check out our previous issue of BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries.

Link to Part I/II.

With videogames I discovered a new medium that was really special and thrilling, they let me choose my own path and take control of a character in amazing fantasy worlds! I started thinking about how much I would love to be able of creating those universes someday.

As I was telling you before, when I was between 8 and 10 years-old I played Super Nintendo games like Donkey Kong Country or Aladdin. Those, aside of being really funny, had a superb art that inspired my drawings a lot by the time. Also I loved drawing landscapes of the nature, I had to be good at it, since some schoolmates accused me of copying/cheating because they didn't believe I could be able to paint them all by myself.

So I continued painting by pure hobby and inspiration, all of this followed by passion of someday becoming a game artist. I learned some Corel Draw in my free time and wrote short fairytales, that I also illustrated. You may think I studied arts since very young, but I got a little bit misguided and did a human-sciences bachelor in high school. But afterwards I was quite strongly determined to go after my dream of being an artist and with a lot of effort I passed the entrance test for Fine Arts University.

What did you enjoy the most learning at the University?

I loved animation subject, the teacher was Josep María Blanco, a brilliant professional. Also natural drawing inspired by human models was something I deeply enjoyed. Thanks to graphic design I reinforced my critical sense about texts styles, paragraphs, etc. I also remember how much I critizised some games that didn't take care of those issues.

I see you are quite perfectionist and are rather curious personality, right?

Yeah, I think we all are quite perfectionists at BeatutiFun Games. As a proof, in Nihilumbra you can see the smooth and well-finished texts of the game, the typography is really carefully selected for each language. But I'm still learning to be satisfied with a certain degree of perfection, because all the extremes are bad.

And what happened after the university? Did you finally started make videogames?

Not really, its a bit weird because, in spite I focused on learning everything I thought could be useful to make games, but somehow lost track and I ended up working in the graphic design area for web, multimedia applications and advertising. After working during a stint on several companies, I was wondering what happened with my passion for doing art for videogames. And what a coincidence that one day I received a letter from the University where they informed about a videogame Masters Degree. That was a true temptation and the only thing that kept me back from signing up was the really high price. But my parents ended up convincing me, they told me that it could be paid in installments and, combining their help with some money that I earned working, we managed to pay it; so there I went, learning how to do art for videogames!

How was your experience with the Video-game Masters Degree?

I started the course thinking absolutely in positive, trying to learn as much as possible, especially about the technical side of how video games were made, that was amazing for me. And also the technological side was my weakest point in my curriculum after I did my Fine Arts studies. Also I enjoyed very much attending conferences by industry professionals who came around to share their experience with us. There I had also the chance to meet great people, with the same tastes than me, and as a consequence of this, some of us ended up founding BeautiFun Games.

What can you tell us about the game you developed at the Master, "Once Upon a Night"?

It was a game we based on experimentation, trying out different ideas each member of the group had. The game aesthetics were very important, since we had two worlds, the dreamy and the nightmarish, it was a challenge to keep the art of each world different and related at the same time. I got the idea of how to change the appearance of the environment from dreamy to nightmarish and vice-versa from watching a seaweed that reacted by hiding when it was touched. The programmers played with the shaders to try to change the textures progressively and in a stylized way. It was quite a complex project for beginners like us, when we tought a problem/bug was solved, another issue emerged somewhere else. Also I found fascinating how things were done internally in our game, we learned a lot from other commercial games and how they solved those problems. As an example, I remember we studied Alan Wake and how it used the flashlight in each position and situation, and also how commercial games tried to avoid or dissimulate tiling.

How did you met the different components of BeautiFun Games?

I met Aniol because we shared the same passion about game development process. We were both curious about all the aspects needed, since our goal was to be able to make a complete game. In fact I was the first person who encouraged Aniol it would be a great idea to create a videogame company, he liked it and after the Masters Degree he surprised everyone from our group with the company creation purposal, and finally here we are!

What were the key factors for defining the artistic aspect of Nihilumbra?

I clearly remember when Kevin and Aniol came one day with several game ideas, and then Kevin explained the idea of Nihilumbra. I started to imagine many things about how that world would be, the amazing journey the player would live. He had the monsters design very clear in his mind and I quickly shaped in my mind the main aspect for the landscapes. The world Kevin had in mind at the beginning was designed to emphasize the use of the paintings, so it lacked colors, the characters were silhouettes, quite Limbo-esque. But I thought that the player should be able to feel the inmensity of the world like Born feels it, and also perceive colors, at least a bit, in some way, so I suggested the usage of expressiveness and plasticity of painting to illustrate the scenarios. Born is a character that begins his existence at the beginning of the game. He is not capable of fully understanding the world that surrounds him. He’s especially fascinated with the colors that he finds, but he can’t really assimilate them properly, like he was colorblind. I thought that we could represent that giving the colors a special importance in the backgrounds while keeping them desaturated, so every world Born visits is somehow pervaded with the predominant color of that world (blue with frozen cliffs, green with the living forest, etc). I took Kevin’s initial idea and developed it so the art fitted with Born, the story and the atmosphere. In the following images you can see a few concept arts Kevin showed to the team to start thinking about how the game should look like.

Are you especially proud of something in particular in the artistic aspect of the game?

I loved that I didn't need to change a lot of things we did on the original Photoshop concepts to what was finally included in the final game (textures, etc). This is something I really appreciate and I thank our dear programmers because they did a great effort to make it possible.

And now we are finishing the interview, can you tell me a good quality of each member of the team, and a good and a bad quality of yourself?

Aniol is very analitic and persevering, loves to look at things from every possible aspect.

Pol is a really patient guy, I remember that I loved the particle, weather and special effects he did at Nihilumbra. He is also good at estimating the time that a technical task will take.

Kevin is always in the journey of self-improvement, he plays tons of games to analyze them and try to learn from their good and bad design choices.

Suey is a really down to Earth guy and always loves to work the extra mile, improving the performance of the game code.

Jordi is a very passionate guy, super perfectionist and critic with his own work (also with others' work, but always auto-critic himself first). I like how he likes to learn new things by himself and love the day to day routine, when we share thoughts and cooperate the best we can.

Jesús is very perservering, love how he likes to learn from everything and also very good talking and getting to know people.

And about me, I can say some of my virtues are I'm persevering and also put tons of effort into making everything as perfect as possible. Those virtues can turn into weak points when they go too far, so I try to learn to say "stop improving something that's already very good", and also while most of the time I'm optimistic and cheerful, I have to control my bad-temper from time to time.

Thinking about the near future, what can you tell us about Megamagic?

Megamagic story is not as abstract and philosophical as Nihilumbra’s, also at an artistic level it presents a lot of new challenges. My work on the game is focused on environments and backgrounds, in this case the game is really happy and colourful. Conceptually I like how crazy it is, the mixture of very different cultural influences, films, cartoons, comics, etc. I really love the freedom I have to create things from my own imagination.

Link to Part I/II.

You can get in touch with Lourdes on Twitter, she is @llEvadne

Other interviews:

Aniol Alcaraz (Producer and programmer)

Pol Urós (Programmer)

Nihilumbra for Wii U official presentation in Madrid.
via @BeautiFunGames

Last Thursday Nintendo flew us to their Showroom in Madrid to present the upcoming version of Nihilumbra for Wii U. Kevin and Aniol introduced the game to many of journalists who were curious about the new features of this release and also the story of our studio. Aside of the technical improvements we added to the PC version, the game for Wii U will have two main new features:

An asymmetric 2-players cooperative mode.

Improved controls: The hybrid control mode (analog dpad with buttons and touchscreen). The Wii U GamePad makes this version the most complete to date.

Stay tuned, we will keep you informed about the release date of Nihilumbra for Wii U!

Another World: Rotoscoping & Interview Eric Chahi

via @JesusFabre

In this feature documentary Eric Chahi brings us back in time to the early 90's, when he created the classic Another World (one of the titles that inspired Nihilumbra). The piece is totally worth to see, especially if you are curious about the technical intricacies behind and the cultural influences present in the game.

The huge phenomenon behind Twitch plays Pokemon.

via @truguers

Around the 12th of February an anonymous Twitch user managed to stream the first generation Pokemon game on his Twitch TV channel. But for everyone's surprise, he wasn't the only one who could control the game, since he binded the controls to the stream common chat so anyone attending the stream could participate. Now is when things go crazy up to the point of having around 120.000 users playing the game at a given time (and at least 738.000 have played in total for now). The owner of the stream is moderating the game to avoid trolls, but in general it seems everything goes quite smooth and the community is very cooperative.

