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Rawal Rumble is a stylish love letter to the classic side-scrolling arcade beat ‘em up, with fun combat, lots of weapons and a suitably silly plot about cyber-police kidnapping your girlfriend.

Read More & Play The Prototype, Free (Windows)

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Rawal Rumble placeholder animations

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Developer Interview - Toni Camacho

Hi Toni, please tell us about your career path.

In the games industry I started porting videogames for a few months at Microjocs. This is back in 2006, at that time mobile phones were nothing like the ones we have now, mobile phones like the Nokia N93 or Sony Ericsson W950.

After that I joined the development team as a programmer. I spent about a year programming in which I had time to participate in a couple of projects, special mention for 'Diamond Island'

In this game, of an isometric view, you have to drag a totem around islands and place it in the right spots. It did work pretty well and we got to make a second version of the game and a downloadable version for PC.

Although as a programmer I always felt very comfortable, we could even say that all my education has been more technical than artistic; I knew I wanted to lean towards the game design side from the very start.

Right when Digital Chocolate acquired Microjocs, I was presented with the opportunity to join the design team, my entire career as a designer has been at Digital Chocolate. Five years after, I have worked on 4 projects for the iPhone platform and on a couple of projects for social networks.

"All my education has been more technical than artistic"

  What did you want to be when you were a kid?

I always wanted to make video games. My first contact with a computer was in school, I do not remember the age, but almost no one had PCs at home. We had Basic programming class on Friday afternoons and we did program a very simple puzzle game. That summer I cried so much to my father that he ended up buying an Amstrad CPC6128.

Of course I had videogames but the part that was most fun for me was practicing how to program in Basic. I even finished a very simple Arkanoid type of game. I decided then that I was going to study Computer Science to program videogames.

What do you like the most of being a videogames designer?

It is a multidisciplinary position. The designer is the only one of the entire development team that has the big picture of how the game will be in mind. It is the one that makes that the work of the artists and programmers makes sense all together.

In a standard day, I can sit with a programmer to discuss which path finding algorithm to use, and then meet with the concept artist to decide which personality we want the main character to have. After that, I could quickly meet the data analyst and the product manager to discuss details about the marketing strategy.

From your point of view, what skills should have a good videogames designer?

A good designer should know how to listen to others, encourage people to come up with ideas and the hardest thing of all: Of all the options, knowing how to choose the best. Many people think that the designer's ideas are those that form the game, but this is a mistake.

I've been learning it over time and from the project we are working on at the moment, for example, I ask everyone how they would do things. I always listen to their opinions and at the end I try to choose what I think will be best for the game.

If you could go back in time and change a decision that you made in one of your projects, what would you change?

Honestly, I would not like to change anything. I started as a designer with zero experience. The closest thing to design a game that I had done before was creating roleplaying games like “Vampire: The Masquerade”.

I think I did learn from the mistakes I made in my first projects and I also hope to learn from the ones I make now. A saying that I tell my team ‘Relax, the mistakes we made in that past game will not be repeated. They will be new mistakes’.

Tell us something that you have done and feel especially proud of, both professionally and personally.

I finished Dead Space playing only at nights and in the dark! Ok seriously now, maybe the first game we did for social networks, the Millionaire City. Words like 'economy' and 'monetization' were concepts that started to be heard among developers by the year 2009, and they are key concepts for a micro transaction based game to work out.

We did not have any idea about how to do it for Millionaire City; we just blindly threw the ball and surprisingly scored. It worked so well that for a year it was the only game that competed with Zynga video games, which by that time their games were top in all rankings.

What is your opinion about casual games?

They are games with very simple mechanics, easy to follow and short sessions. They are ideal for people who do not have the time or the desire to learn more complicated games; they should provide a decent level of enjoyment regardless of their simplicity.

And even though these games often have bad reputation among those who consider themselves hardcore gamers, I am aware that many of them (me included) have gotten addict to some of these more casual games.

Particularly interesting is the balancing process of RTS games, what sort of balance is used in Galaxy Life?

