(c) Videogames Live

En una entrevista realizada al compositor de Halo, Marty O’Donnell, en octubre de 2004 cuando la música de juegos no era un arte tan reconocido (o remunerado) como la música de cine, le preguntaron lo siguiente:

Nico: ¿Qué se necesita para que la música de los videojuegos llegue a ser considerada una forma legítima de expresión musical?

Marty: Sólo unos cuantos años más, baby… READ MORE

Mega Man 8 bit deathmatch (c) CutmanMike

Los mosaicos o tiles, son un elemento bastante utilizado en juegos, como ya hemos mencionado enartículos previos. Sus principales usos son para optimizar recursos tanto de espacio, como de capacidad visual, y de tiempo de desarrollo.

Para la elaboración de mosaicos, lo más importante es  tener presente son las orillas de la imagen. La principal característica de un mosaico es que se repite múltiples veces, y debe estar pegada una imagen completamente a la otra. Si nuestras imágenes no están diseñadas de una manera que se vea natural esta transición, el mosaico que resultara de repetir estas imágenes una junto a otra estará lleno de filos y lugares donde podemos claramente ver que algo simplemente “no queda”. READ MORE

Mario Bros L 1-2

Dentro de cada una de las áreas del proceso de desarrollo de videojuegos existen métodos y técnicas que hacen a los artistas y programadores avanzar de manera efectiva y más eficiente. Estas técnicas han evolucionado junto con los videojuegos e inclusive, han llegado a convertirse en rasgos característicos de algunos géneros. En este post hablaremos del uso de tiles para desarrollar videojuegos, una técnica que nos ayuda a optimizar recursos de procesamiento así como en la creación de assets. Para evitar el uso de términos en inglés, utilizaremos el término mosaico cuando nos refiramos a tiles. READ MORE

(c) Burger Time

En varias ocasiones he escuchado que personas dicen que tienen una gran idea para un videojuego, y la mayoría de las veces cuando platican su idea, resulta que su ésta es más una historia que un videojuego.  Yo pienso que esto se debe en gran medida a la integración de narrativa e historia dentro de los juegos AAA que vemos día con día.

En este post hablaremos de algunos consejos que pueden llegar a mejorar la narrativa de su juego, hablaremos de los cinemas, quick time events, y daremos algunas ligas con ejemplos para todos aquellos que dentro del área de desarrollo se quieran enfocarse a este aspecto tan difícil como lo es la narrativa e historia. READ MORE

(c) Alebrije Estudios

Para producir un videojuego, el departamento artístico va a necesitar desarrollar arte conceptual, bocetos, tiles, texturas, partículas, spritesheets, GUI, etc. El uso de estos elementos es diferente en la etapa de pre-producción y producción; hoy nos enfocaremos a la producción.

Aquellos elementos que se utilizan dentro de la fase de producción de un juego se conocen comoassets (o activos, en español). Así como en contexto económico, los activos son los recursos de las empresas; en los videojuegos también lo son, ya que se utilizarán estos activos para llenar las necesidades del proyecto. READ MORE

Indienomicon the Book of Indie (c) BadPilcrow

Under the watchful eye of a jaguar, a dark figure fled through the inky black jungle. He continued across ancient, nameless rivers, and over burning desert sands, until, exhausted from his journey, he spied his destination: the Mexican headquarters of independent game developer, Alebrije Estudios. The sojourner retrieved an invitation from the folds of his robe, and slid it under the door. Weeks later, The Indienomicon‘s roster grew by eight, as the award-winning team joined its macabre experiment.

I had a chance to ask the team some questions; here are their replies.

An alebrije is a colorful and ornately decorated sculpture unique to Mexico. Why did you choose this word to represent your studio?

Well… basically because when we started with the studio, we thought it was a strong and strange word that symbolized what we were trying to do and the way we wanted to do it. According to the history of the word, Pedro Linares once dreamed these strange creatures calling him from the other side of a cliff when he was sick. Following their call, he took a leap of faith and walked on air to cross the cliff, and when he reached the other side he woke up was finally healed. What doctors couldn’t do, these creatures in a dream could. So, he devoted himself to creating little sculptures about them with different kinds of materials. He named them “Alebrijes” because that’s the sound they made in his dreams. So, for us, the history of the Alebrijes (the sculptures) represents in some way our own creations, because an Alebrije is born from dreams and fantasies, but comes to life by means of artistic craftsmanship.