The game already generated several memes, like the Helix Fossil one. Due to having so many people trying to control the game, there was an specific item that was constantly kept vainly selected, the so called Helix Fossil. This constant action of consulting that precise item created a wide range of stories and jokes among the community, treating it like it was a holy deity, which the player uses for guidance. The community jokes that the true goal in the game switched to accomplish the usage of that Helix Fossil item in the proper place, that is to revive ancient fossil Pokemon Omanyte, once you get to Cinnabar Island.

Keep an eye on Hunting Anubis.
via @JesusFabre

Hunting Anubis is a single/multiplayer combat flight sim focusing on near future drone warfare. Currently in a free, open Beta period. Dogfight enemies fully autonomous or remotely manned in the endless fight for the skies of the 21st century.

Here you can download the beta for Windows, Mac or Linxu.

Credits:

Orihaus :: Design, Code, Modeling, Graphics, Enviroments.

Lhasa Mencur :: Music, Audio.

Aliceffekt :: Additional Modeling and Map Design.

Henk Boom and Renaud Bédard :: Waiting For Horus base Code.

A video with every NES game start screen in alphabetical order.

via @JesusFabre

Aside of the logical nostalgic feelings this video will arouse in many old-school gamers, I find really interesting to see how the games were presented twenty to thirty years ago: the music, the aesthetics (logo, colors, shapes, etc).

Here you can check out our previous issue of BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries.

Jordi Longueira is a passionate 26 years old artist, most of that time he has spent watching cartoons, reading comics, playing videogames, but above all, he has been drawing and constantly trying to improve his technique. Let's know more about his story.

Jordi: The first memory I have is from 1992, then I was 5 years-old and my father gave me a Nintendo NES. I remember exactly how some delivery guys came home, installed a 17inch TV and plugged a NES to it. In that moment I had no idea of what was that machine, I thought it was some sort of a VHS player, that device used some weird tapes. The first one I saw in movement was Super Mario Bros and my thought that it was a horrible cartoon... until they moved the character and it blew me away. I loved all kind of cartoons as a kid, and videogames were the most awesome extension of cartoons ever, those were ones you could manipulate at your will!

Jesús: So your father was curious about games and decided to buy a console overnight? Are games also a family hobby at home like happens in the case of Lourdes?

Unfortunately not, anyone in my family plays games,only my sister played a little when she was little,I was the one who got deeply hooked. After seeing I couldn't stop playing, I think my father repented of buy a NES console. My family is very traditional, my father has a restaurant and still works there during like 12 hours a day, my mother has been a housewife during all her life, but also helped my father at the restaurant. Both of my parents have no distractions or hobbies, they have seen videogames as a waste of time and toys for kids for a very long time.

Wow! So in your specific case, get to work on videogames within such a discouraging environment has been a big achievement.

I have to admit it wasn't anyway easy, my parents didn't appreciate my passion for videogames, cartoons, or drawing. They kept telling me this was useless, that no way I would make a living out of it. But didn't care about what they could say, in particular about drawing, I simply loved it and couldn't stop doing it. Was particularly obsessed with drawing, did that all day long, even at school, where several teachers sent letters to my parents complaining because I wasn't paying attention to their lessons.

Remember I spent the whole day sketching at school: He-Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Flinstones, Evangelion and many more. Drawed everything I watched in all the cartoon series, even at the same time they were moving on the screen! (sometimes I had no time to finish the sketch because the character -logically- moved, and was a bit frustrating). But I have to remark a cartoon series that captivated me, that would be Dragon Ball and Dr. Slump.

Why Dragon Ball and which of their characters did you like the most?

Dragon Ball and anime in general was a huge fenomenon for the kids in Catalonia in the 90s. As happened with Dr. Slump I loved that innocent humour of the first era when Goku is a kid, I even spent the few money my parents gave me in buying Dragon Ball comics, the white and red series.

For me the most charismatic character is Vegeta, also I love Majin Buu because of his excentric personality mixing extremely stupid humour in the middle of the more absolute chaos.

Can you tell us about where you were born and how was your education?

I was born in Terrasa, a city close to Barcelona, where I'm still living with my mother. I was to a very conservative school, where you had to talk to all the teachers like they were eminences. Drawing for me turned also into a way of showing my rebelliousness against that educational system. It may seem contradictory, but my most hated subject was Plastic and Visual Arts, I had to deal with geometry or geography but never had to draw anything! The most useful thing I take from that time at school were the many Dragon Ball drawings I sold to classmates. And with that money I could rent my favourite games!

Which games did you enjoy the most during your childhood and adolescence?

I'm a big Nintendo fan, maybe its all due to being NES the first platform I played on. Since then I purchased all their systems. So being such a big fan of the big N is very much caused by Super Mario Bros, that was the first game I ever played and the one that would end up hooking me to the medium forever. The game was hard for that time and for my age (5 years old), but instead of discouraging me when I got killed, it managed to animate me and keep trying and trying.

In the NES I also discovered the first Zelda game, that was even tougher than Mario! I was lost all the time, with no idea of what to do or where to go, until ten years later I ended up beating it (without using any guide!). Nowadays I can proudly say I beat all the Zelda titles developed by Nintendo except the ones for DS, simply because I cannot stand the touch controls.

I loved two player cooperative games because I played them with my sister. In the NES era I cannot forget to mention Chip'n Dale: Rescue Rangers. And for SNES I very much enjoyed Donkey Kong Country, that cooperative mode and pre-rendered graphics impacted me like nothing else I ever saw before. Also the second part was devilishly hard!

If Mario made me love videogames as a gamer, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was the title that made me dream with the possibility of one day becoming a game developer. It had really epic and memorable moments, characters that you took very fond and a dark atmosphere without needing to use blood or gratuitous violence. Ocarina of Time is, without a doubt, my favourite game since then.

I also had a Playstation One, where I played the sublime Final Fantasy IX. The seventh installment of the series was great, but I liked this one much more. I loved its ambience that took back to the origins of the saga and some of its characters (specially Vivi and Steiner) are the best I have ever seen in the saga in regards to design and history. The only complaint I have about the whole game is the final part, I wasn't satisfied with it since it went too far from what the initial story purposed.

The last game I will remark is Pokemon Blue Version, it had a huge amount of creatures to capture and train, attacks, evolutions...I never learned the names and dates at my History classes but I managed to learn the 251 Pokemons with their level evolutions. Also, spent countless hours with my link cable, exchanging creatures with my classmates.

Other interviews:

Aniol Alcaraz (Producer and programmer)

Lourdes Nicolich (Artist)

Events and more events!

via @BeautiFunGames

This past week was full of events here in Barcelona! Monday and Tuesday Kevin attended to the Mobile World Congress 2014. Besides Kevin on Wednesday, Lourdes and Jordi went also to Digital 4C and in particular #BreakfastClub on Thursday, two events focused on networking among Catalan digital artists and promoting their work. Finally on Friday, Kevin savored a homemade burger at our last Indie Burger Developer meeting!

Help Clarence with his most important date ever.
via @BeautiFunGames

Clarence Big Chance is a flash game about a guy called Clarence who has the chance to date the girl of his dreams. There's only one problem! He is really bad at seducing women, during the adventure you have to prepare him for the date. Depending on how good he does there are a number of different endings awaiting. Someone in BeautiFun has managed to unlock all of them, including the one you get for arriving to the date completely naked. Better luck next time Clarence!

Red Goddess: Support this Spanish gorgeous looking project.
via @JesusFabre

Red Goddesss is an action/adventure game with a very special "Spit character" and "Possession" gameplays. The main goal of the game is to help Divine, the Red Goddess, to recover the power he lost due to lack of memory. So the player will have to use two types of emotions, rage and fear, to interact with the planet and recover parts of the memory of Divine. Would be great if the guys behind the game, Yanim studio would offer a demo to help people to have an idea of how the game feels. Anyways, looking at the art and animations all we can do is congratulate them for such a beautiful and promising work.

You can support the project on Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight.

Gunscape: FPS Construction Kit
via @JesusFabre

Gunscape is basically what we could call an FPS editor made out of parts taken from many other FPS styles, no matter how old they are. You will get your hands at a very complete construction kit, that will allow you to create potentially infinite levels with their enemies, items, weapons, etc. Those levels can be played in single-player or multi-player mode (co-op and all vs. all). The game looks fun and promising, especially if you are a fan of FPS and love building/crafting games like Minecraft.

Gunscape demo/pre-alpha is available here. You can contribute funding the game on Kickstarter.