It was our first RTS game and to consider its balance was not easy. We tried to divide the task into 2 parts, one of them being the combat balance. How good or bad a particular unit is in combat. To do this, I created a standard base scenario and I attacked it with countless armies, armies always compromised units of the same type.

Then I would finally adjust them using other scenarios. The second part was to adjust the economy of the units. Once you have your combat stats, we gave them an according cost and production time.

After the growth of mobile games in the recent years, do you think that the console industry is at risk?

I think there is public for everything. I think that the problem is that they do not know whether to make a radical change of the concept or to leave as it always was.

For example, almost all the news coming from Sony and Microsoft about the next generation of consoles talk more about extra features than about the console actual technical potential and future games. I think this is because right now there are 2 different types of gamers.

The fans about old style videogames, say those who have more than 30 years, who are used to turn on the console, load a game and play alone for hours and the fans of nowadays, that like multiplayer and sharing.

What do you think about the increasing inclusion of cinematics in videogames?

As long as the essence of the game is preserved, I am in favor of it. That you can include cinematics in your game does not mean that you should do it, only do it if it helps with the storytelling, to create more empathy with the characters… in short, the cinematics should add value to the videogame.

Nintendo or Sony?

Currently Sony, but there will always be a dedicated corner in my heart for Mario Bros and, especially, Zelda.

Top 3 favourite videogames

Difficult to say only 3, but ... well, there are 3 that I have special affection for: Ocarina of Time, Silent Hill 3 and Super Street Fighter Alpha 2 (I remember finishing the latter with my eyes closed, having only the audio as guidance)

Besides videogames, what other things do you like? Any hobbies?

I love reading and movies. Sports too, football, basketball en, especially, swimming. It is extremely relaxing.

"Casual Games often have bad reputation among those who consider themselves hardcore gamers"

#social gaming #digital chocolate #devblog #videogames #microjocs #ios #appstore #smartphones #iphone #ipad #ipod #facebook

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rain STORY TRAILER 

Here’s the story trailer for upcoming downloadable adventure game rain. It’s the tale of  two silhouettes and their journey in a mysterious world of perpetual rainfall. Invisible monsters, haunting classical music and a charm that reminds me of games like ICO and Limbo await players this fall when rain hits the PlayStation 3 exclusively. 

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Killzone Shadow Fall devs talk PS4 development

Sony’s new PS4 development video series goes behind the scenes with Guerrilla Games.

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Video Game Vectors - Created by Ricardo Polo

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Remember Me gets a live-action prologue

Remember Me releases next week and Capcom has delivered a new trailer that provides a bit of a backstory.

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Capcom release new batch of ‘Remember Me’ screenshots

Capcom has released a set of screenshots for their upcoming cyberpunk action-adventure title, Remember Me.

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Dirty Coursebooks by Pavel Fuksa and Karolina Galácz

With the announcement of Porn Studies, an academic journal dedicated to the exploration of gittin’ it on, Pavel and Karolina created these Penguin-style educational books, each focused on various interdisciplinary branches of pornography such as bukkake, squirting, and making me giggle uncontrollably.

Artist: Flickr / Website

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Street Art Project by A Common Name

This year I have been working on a street art project around the Los Angeles area. Rather than using traditional paint or wheat paste methods in a 2D platform, I’ve been using paper in 3D. These sculptures come in all sizes and fit in the holes of buildings and pipes found while walking around. The finished shapes represent geodes, crystal, quartz, or any mineral formation that you would normally find in nature, now in our planned out cities.

A parallel aspect of these “geodes” in nature and in the city is they are always unexpected treasures. You might go hunting for treasures but you generally happen upon them during your adventures or casual interaction with the environment. I enjoy the fact that many people will not notice these, but some astute people will; that these will not last forever and the weather will affect them as naturally as it might in nature. So far I’ve made twelve—several have been trashed or taken away, and one has fallen apart due to rain.

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BMO Super Gif!

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Dios de los Metroids

T-shirts available for $11 today at The Yetee!

Created by beware1984

#gaming #metroid #nintendo