There was another reason we chose it, though. The name and concept of “Alebrije” also called us and presented itself to us while we were doing something else. We were once considering naming the studio “Phoenix Studio”, but one day as one of us was sketching a phoenix and once everyone looked at it, someone said: “It looks like an Alebrije” . There was a silent pause, and that’s when it hit us, and the name was decided.

Does the history, culture, or spirit of Mexico find its way into your games?

In simple terms we could say that, so far, none of our productions show any historical theme or character. But the “Mexican point of view” about things somewhat becomes present in our productions. Some texts and ideas about Mexican identity (like those written by Octavio Paz) can be found (at least veiled) in our stories.

Since our city is in the northern part of the Country, and built in a territory in which there was no real pre-Hispanic culture or civilization, we are less culturally involved with the glory of these civilizations as people in the south are (even though we know our history, of course). So, we may create something related to pre-Hispanic cultures and myths at some point, but we don’t know when or how.

One of your games, Ayuda Jugando, was released to collect donations and raise awareness for the Mexican victims of Hurricane Alex in 2010. How can gamers and game developers better leverage their talents to benefit others?

I don’t know… I’m tempted to say that using whatever tools they have available, and using it to the best of their abilities to make something useful. I believe there’s no limit to the extent of what developers and gamers can do to benefit others. The industry is filled with creative and smart people, so I think that they can benefit others in many ways, whenever they try to do it. In our case, we thought we could use our tools to laugh a little about ourselves and the tragedy that our region was living, and give people something to play with, while connecting the game with other efforts to help affected people and fix things. An important part of Mexican culture is satire and laughing at difficult times, so it kind of came naturally. There were a lot of initiatives in which people were helping each other out, so basically we just added our own brick with our particular style.

What will indie game development be like in ten years?

No clue. We certainly would like it to be as fun and rewarding as it currently is (and of course, we would have no complaints if it gets better). But this question is beyond our ability to speculate. Of course, there’s always talk about new opportunities for indies, how indie developers can take advantage of new media and platforms (like Angry birds, for example), new channels of distribution, several indie developers that have made it big, and so on. I think, whatever the big picture may be in ten years, it’s likely that some of the smaller studios right now may be the leading figures of the industry by then. The indie game developer community is a strong force moving it (others still being, whether we like it or not, the big players in “published” development, as well as the gamers)… and although we may have a basic idea of where it is going right now, and how we as a studio are affecting it and contributing to it… shifts happen (no pun intended), so let’s see. Whatever happens, we will want to be there… and hopefully we will be.

Is there anything else you want the world to know about Alebrije Estudios?

Not at the moment… I think that our games will speak for themselves when the time is right (if there’s anything worth saying, of course!), so for now, thank you for inviting us to the Indienomicon.

via DavidSuchil

Mike at GDCOnline 2010 with de Hi5

Hace unos días, platicando con algunos estudiantes de Ingeniería en Sistemas, nos hicieron una pregunta muy interesante: ¿Cuál es la diferencia entre la programación para videojuegos y el desarrollo de software tradicional o aplicaciones?

En este post trataremos de dar una respuesta basándonos en nuestra experiencia y cómo hemos visto se han integrado los programadores tradicionales a la industria de los videojuegos. Para efectos del artículos a toda forma de código diferente a los videojuegos la llamaremos software o aplicaciones. READ MORE

#CD11 - Monterrey, N.L

Alebrije Estudios was invited to participate at Campamento Digital 2011 with the conference Videogames: Entertainment Can Help. In this talk, Miguel Olvera, Alebrije Estudios’ CEO, talked about the effort they conducted last year creating a videogame, Ayuda Jugando x NL, which final objective was to invite the user to donate to the corresponding entities in Monterrey responsible to restore the damage caused by Hurricane Alex last June 2010. He also talked about how games can generate a social change in searching for solutions for unfortunate circumstances. He finished his talked summarizing the effort that the video game industry has have towards helping the people in JAPAN. Games like Farmville and TeamFrotress 2 among others have generated donations flow thanks to transactions inside their games. After the talked, Miguel got a chance to talk with some participants interested in game development.

Alebrije Estudios will like to tank Eva Sander for the invitation and to congratulate all the participants of the event for their commitment to be social responsible citizens.

inGenio 2011 - Miguel Olvera de Alebrije Estudios

Saludo a todos los organizadores de inGenio 2011.

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