ArnoldC. A programming language with the sentences from all the mytical characters played by Arnold Schwartzenegger.
via @JesusFabre

Yes, we are not kidding, this is absolutely real. You can find the code and sintaxis here.

"Although the one-liners of Arnold Schwarzenegger are fairly well known the true semantics of the uttering is yet to be understood. This project tries to discover new meanings from the Arnold movies with the means of computer science."

Here you can check out our previous issue of BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries.

Jesús: When you were in school, did you had a group of friends who also loved drawing in your class or were you the only one?

Jordi: Back then, there was a girl in class who also drew quite well, but I didn't have much contact with her. None of my close friends drew, so for me it was not simply a hobby, but an obsession. To help you make an idea, when I wasn't drawing, I was thinking about it all day long, that's how I improved my skills, drawing until exhaustion. Everything I saw on TV and games was something I wanted to re-create or create my own versions of.

I feel great now I'm working on games, it's the most interesting industry for me at the moment, but ultimately what I want to do is drawing, whether it will be for games, comics, books, or cartoon animations. The idea of working in the comic industry is something that stands out to me quite a bit, but here in Spain that's almost impossible. Most of the comic authors are working for big foreign companies.

And how was your education? Did you had the chance to train your drawing skills?

All my education until secondary has been particularly troublesome, and that was because I couldn't concentrate during class on the subjects I didn't like. Albeit I've always been good at memorizing stuff, was simply impossible to pay attention to things I didn't enjoy, so all my life I've had troubles with teachers, who lowered my qualifications due to my lack of attention in class. That made me focus more and more in what I truly liked, drawing, as it was like my emotional shelter. I relaxed the drawing rhythm a bit at fifteen (didn't take it too seriously) and started to go out with my friends more often. But not so long after that, I had to decide what I was going to do after high school, so inevitably went back (and very seriously) to drawing, because there was nothing else that motivated me nearly as much. I wanted to learn anatomy, perspective, and the other fundamentals of drawing.

And which resources did you use to start your education in drawing?

I began reading a series of books I found in kiosks called "How to draw Manga". Sorry, but cannot recommend those books to anyone, they explain the first steps but not much more, their quality was quite poor. Also talked to some people who was doing bachelor of fine arts, most of things they told me were about history and styles of painting, but sadly I found quite few stuff relative to drawing in the program. Then, what I finally did was applying to Escola Joso, a private drawing school here in Barcelona where I studied a four year degree in drawing. My parents payed me the studies, but in change I worked for him since age sixteen in his restaurant during weekends and holidays, for many years.

What can you tell me about Escola Joso?

Joso is a school very focused in teaching how to draw for comic, illustration and graphic design. To my joy there was few theoretical subjects like History of comic. All the teachers I found there have been or are working for important companies like Marvel or DC, for example, my first screenplay teacher was Pasqual Ferry, who drew Superman. That was the best learning environment for a sixteen year-old me, like a dream come true. My motivation jumped sky-high, even after I arrived there and received a lot of critics about my work. That was normal because before I always compared myself with people who didn't draw. So I took every feedback as a serious challenge and tried my best to refine my style. Then is when my great "not sleeping" era started. Every night I slept around 3-4 hours, but in change that resulted in a very significative improvement in my grades.

How did your style evolved over the years?

In spite I was never a hardcore fan of Japanese culture and Manga, when I entered Joso school I came from a world where that style, and in particular Dragon Ball, was mainly all I enjoyed drawing. But then I discovered many other styles and started to put more features to my style. Also I saw how in some Manga series the characters use to be very flat, all have the same nose, eyes and the only thing that's changing is the hair and colors. Since then, I learned how to give each character a very differentiated personality.

So you significantly changed your style? Was that an easy job?

One thing I've noticed is that most people think that drawing is like a divine gift. Everybody can learn to draw, you have to be persistent and insist a lot on perfectioning, put as much effort as possible on big structures as you put on the smallest details. You have to heavily document yourself for each character, its not the same to design an animal or a robot. Also in games there is another big missconception in some cases, when people say they want to work making games. That has nothing to do with playing them, I know people who love reading comics but don't like to draw them nearly as much.

Did you enjoy your time at Joso's?

I entered Joso because I wanted to make comics, but later on it lost the magic for me, it simply wasn't what I expected. Then I returned to do pixel art (during my adolescence I spent a lot of time learning pixel art and making games with RPG Maker) and many people told me my skills would be nice for games. That made me think it would be great to study a master in 3D modeling and animation. There I discovered how much I enjoyed character modeling, because it followed quite an artisanal process, so similar to drawing. I did all the possible extra works I could to basically learn as much as I could. Then I went out of the school and started doing some freelance works at the same time I kept working with my father at the restaurant.

How was your professional experience until you entered to work at BeautiFun Games?

Basically until I came here I had been only freelancing from now and then, been working at the restaurant for around 7 or 8 years was my most extensive working experience. I did freelance works of illustration ,graphic design and organized a couple of drawing workshops. I was also doing my own webcomic about a story that I started when I was in High School (had around 14 or 15 years old). The tone started as an adventure but then it turned more into humor. Talks about two explorers who travel through the world searching treasures in abandoned temples, caves and all kind of dangerous places. I don't want to please people with it, my one and only goal is to create something I like: silly humor, references to cartoons and movies from the 80s and 90s (Back to the Future, Goonies, etc). Yes, you guessed, the webcomic was a way to escape from a bad period of my life.

What's your biggest motivation at work?

The fact that I'm challenging myself is perhaps the most important thing. Maybe its because I often say to myself "I cannot accomplish this or that", and in consequence there is another voice wanting to defy that negative vibe. Then when I achieve this I talk again to myself with something like "see? I made it!"... hehe, I know it may sound a bit crazy, but having those dialogues with myself works quite well for me and keeps me in balance with my drawing-addiction. In life I have to eat, drink, sleep, breath... and draw.

About, the process of searching and getting the job, was it hard?

It was hard to get the job at the studio, I had to pass a test and a job interview. In spite of doing my best, never imagined I could be the one chosen at the end. Once I started the work noticed how everybody was really engaged and passionated about the game we are making. Also I couldn't avoid to get nervous during the first days, it was my first job in the industry and wanted to do my best.

What is you working routine now at Megamagic? What do you like the most about your work?

Normally Kevin approaches me with the game story and explains me how he imagines a certain character I have to draw. Then we both try to find the best design for it. I also try to collaborate with Lourdes, who is more focused on the backgrounds. My favourite part of Megamagic is the broad variety of characters, environments and situation the player gets to experience. You see the protagonist, his ally, the bad guy, each of them are so different in the design and also in their personalities, reactions etc. Also the game is crazy, I feel very happy to work in this project because its making me to train my versatility by drawing so many different things.

Can you tell me some good and bad points in yourself?

I'm proud of, albeit having tons of work ahead, being able to manage having everything done on time. I would say I'm highly compromised to have my work done on time.

Is hard to assimilate critics when you see things are greatly done your way, but many times you have to learn to concede and accept it, swallowing your pride. Learn to work in team is a must in this industry.

Lastly, can you remark a good quality in each of the members of the team?

Aniol is extremely perfectionist. That's good and bad at the same time, but I think is especially good when you are making games, since they are very complex technically. He strives a lot on everything he does.Also is the biggest Nihilumbra fan... He holds the world record for beating the game more number of times!

Kevin has very clear ideas of what he wants to be done in the game and also he knows how to convince you to think his opinions are the best. He plays tons of games and looks for the best way to improve his designs.

Lourdes has a tight control on her work, is very perfectionist, devoting 100% of her attention to every single thing she works on, cannot forget to say she also takes care of us a lot and has an infinite patience with me.

Suey is the law. He's a guy with awesome work ethics, loves his work and is always learning something new to improve what he does.

Jesús, aside of working hard, you are also very attentive to what's going on in the industry, keeping us informed and spreading the word out about the studio to the press and the community.

If you want to check out more works by Jordi, here is his Devianart page.

Link to Part I/II.

You can get in touch with Jordi on Twitter, he is @JordiLongueira

Interview done by our Community Manager /PR @JesusFabre

Other interviews:

Aniol Alcaraz (Producer and programmer)

Pol Urós (Programmer)

Lourdes Nicolich (Artist)

Game Developers Conference, there we go!

We are charging our batteries for next week, preparing everything for the trip Kevin and Suey will do to San Francisco. For the first time in its short history, BeautiFun Games will attend GDC! Our main goal will be showcasing Nihilumbra for Wii U and meet tons of nice people there! We have been invited by Nintendo since Nihilumbra is one of the first titles made with Wii U to release on the system. You will be able to find us in the Nintendo booth under this schedule, we want to hear your feedback playing Nihilumbra for Wii U:

Wednesday, 19th: From 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.

Thursday, 20th: From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

*If you cannot make it to meet us at this schedule, be aware that our guys will wear a Nihilumbra T-shirt during the event, so feel free to stop them and say hi if you see them.

Also there is a surprise for everyone who is reading this, comes to GDC and find us! as you know we have been working on our next game Megamagic for around a year and haven't publicly showed anything sustantial yet. Turns out that we will carry with us some materials from the game that has never seen the light out of the studio. So if you want to be one of the first in seeing more about our next game, you only have to find us and tell this passphrase: "It's a kind of Magic", and many secret stuff about Megamagic will be privately revealed to you!

Awesome decoration from the 80's landed into our office.

via @truguers

Yesterday, Kevin came with these VHS tapes from his childhood called Visionaries. For some weird reason we felt it was the right thing to keep them at our office for some time. They are a great source of good vibrations from the past and here with us are in good company!

"It is a time when Magic is more powerful than Science, and only those who control the Magic, control destiny. They are the Visionairies."

"Visionairies, Knights of the Magical Light, Visionairies, with Magical Powers they fight. Powers of mind, strength, skill, 'n' speed. Powers to accomplish the greatest of deeds. Visionairies, Knights of the Magical Light."

For those of you who don't know, here is a brief introduction to the series taken from Wikipedia:

"Visionaries' story is set on the planet Prysmos, an advanced society where all electronics had failed and the people were forced to rely on the old magics. The Visionaries consist of two groups of knights — the Spectral Knights and the Darkling Lords. They are both called to for a competition by the wizard Merklynn. After surviving traps, dangerous creatures, and each other, the survivors on both sides are rewarded. Everyone of them is given a different animal totem which appears on the front of their armor, which they can turn into. The animals are selected by Merklynn based on their personalities..."

Did you know about David Rapoza?

via @JesusFabre

Following with cartoon series from the 80's I want to introduce here David Rapoza, an american young artist who I recently discovered. His works focus on videogames, comics, and much more. In the following lines I want to remark a few artworks with hyper-realistic versions of characters from Thundercats, TMNT and He-Man. Simply brilliant.

Find more on Dave Rapoza's Deviantart page.

Heart & Slash in the pursuing of the extra mile.

via @BeautiFunGames

We want to congratulate our fellow countryman Juan Raigada and its team for their great work on Heart & Slash. The game got fully funded this past Friday, 7th of March. Now they aim to reach their first stretch goal at $25K. We really hope this roguelike / 3D brawler will get as much support as possible, these people are very talented! Remember they have an alpha version available for download.

Retro Game Crunch is out for your enjoyment!

via @JesusFabre

In November 2012 three guys (Rusty Moyher, Shaun Inman and Matt Grimm) embarked on an adventure consisting of creating six games in six months and actively listening to the feedback of their community, who was following the development process:

After all this time of hard development work, they have come up with this package of games that is completely worth to check out! Also the compilation is on Steam Greenlight, so give them a vote if you like what you see in the video below.

Here you can check out our previous issue of BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries.

This week we start our interview with Marcos Sueiro, 25 year-old programmer, music and sports lover. But above all, a passionate game developer who is everyday trying to improve his skills as much as he can. In this first part of the interview you will discover about Marcos favourite games and next week we will cover his short but intense career in the video games and IT industry.

Jesús: Where did you grow up and how you got introduced to video games?

Marcos: I was raised in a mid-class neighborhood at Cerdanyola del Vallès, a small city near Barcelona where I still live with my girlfriend. When I was a small kid I always wanted to have a video game console, but there was no way to convince my parents. Until one time we went to visit my uncle, who lives in Madrid, and was really into games. He had a Super Nintendo with Street Fighter, also took me to visit the arcades for the first time, my life was not the same after that trip.

My uncle was the person who got me hooked, and when I got back home I didn't stop insisting my parents until they bought me a console. It was the SEGA Mega Drive (Genesis), I was barely 8 years old but I knew the cartdridges were notably cheaper than SNES ones. The console came with a pack of four games, Sonic, Golden Axe, Streets of Rage and Revenge of Shinobi. Shinobi was the first game that really got me playing for endless hours, the game demaned all my attention, the music had lots of energy. There was a time when I couldn't go out for a long time, so when I came back I played, also when there was bad weather. My mother always says I wear glasses due to that game.

By your words I understand that games weren't so much of their interest, but have your parents ever tried any of them?

My mother has never played a video game and I think that was one of the main reasons why she critizised them so much back then. My father played a few games when the first Playstation came out, mainly racing games like Colin Mc Rae Rally, but in general games were seen as a waste of time at home back then. In the last years, after they saw me studying how hard it is to create them (buying and reading many books about it, etc), they have started to respect them much more. Even my mother is now playing games like Plants vs Zombies or Cut the Rope on her Android tablet.

What did you play with before having your first video game console?

I could say my childhood can easily summarize when I see the park in front of my flat and my school, which was a couple of blocks away from home. I played football with some friends in a small street next home, when I got the console we alternated playing videogames while eating sunflower seeds. It was also very common for us to watch cartoon series as Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, Conan the Barbarian, Captain Planet and the Planeteers, King Arthur and the Knights of Justice, Dragon Ball or Digimon.

And which one of that series marked you the most?

It would be hard to decide among Dragon Ball and Digimon, I loved both. Remember I watched them when I arrived home for lunch during the mid-day and then I headed to school early only to have thirty minutes the daily episode with some friends. I clearly remember the neverending fightings in Dragon Ball, was very curious in the series of that time to see how time passed by really slow. I think in that was improved in the series made during the nineties since they handled that issue much better, but on the other hand, I don't know why I remember the characters of those more primitive series as more charismatic.

Lets talk about your gaming habits in your first years. Did you enjoy more playing alone or with friends?

Except for a few games as Micromachines, Mortal Kombat or Streets of Rage, that sometimes I played along with my brother o a friend, I mostly played alone. It has been only recently when I have started playing with my friends. In the last decade that habit translated into playing shooters everynight with my friends, like Halo 3 on my XBOX 360.

How were you, back at that time, as a student?

I have always practiced some sport or extra activity after the school, soccer, basketball, swimming, even painting and sculpture. In school I was quite naughty, used to have troubles with the teachers but at the same time I passed the exams, that pissed off some of my teachers because they saw how their reprimands were useless. As a funny anecdote I remember me and a few friends threwing down the banister, climbing walls and walking on high and risky places in school,we tried to imitate everything we saw on movies.

We talked about cartoons, but what about movies?

My father and I we used to watch the local Catalan TV where they played tons of American action movies during weekends. Cannot forget classics like Robocop, Indiana Jones or Starwars. Especially I remember how impacting for me Starwars was, never saw such a complex sci-fi universe, the only thing I had to compare it with were westerns of medieval movies. In school we played some of the combat scenes like if it was a Star Wars movie, Han Solo was my favourite character by far.

In recent times, I sometimes stop to think especially about the violence depicted in those movies, Robocop in particular. I don't know how I could put up with such amount of gore in that film. But I didn't care, I jumped on the sofa everytime there was a film starred by Schwartzenegger, Van-Damme or Stallone. I know there wasn't any deep message behind most of those movies, but I loved the character, the music, and the sometimes crappy special effects.

Which music did you enjoy during the that time?

When I was nine I got a Walkman from my family, there I listened the pop of that time, Aqua's Barbie Girl, Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, sometimes I wonder how I could listen to such vulgar music, but you know, I had no experience and followed the recommendations of my classmates. After that era I listened to what we called Makina music, that is hardcore, techno and progressive music. Everyone in class wanted to reach the minimum age to enter the discoteques and that was the path to follow. The next era for me was defined by Nu Metal and its powerful guitars, with Linkin Park, Papa Roach, started to listen that kind of music after watching Impossible Mission and buying the soundtrack. That took me to learn to play the guitar and research about some of the most relevant guitar players in the world, discovering their bands I also got to enjoy Thrash Metal, Hard Rock. Nowadays I can listen to everything that has to do with Rock and AOR and sounds nice.

Let's continue with your gaming history. Which platform did you had after Mega Drive?

On Mega Drive I enjoyed Gunstar Heroes, a fast paced wild action shooter with a lot of variety of weapons and scenarios. Sonic had a great music and that speed fascinated me, also the game has a lot of characteristic elements that help me to fondly remember it, like the formula of two stages and a final enemy that needs 8 hits to be killed. The only thing I disliked was the water stages, it was so slow and a bit desperating to handle, also that backwards counter managed to increase the anguish.

Until I bought my next console, a Playstation One, I spent many years of playing arcade games with my friends in my neighborhood. In those places I made a lot of great friendships I still keep until today. Remember in the arcades I saw games I loved and was impossible for me to ever play at home, like Marvel vs. Capcom (1 and 2), King of Fighters 95, Metal Slug, House of the Dead, Tumblepop. I enjoyed a lot the competition with other players to see who can get further with only one credit.

During that time of arcade gaming I had my first computer, it came with Duke Nukem 3D but my father didn't let me play it for many years! He claimed it had too much blood and hated the idea I could throw money at streaper girls, heh. It was funny fact to see that game caming along with the computer as part of a suite of discs like an encyclopedia or other educational discs to learn about maths or nature, etc. But I finally did it, will never forget the day I played Duke Nukem 3D, it was my first FPS and got absolutely shocked. There were tons of freeware games published by Apogee Software back then, Jazz JackRabbit, F-22 Raptor, One Must Fall, Wacky Wheels, Biomenace, Secret Agent, etc. Later on I got very much into strategy games with Starcraft. I loved its atmosphere, was one of the first games with story that I played. Was amazed at its video introductions before each level. My love for Blizzard and Starcraft took me to Diablo, a game that introduced me to RPG elements, without leaving any pinch of action aside.

Also enjoyed the turn-based strategy genre, starting with the first Civilization game, I devoted an incalculable number of hours to it, almost to the obsession. Master of Orion was another title I loved, especially recall the art and detail of each race's background story.

After that era I played tons of graphic adventures as Monkey Island 1 and 2, Loom, Day of the Tentacle. I enjoyed a lot the points where you had to use weird objects from the inventory and go for a crazy solution to solve a puzzle. Several times I ended up phoning a friend to ask about what to do in order to progress in the game.

And finally in 1998 I got a Playstation One, was asking for it since it was launched! I could enjoy Crash Bandicoot 3, Final Fantasy VIII, Legend of Dragoon and many others. I remember something I loved from the third Crash game was that it had not only traditional 2D platforming levels, there were also racing stages and other really original genres mixed in.

I tried to play as many different game genres as possible. Suikoden II is one of the few Japanese RPGs I played and probably the one that I liked the most. There were over 100 characters, a very interesting and intricate story, and some strategic elements in the combats. Was very surprised to see that, at one point in the game, you could conquer a castle once you beated a vampire who lived in. Then you could upgrade that castle, so the game turned into kind of a simulator where you could place workers, and they unlocked really funny mini-games.

Since that time when I played on PS One, I'm convinced that consoles are better for me than PC as a gaming platform. I think this opinion has been mainly biased because I didn't have enough money to update my PC and this outdating/obsolescence issue is much of a smaller problem with consoles.

In the last years, I want to remark the XCOM remake, which has been the resurgence of the strategy genre for me, I think many people will see it that way, especially when you played the original XCOM. Bought it on console, but I found it much cheaper on PC and bought it again because it was cheaper if you wait a bit.

I see one of your favourite genres has been FPS, what do you feel about its evolution after all this time?

When I started with FPS, it was my favourite genre, Duke Nukem 3D, then Half Life, Counter Strike, Unreal Tournament. Those multiplayer experiences at cyber-cafes defined what gaming was for me.

Nowadays things have changed a bit, the amount of titles I find interesting have decreased a lot. I would love to go enthusiastic again, but is hard since most of things I see from big studios is something that has been done already and is hard to find something fresh. A few exceptions I felt in this genre during the last decade were the sagas of Halo, with that open world feeling, and Bioshock, with a very deep immersive atmosphere.

Nevertheless, there is some hope in the indie scene, last FPS I beated was Outlast, a survival horror made by a small team with a huge degree of dedication, very recommendable.

You can get in touch with Marcos on Twitter, he is @Sueythelaw

We will post the second part of the interview soon, stay tuned!

Interview done by our Community Manager /PR @JesusFabre

Other interviews:

Aniol Alcaraz (Producer and programmer)

Lourdes Nicolich (Artist)

Jordi Longueira (Artist)

Pol Urós (Programmer)

Jesús: Have you always wanted to be a game developer?

Marcos: Not really, at high school I used to play lots of strategy games with a historic-based theme (Age of Empires, Praetorians, etc), so I got curious about how cool could be to study History. But later I noticed that was not my thing, I never enjoyed reading so much, and it was the main thing I would have to do there. I also considered being an archeologist! At home, they encouraged me to not to go to university, my grandfather and my father work at a car factory (SEAT) and when I turned 18 I was asked if I wanted to work there too. I didn't want to reduce my possibilities and leave my studies at such a young age, so decided to keep studying a bachelor degree, I chose Computer Science, only because of its relationship to games, but it was kind of a dream, never expected to end up working in this industry!

How it was to study Computer Science? the studies fullfilled your expectations?

It was really hard for me, especially at the beginning. I remember how I failed at half of the subjects in the first year, until I discovered what my problem was. The strategy that worked very well for me in highschool was to pay attention in class and then review some notes at home. That wasn't valid anymore at university, now listening was not enough anymore, so I had to study hard, very hard. Went through the first two years in a sluggish fashion, and when I got to the third year stopped to think if I really wanted to keep on with that suffering. I didn't think it was worthy to keep studying with such mediocre results, it will take eight years to finish my degree! Finally I concluded to dedicate my body and soul to pass every subject. That worked out, so I finished in six years and what is more important, learned a lot!

What was your first job?

Started working at a pizzeria while I was studying my second year at university. I started there as delivery guy and two years and a half later ended as store manager. That experience was extremely hard and was a key factor to make me decide to go seriously studying. I worked by night, what helped me to keep working and studying simultaneously, but I can tell you it was a hell to cope with both tasks at the same time. Once I was able to, I started an internship in an IT company where I worked as programmer on a project about car plate recognition (those devices that are installed in car parks in Shopping Centers). There I learned what a serious job it was, how to work in team, etc. I enjoyed my six months working there, in particular because there was a strong component of innovation.

And how did you change your direction into game development?

In the fourth course of my degree I started to get interested in subjects like Computer Vision. That visual feedback I got from everything I was doing made me feel really close to what developing games would be, loved the fact it wasn't a cold console with data. I enjoyed manipulating 3D objects, lighting them, experiment with their behaviour in general. Always tried to learn the extra mile in every work I did for that subject, my goal was to be able to show something relevant if someday I did an interview for a company (something in OpenGL, a 3D object loader). Then I was collaborating in a radio podcast called Arcadia Gamers and one day at Gamelab (the most important videogame industry event in Spain), a guy approached me, he recognized me from the podcast. His name was Nacho Lasheras, who currently works at Digital Legends. I quickly asked him if they were looking for trainees, and he said yes. So thanks to him I got an interview with their CTO Unai Landa, who game me a test and also reviewed the works I had previously been doing at the university. They called me a week after and told me I had been chosen to fulfill the position. That's how I got my first job in the industry, in nothing less than one of the most important game companies in Spain!

What was your work at Digital Legends?

I integrated a system that compiled the engine code and created program builds for different platform, propagating those changes along every version. Mainly did all the bash scripting to automatize that very complex process. After that I started to program testing modules for their own graphic engine, Karisma. Those modules checked out the compatibility between new and old features on many of the different system configurations. After that project I jumped on to work on the graphic engine, did a tool that communicated with a server to send some data relative to 3D models. An artist sent a 3D model to the engine and then the model was processed to adapt it to each platform technical capabilities, that was called a data build. I really appreciate all I learned from my mentor, Oscar Villellas, who came from Ubisoft Paris. But eventually my time at Digital Legends was over, the crisis got worse and projects got finished or cancelled, so there was not enough work for me and some other colleagues and we had to leave the company. It was a tough moment for me, because I worked really hard and my goal was to prove my compromise and working capacity, so someday they will decide to contract me indefinitely as part of their team.

I value a lot all the good things I learnt from that time at Digital Legends, and above all I met great people, some of them are still very good friends.

How was the relationships with the colleagues?

At Digital Legends there was something I valued a lot, we were all working hard and then at 11 in the morning everybody took their coffee cups and headed to the restroom/lounge. Then we enjoyed a great time talking and joking about all we wanted, it was like switching between two worlds, the serious and the unabashedly one. I think that this separation is the best way to work, so we can find a balance and have a time for social conversations, and then other time to focus on what we have to do and try to not get distracted too much.

What was your next step after leaving Digital Legends?

I used that time to finish my degree and do the final project. Afterwards, one day I got an email from Aniol (who I also met at Gamelab), he said they were going to port the game from PC to iOS, as I had been working with Unity at the university, they asked me if I wanted join and help out with that. I saw it as a great opportunity of continuing my career, so I started to work full time at BeautiFun Games.

How is the contrast between working for an established company, as Digital Legends, and a small indie studio like BeautiFun Games?

At the beginning it was not very easy to get used to the new environment, technically I had to learn how to work with Unity within a team (as I was developing my final project alone at the university). At Digital we were a big team, I had a mentor, everything was really well organized and streamlined. When I entered BeautiFun Games it was kind of a drastic change, I had a boss, but not the kind of boss I was used to work with. Nobody approached me telling me what I couldn't do and when I should have finished this or that thing, I had much more freedom. This is good and bad at the same time, I like to have freedom but at the same time I need control, a list of things to do, so thats something we fixed and now I always have something to do next on the tasks list!

What has been the best part of your time at BeautiFun Games so far?

The best for me has been definitely to be involved on Megamagic since the very beginning, soaking up many books about software architecture, real-time applications design, and also prove yourself that a lot of theoretical things you learned at the university are really useful. To feel that sense of ownership over a big part of what we have been building, as we are very few programmers, I feel I understand everything quite well, not like in Digital Legends, where the projects were much bigger.

What's your favourite part of Megamagic from a more technical point of view?

I particularly like the process of learning and developing how the combat works, to program the AI of each creature so you feel there that something serious is happening on stage, among many other things. To say the truth, this project has so many faces, and the design is complex and not very limited (to put an example, is just the opposite to what Flappy Bird presents). There are many elements from other games I played in it, and now I'm discovering how they are made from the inside, like for example how one enemy can detect other character's presence. I'm learning a lot through seeing what other games did and from other colleague's advices.

Why did you chose to be a programmer and not another role?

The first thing I like in videogames is how visual it is to see almost everything you do, it doesn't show you a file with data that you have to interpret. Love for example when an artist creates a mock-up of a game system or a new animation and I have to create the code to make it look the best I can, so the work of the artist looks the same way (or even better if possible) he/she imagined. Then its awesome when the team stands up and gets close to your PC to check out the result of many hours of work.

Nihilumbra for Wii U is expected to be released very soon, what can you tell us about the process of porting it?

In general terms, the game has been quite easy to port to Wii U, also the technical support received by Nintendo has been very good. Its curious because, as we have been one of the first Wii U developers working with Unity, I think we have been kind of guinea pigs for them and helped them with some advices for other studios who will also port their games in the future.

Can you tell me a good quality of yourself and a not so good one?

One of my best qualities I think is persistance and also ambition to do what I didn't achieve the day before. A bad quality is that I'm quite perfectionist with myself and with others, so sometimes I get angry because I don't like to argue about small things. But in the end I think the best is to have a clear and honest dialog with the team and explain what makes you feel bad.

And a good quality from each one of your colleagues?

Aniol: At a technical level he is really good and has a great abstract thinking, he can come up with an idea and turn it into code very easily. Also he is a very good person, always trying to make everybody feel good at the studio.

Jordi: Works hard like hell, even during the weekend. He is pure motivation.

Lourdes: Her work on Nihilumbra is really good, quite perfectionist and I think she will also be a key member to define the final artistic aspect in Megamagic.

Kevin: Has brilliant ideas design-wise, he easily adapts to the tools he has to use them in the best possible way. He's kind of a guide for me, the person who gives me the next stuff to do.

Jesús: I see you're very compromised, also moves a lot to make great contacts and get useful information from what happens in the industry. Loved the marketing work you did at Nihilumbra.

Link to Part I/II.

You can get in touch with Marcos on Twitter, he is @Sueythelaw

Interview done by our Community Manager /PR @JesusFabre

More interviews:

Aniol Alcaraz (Producer and programmer)

Lourdes Nicolich (Artist)

Jordi Longueira (Programmer)

Pol Urós (Programmer)

Marcos and Kevin presents:

Adventures at GDC 2014!

Part I

We decided it would be a good idea to inform you about the details we got from our two explorers in San Francisco. They arrived on Monday evening really tired after a really long flight!

We know plane food is not always enough, and even less for a (indie) game developer. But their breakfast was solid, no worries.

"Breakfast in America"

They visited Chinatown, and found Link's sword and shield!

Afterwards, their meal was also solid, they got full of energy!

"FAST FOOD"

"Cocacola with ice cream!"

After the meal, they went to the Moscone Center to visit our stand, as you can see, everything was under preparation:

Here you can see the games sharing Nintendo's booth with us:

Suey is concentrated, testing our game for the first time at the event:

They talked to other devs at Nintendo's both and set up our space for the show on Wednesday, everything worked perfectly fine!

In the afternoon, our guys visited St Regis Hotel lobby for a meet up with the folks from GOG.com and show them Nihilumbra in person. They also wanted to know more about Megamagic!

Yesterday they attended GDC and IGF Awards Ceremony. As you can see it was really crowded!

They couldn't resist to try out Project Morpheus!

Kevin is really enjoying the experience. For his words that thing seems quite inmersive, and also had sharks!

"Want to see me smile? Just put some VR glasses in my head. Actually I was playing a diving simulator and shooting a shark with a flare gun. How could I not smile?"

Here you can find more funny stuff they sent to us!

"Elevator Action" - Kevin

"Dude chainsawing a chain with audience" - Kevin

Marcos, Kevin... and Aniol presents:

Adventures at GDC 2014 (and Vienna)!

Part II

After a wonderful starting of the trip (see Part I), the last couple of days at GDC still held much excitement left for Marcos and Kevin.

On Thursday, Randy Pitchford and Brian Martel, CEO/President and Chief Creative Officer at Gearbox Software Official respectively, approached our stand and played Nihilumbra for Wii U. They seem to be enjoying it!

In this video (by the kind people from Nintendo World Report), you can check out some gameplay footage recorded at the event, special attention to the last minutes where you can see how the Wii U GamePad works with the game.

After the exhibit our guys relaxed playing some Towerfall: Ascension along with some other devs, some of them came from Harmonix and Irrational Games.

And before going to bed, Kevin found a copy of E.T. that epic game for the Atari 2600!

Friday starts! and it jumps in with Kevin posing with his AAA tough guy face.

But he couldn't resist to his true passion! Indie games! Then Chroma Squad was a MUST play!

Watch out the awesomeness!

And, on Marcos side he was meeting John Romero, video game legend who, among other really cool things, co-created Doom!

And this selfie is the last graphic material we got from them, a selfie that proves how awesome GDC 2014 was! hope to come back next year to the wondrous land of San Francisco!

NOTE: We recommend you to check out this list compiled by the great Javier Arévalo if you are curious to know about some really interesting materials shared by some of the lecturers during the event.

And meanwhile, in Vienna...

Aniol Alcaraz, our CEO and programmer, travelled to participate at the Magic: The Gathering Vienna Grand Prix along with other 1208 registered players. After a really disputed final match, Aniol bested the French player Jérémy Dezani. That places him as the fourth spaniard with Spanish championship title and a Grand Prix. All of us at BeautiFun Games want to congrat Aniol for the great victory!

You can watch the Finals match here.

This time is the turn of Jesús, our usual interviewer, to tell us about his life regarding to games, as a gamer and professional. He is one of the last members to join the team, been working with us since September 2013 as PR and Community Manager. The questions of the following interview have been ellaborated by the members of the BeautiFun Games team, and in this case Aniol is the person who is conducts the interview in their representation.

Aniol: Can you tell us about how were you as a kid, and how was your childhood?

Jesús: I was born in Murcia, a city in the Southeast of Spain, I grew up as only child until 14 years old, when my brother was born. In general I can say I was a very shy guy who loved playing with all kind of toys for hours and hours, also enjoyed watching cartoons and listened to music since I was very young. I especially remember how much I enjoyed playing with small cars, Transformers, G.I. JOE, Playmobil Clicks or He-Man, all mixed on the same playground!

TV was the big entertainment in the 80s, which cartoons did you enjoy the most?

I clearly recall an animation edutainment series called "Once Upon a Time... Life", it told the story of the human body through the adventures of a bunch of characters who happened to be cells, hemoglobins, vitamins, viruses and all the organisms and sustances that populate the human body. I have been curious about how things work since I was a little kid, thanks to that series I learnt a lot and also stimulated my imagination. I remember how I tried to recreate the scenes in my room, with tons of pieces of paper from different colors representing each type of organism. Aside of that series I also recall Asterix, Transformers, Knights of the Zodiac, Dragon Ball, Heidi or The Smurfs. As you can see, my interests were really diverse.

Did you read comics?

Not a lot, between 6 and 9 years old I mainly read Mortadelo y Filemón (Clever & Smart), but eventually got a bit tired of their crazy and exagerated humour and then started reading Superlópez, which main character was a Spanish parody of Superman (I felt identified with his daily routine etc), that ended up being my favourite comic and character from my childhood.

And what about videogames, when and how they appeared in your life?

My parents weren't familiarized with video games at all. They've never heard about them, until one day I went to one of their friends house and their daughter was playing a space shooter about a spaceship that could turn into a robot at will. We are talking about 1991, and the game was Choujikuu Yousai – Macross, and I was fascinated to see that robot/spaceship shooting and all those graphics in movement. The colourful backgrounds, the cheerful music, it was pure love, I couldn't stop playing! Such a discovery was so intense that I didn't stop asking my parents to buy me a console to play that game. So finally my grandfather bought me one, it was a NES clone called "dido", with 260 built-in games. 260 games, that was crazy! But soon I discovered it really had around 50 and the rest were variations and glitched versions of those, it was enough to play for a while anyway.

Which NES games did you liked the most from those 260 built-in games?

The most remarkable for me were Bomberman, Tetris, Super Mario Bros, the first Mario Bros (from 1981), Rally X, Pac-Man, Adventure Island, Dr. Mario, Antartic Adventure, Quartz or Soccer. I also remember one weird wrestling game called "MUSCLE" featuring the characters from Kinnikumanseries. Had good a good time with that one, and it was so weird that any of my friends ever heard of it!

Once I got bored of playing over and over the same games, I started buying cartdridges, great ones were platformers Shatterhand, Batman and Power Blade, racing games like Super R.C. Pro Am or Super Off-Road. Remember I had a friend who invited me to play at his house, we loved co-op games like Chip'n Dale or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2. Some of the later great games I played on the system were really hardcore and more different experiences for me: Zelda, Maniac Mansion and Prince of Persia. I keep a specially good memory from Maniac Mansion, since it was the first game I beated, did it with all the patience a 13 years-old me could have!

I see you played NES a lot, but what happened to the other systems available at the time? Did you updated to a better console?

I discovered PCs and the 16 bit console systems around 1994, especially the technical leap I saw on PCs fully amazed me. Games like The Neverhood, Myst, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D or Another World blew me away and convinced me that this was the definitive gaming platform, especially for the players who could afford the quite expensive Pentium computers back in the days. At the same time, I had a couple of friends who were really hardcore fans of SEGA and Nintendo, respectively. So I was the lucky enough to enjoy Super Nintendo and Megadrive (Genesis) most relevant titles. From SNES I would remark the long evenings playing Super Mario Kart, Super Castlevania IV, Killer Instinct and Super Star Wars. On Genesis I particularly enjoyed Flashback, Sonic 2, Earthworm Jim 1 and 2 and Micromachines' awesome battle mode.

As you can see, I was surrounded by friends who only played really good games (nothing comparable with most of my old NES clone cartdridges or built-in titles), and my parents didn't like the idea of buying another machine. And as a way to rebel against the idea of not being able to play any new game, three years after the NES I resolved to save a lot of money (I even sold many comics) and secretly buy a Game Body. There I played tons of platformers, like the Donkey Kong Land and Super Mario Land series. Eventually my parents discovered I bought the console and got really angry... but, they also started to accept that video games were a vital part of my life that couldn't be easily removed.

That helped in some way to give you access to a newer system?

Not exactly. They were fully against the idea of spending 400€ on a PSX or a SEGA Saturn. So I had to figure out a cheaper way to play games, and also a good excuse to make that kind of big purchase. The solution I found was the PC, and the excuse to buy it was that I was going to use it to do lot to works during my last year at High School and also the University (I really used it, thanks to that cool interactive encyclopedia that came with it!). That PC was a Pentium II with 64 MB of RAM and 8 MB of video memory. But against all odds, it lasted for 6 years, started playing Doom, Redneck Rampage, Populous, Dungeon Keeper and ended with games like Unreal Tournament 2003, Sacrifice, Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Half Life 2, Rise of Nations or Age of Mythology. I managed to enhance the system a bit from time to time: memory, processor, graphic card... every year I was updating some part, until in 2004 I found most of the games were completely unplayable with the lowest settings. So bought a Pentium 4 and felt like if I had a F1!

So you have been playing games uninterruptedly since you got your first console, right?

Well, I have always been a big fan of video games, played a lot of them and from very different genres, that hobby helped me to decide to study Computer Science, which was a really hard degree in my university (and still is). So, maybe oddly enough, when I got that Pentium 4 (and there was no problem to play games with graphic settings to the max) it coincided also with my fourth course, the very hardest one. Lots of practical works and theory at the same time. When I saw those loads of stuff I had to go through, I resolved that there was no more time for games, at least during that fourth year. I won't lie to you, it was hard (especially when I was doing the practical projects at my brand new computer).

And that "dry law" measure worked out well?

To say the truth, it was a complete success. I entered my fifth and last year at university with all prior subjects passed. Then I started to work part-time and with my first salary I decided to buy a PSP. The feeling of happiness was kind of similar to what I felt when I bought a Game Boy ten years back. I have to confess that the first thing I did was installing a Custom Firmware to play emulators and install curious programs (like the one that allowed you to use it as a remote control, or scan Wifi networks around). I enjoyed titles like Wipeout, Darkstalkers, Ridge Racer, and on the emulator I played tons of NES, Megadrive and SNES games.

That should have been a great time for you, but what happened with all the home consoles that were having a big success at the time?

Yeah, it was! I remember the PS2 had an impressive catalog, but many games from PS2 were starting to appear on the PSP and/or also had their respective PC version, so I could end up playing most of them in a way or another without buying the system. I remember I was really curious to play XBOX, I liked the idea of playing online and also saw some games there that looked impressive as Panzer Dragoon Orta or The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. But instead of staying up to date in terms of new consoles and buy an XBOX 360 or a better PC, I decided to "go back in time". In 2008 I was working in Madrid, didn't have many friends to hang around with, so in my free time one day I got curious about the second hand video games market. I was astounded to see how the games I could never afford back in the 90s were at a ridiculous price (around 3 or 5 euros). So started collecting and playing them as a hobby, and that became almost an obsession, I remember I could visit around five game shops per week looking for the best deals.

When did that stopped and how did you managed to control that almost "compulsive collector instinct"?

After buying tons of games, I started to notice it wasn't useful at all to buy a game that you won't have time to play, I felt kind of frustrated of seeing so many games there waiting for me. Also I didn't have a lot of space in my rented room to keep them. Eventually I slowed down with my frantic purchasing pace, and now I kept playing PC, PS3 and XBOX 360, sometimes buy very concrete retro games, but mostly focus on the most modern ones, indies in particular!

And lastly, what have been the best games you played in the last years?

In chronological order I will mention and explain why I chose them:

Virtua Tennis 3 (X360): Loved that arcade feeling, and at the same time it had a wonderful simulator vein with great controls and physics.

Uncharted 2 (PS3): The perfection of the formula. I had the feeling that when this second installment of the series, Naughty Dog took each and every feature from a lot of previous great games in the action/adventure genre, mixed them and, after all, be able to put their own innovative touch and crafting a really well-made game.

Borderlands: Loved its deep gameplay, also was technically spectacular, and with tons of humour.

Nihilumbra: Played it in 2012 on my iPad. Was the game that made me think mobile devices could be really good platforms to play the games I always loved, you only have to design them wisely.

Journey: Enjoyed the experience after talking to many people about it, watched many gameplay videos and saw how many awards it got. The real experience lived up and even suprised me.

Do you think that society sees now games in a different way than back in the early 90s, when you started playing?

I think most of the people still sees games as an unproductive activity, but with the time we are witnessing how they are more and more integrated in our day to day life, especially thanks to the mobile devices and things like motion sensors or GPS. Now helped by the rising of the indie scene, games are much more closer to be a medium of expression than they were when I started. It will still take a bit of time for them to become fully widely recognized, maybe a generation.

Continues soon in Part II.

You can get in touch with Jesús on Twitter, he is @JesusFabre

Interview done by @AniolAlcaraz and the rest of the @BeautiFunGames team.

More interviews:

Aniol Alcaraz (Producer and programmer)

Marcos Sueiro (Programmer)

Lourdes Nicolich (Artist)

Jordi Longueira (Programmer)

Pol Urós (Programmer)

Almost recovered from the GDC experience (by the way, remember you can download free GDC14 materials here) and almost two weeks since the last issue, we're back with our regular BeautiFun Weekly post. We had time to do lots of things, even to create our very own Instagram and Pinterest profiles, feel welcome to follow us!

Art in video games... and Lourdes at the microphone! Via @llEvadne

This past Friday Lourdes was invited to "Siglo XXI", a cultural show played on the Spanish national radio station. Along with Tequila Works' producer Remy Chinchilla, they talked about the growing relevance of video games in the society and how important they are as an artistic medium.

You can listen to their intervention here at minute 40.

How relevant it is the price you set for your app or game? Nihilumbra as a case of study. Via @AniolAlcaraz

In this case is the Spanish national TV channel that featured us. They talked about the relevance of the Mobile Apps market and how it is expected to grow in the upcoming years. A market study said that it will generate upto 65.000 mill. of euros and 5 millions of jobs in Europe during the next four years. It was Aniol who appeared on Saturday night news explaining (min 34) how we sold 800.000 copies of Nihilumbra during a week when the games was available for free on the AppStore to celebrate the game's anniversary. We also appeared in the Catalonian TVE regional station, watch it here at the min 1.

We thank to Núria Ramírez and Gina Tost for remembering about us for contributing to the story.

The Spanish industry is resisting well to the crisis, especially in Catalonia. Via @BeautiFunGames

Last Wednesday we were part of a monographic on the Spanish journal LaVanguardia.com, they talked about us because it paid especial interest on some Catalonian video game studios and developers (in particular, Francisco Téllez, EnjoyUp, Novarama and Omnidrone Games) and also talked about the Spanish video game industry in general. Our national industry accounted around 400 millions of euros last year and employs more than 4200 professionals (more than a half of them are under 30). An industry that resists in the difficult moment the Spanish economy is living.

Games as a product vs. games as a service (Catalan / Spanish)
Via @truguers

Around a month ago, Kevin attended and participated in a roundtable about the different economical models in the digital video game market. It was moderated by Uriel Boira (CCMA) and other speakers were Xavier Carrillo (Digital Legends) and Jordi Martin (Ubisoft). It is very interesting to see how the different models than ours (pay to play) work and how they aren't bad by themselves, they are sometimes abused... you can watch the full video here.

Kevin listening to Xavier Carrillo (CEO at Digital Legends)

Insert Coin documentary rewards. Collector's edition has arrived! Via @BeautiFunGames

Maybe most of our English-speaking readers don't know about it, but we Spanish devs also have our own version of Indie Game: The Movie! It is called Insert Coin and in it appears a lot of fellow indie devs and studios telling their stories and explaining the good and the hurdles that takes to create video games. Back in October 2012 we looked at the crowdfunding project created by Juanmi Pérz and Víctor Frías and soon we saw it was something serious and necessary for our industry. So jumped into the it as co-producer and at the moment we are very satisfied with the first volume!

Here are some of the rewards received. Awesome Spanish indie games postcards!

We recommend you to play: South Park: The Stick of Truth.
Via @JordiLongueira

Several years have passed since Jordi watched the adventures of Cartman, Kenny and friends regularly. But somewhere inside him, the South Park fan is still alive enough to make him buy the last of their games, South Park: Stick of Truth. After finishing it, he assured it was one of the funniest games he ever played. Here we leave you with two highlight images he sent to us:

We backed, and encourage you to support: Red Goddess and Duelyst. Via @BeautiFunGames

This past week we backed two Kickstarter projects, the first one is Red Goddess, a Spanish platformer by Yanim Studios that counts with members who participated in games like Deadlight, Gothic and Wanted: Weapons of Fate. The game put you in the role of Divine, a goddess that is suffering a mental illness that is destroying her from her soul to the body. To look for a cure, you will have to walk through the different regions of a mysterious planet using several habilities, like enemy possesion and a very unique "split character" control scheme.

Duelyst is a tactical turn-based strategy game with ranked competitive play for PC,Mac, and the web. The focus is on squad-based combat on a tactical map for intense, fast-paced 1v1 battles with the simple winning objective of defeating your opponent's General. The development teams counts with members that participated on games like Diablo III, Rogue Legacy, and the Ratchet & Clank series. The game differentiates from other titles in the genre by offering a very straightforward approach on battles, skipping stuff like resource management or random encounters grinding.

Here you can check out our previous issue of BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries.

It has been after three long months of negotiations that we can finally announce the participation of Hollywood star David Hasselhoff in Megamagic, our next game. "We wanted a charismatic pop-culture personality to bring back the good old magic from the 80s to Megamagic, and who's better than the man who blown our minds away with Knight Rider and later helped to refresh our summers in Baywatch?", Kevin Cerdà, Megamagic's game designer and writer, assured.

Today is a day of celebration and joy here at the office, the breaking news have been confirmed just this morning when Kevin and Marcos came back right away from the airport. They spent an extra week in USA after GDC, during those post-GDC days they had a historic meeting with David in Las Vegas. They could finally met in person and show him a video of our Megamagic prototype. According to them, seems the celebrity was so amazed that just after watching our video, he inmediately claimed his wish to participate as a real actor in the game! So the next day they went to do some motion capture so we could do some tests in our alpha placing his athletic figure in the game.

David affirmed he always dreamed with feeling like Jordan's Mechner's brother when he got his movements captured in the original Prince of Persia, and then started to jump through walls and simulate all the movements from the classic like the craziest fan. "Maybe this will be the first 2D game in history that uses this super modern motion capture technology?", he asked us.

Detailing the terms of our agreement, Hasselhoff will work on all the motion capture scenes at the renowned Red Eye Studio, but all the voice-acting will be done in Barcelona after his show "Celebrate the 80's & 90's with the Hoff" on 2nd of May in Navarra.

Taking a look back into his past relationship with games, Michael (huh, sorry!), I meant David, said he is really excited with his return to the video game world. "Now indies are the big thing, I had lots of fun with my participation in Pain (Idol Minds, 2009) for the PS3, and would like to repeat the experience, now in the indie way!".

“I’ve wanted to develop my own game so this was a way of seeing if this works out and maybe we can take this one step further with using the same concept as ‘Burnout Crash,’ and maybe do something with the Hoff,” he’s quoted as saying when he participated in Burnout Crash for XBLA (and Kinect support). You can verify how much energy David put on the project at these superb promo videos:

The famous man assures he wants to return to the video games essence and recognizes he was kind of lost in the social gaming world. His last movement was his involvement in "The Hoff" Facebook Casino apps, a series of games include video slots and scratch-card type games, all played for real money in Europe's online casino environment.

And now he tried with AAA games and Facebook apps, it's our turn: "I want to support you indies, I don't care if the game doesn't make millions, I believe your creativity is the future of the industry, I believe in Megamagic", he assured looking straight to our eyes with misty look.

We at BeautiFun Games are incredibly proud to have him as part of Megamagic's cast. With the Hoff, we rest assured thinking the game will be a massive indie success like Super Meat Body or Canna Balt.

BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries Ep.7

The BeautiFun Team Stories - Pol Urós (Programmer) - Part I / II

The BeautiFun Team Stories - Pol Urós (Programmer) Part II

BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries Ep.8

The BeautiFun Team Stories - Lourdes Nicolich (Artist) Part I/II

BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries Ep.9

BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries Ep.10

The BeautiFun Team Stories - Lourdes Nicolich (Artist) Part II/II

BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries Ep.11

The BeautiFun Team Stories - Jordi Longueira (Part I/II)

BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries Ep.12

The BeautiFun Team Stories - Jordi Longueira (Part II/II)

BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries Ep. 13

The BeautiFun Team Stories - Marcos Sueiro (Part I/II)

The BeautiFun Team Stories - Marcos Sueiro (Part II/II)

Adventures at GDC 2014! Tuesday and Wednesday

Adventures at GDC 2014 (and Vienna)! Part II

The BeautiFun Team Stories - Jesús Fabre - CM|PR - Part I/II

BeautiFun Weekly: News and Discoveries Ep.14

David "The Hoff", gets confirmed as protagonist in Megamagic.