A Writer's journey into game development

 At last, we have a port of Labyrinth of Knowledge for PC . You can play on Windows and Linux, using keyboard like in the early 90s, or using a controller (still needs polishing). You can get it free, or leave a donation, in case you want to help me rebuild my broken PC.

 Not my work, but Im proud to present you this game being developed in Cuba. Against the odd, we fight and we build our future videogames industry!  If you are interested in the tech details, it uses Unity and Mirror for networking. The VPS is rented in our ISP, but the lowest ping I have experienced is 90ms, the average is 115-120, with peaks of 200.

 This is the look of the project I have been working during the last year. My lazyness prevent me from writing a long post explaining the big effort I made and why you should test it as soon as releases, so Im just going to leave it here : 

At last I finished this game. The narrative wasn't too good in the beginning, but gets a bit better later. Anyway, it is compensated by the corrosive humor, which gets better and better towards the end of the game. I laughed a lot, I admit it. I couldn't finish the first game, but I think this second one has some improvements over the original gameplay mechanics, specially in battles. I disagree with some design decisions, like the suits being useless, except for cosmetic purposes. I expected the clothes to provide some bonus, but they didn't, so I totally forgot about them. So, it is a good game, and I hope we have another South Park soon. Maybe in the E3 this year?

In case you missed it, there are some new documentaries about CD Projekt RED and The Witcher games here that you must see. Even from the developer point of view you will find a few pearls of knowledge.

Got this game a couple of days ago and have been playing like 10-11 hours. Not gonna make a full review here, because there are people who does much better and earlier than me, these are some ramblings about disperse topics. I don't have complains so far about the game. It is a really good RPG, and I would have done some things different, but thats all. As a writer, I tend to think the same about some books. For example, the first stage seems a bit long to me. I started in Classic mode, which is the second difficult level, and most fights are hard to win. As the game progresses, the only way I found to win was to outnumber the enemy. Then, I had to switch to Explorer mode, which is the easier level. Read here my opinions about how the first quests of an RPG should be designed. In some cases, the information about the quests is not clear enough: I had to risk crossing a fortress in stealth mode because I had no idea about what other path there were. Not a big problem, this gam...

Found this interesting documentary on YT, that every Witcher fan should see. They go back to the pre-CD Projekt attempt to make a Witcher videogame, how did it fail, and the evolution of The Witcher 1.  

This is the game that hurt my wrist again! Lately, free games are killing open source games. Nobody cares about source code and compiling when you can get all the free games you want in your phone. I have to admit that I haven't been paying attention to open source scene since a couple of years. 0 A.D. was on my wishlist since long time ago, but I always delayed it, waiting for a better AI. Playing an RTS against a weak AI is one of the worse experiences a gamer can have. Also, I'm playing about 2-3 games per year, plus  the occasional DOTA, or Warzone or Freeciv match. Writing and programing are eating most of my free time. But last week I decided that I had waited enough, and downloaded the latest alpha. To my surprise, the AI is good enough most of the time to beat me if I'm not quick enough. Not only AI is decent and poses a real threat, graphics are great, even commercial quality, and when you get used to game philosophy, you can have lot of fun. Seems that the mo...

First, I finished the draft of the novel. It is now on the hands (PCs, actually) of the zero readers. Then comes a process of polishing, leave to rest, and then polish again, which will produce the final version, which, in turn, will be handed to a second pair of eyes to hunt typing/grammatical errors. Violating this rule I imposed myself led to a book that was not as good as I expected in the previous novel.This means that I have some free time now to work on the next book. The not so good news is that the editor is not so interested in publishing it. They had a goal, and it was not exactly to make a success of every title in the catalog. As I'm not one of the most widely known authors, I haven't received any promotion, and neither has some good titles of the catalog, written by promissing cuban young authors. Back to semi-good news: the game demo is almost ready. I'm just trying to explore all the possibilities to host it in Google Play instead of somewhere else. I t...

Last august a good old friend passed away. Was a tough season for me, for many reasons, and receiving news of his death was another reason to feel sad. I decided to honor him playing a bit of Heroes of Might and Magic, a really old TBS game he liked a lot. I was a fan of it too, I even had a Linux version, created by Loki Games. HoMM is fun, but I have a serious complaint about it that makes me leave it for long seasons: its AI cheats. All game AI cheat in some way, but HoMM AI shameless throws you dozens of enemy heroes with insane armies, when you struggle to build two armies. You destroy two heroes and suddenly you have two more from the same AI player, with large armies, knocking at your door. The AI not only knows what castles are defenseless (Freeciv AI does that), but also gives computer controlled players unlimited supply of gold, I think. Annoying.

There are 34 hours left, and the campaign has been a success: they got $30k, twice what they were asking, with about 1000 backers. My congratulations to the team. The stretch goals achieved ensures player base of operations, crafting system and female player character.  I hope we can play the game next year, as scheduled.

Polygon has publishes a hughe 12-part article about vide o games in Cuba. Twelve long articles cover lots of topics, so I would omit detailing all of them here. Head to the intro and read all of them.

A bit late, but here is it: I have been trying to post this since I found it two weeks ago, but some connection problems prevented me from doing it. Enjoy!

One of the problems that comes with being a writer, is that you start analyzing everything you read. Sometimes you think you would have written it in a different way, or simply you see a pattern: this guy is going to die , or this is going to end this way . Yesterday I finished Deus Ex: Mankind divided, one of the titles I wanted to play last year. Took me a bit to get it, just to find that my hardware is not enough and I had to avoid using weapons: impossible to aim with only 15-18 frames per second. I urgently need a better video card, and a PSU to feed it. The game itself is not bad, the only complaint I have is about the story. Deus Ex felt like a bit short to me, with a quite basic plot. Except for a couple of decisions (do this or that, not both), the dialogs are mostly useless cinematics that provide information at the cost of wasting gameplay time, and do not add any complexities to the storyline. And why do I expected a better story? Well, because Deus Ex is an RPG, de...

I want to play an RPG. The problem is that there are not many choices. I want something like The Witcher, Dragon Age, or Mass Effect (the first one, before they reduced RPG elements to bare minimum). Lately, large studios are avoiding the genre, and we are forced to rely on indies to get titles that really go back to the roots. The old school RPG is a risk for the big companies, too much work, for a not big enough market. They insist on saturating the market with disposable FPS, and they think that implementing silly features like fights in zero gravity or more Quick Time Events they are being innovative. It is time to face the truth: an FPS is just about following a linear story and shooting at everything, no matter how much you try to disguise it. We only have a couple of studios who dare to face the challenge: Bioware and CD Projekt RED, and their titles are like Halley comet: one each 75 years. Please don't mention Bethesda, with Fallout 4 they proved that they are taking a ...

Saviour, our first indie game, has started its crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo . Official site haven't been updated, so I didn't knew about it. They have reached $6861 and the goal is $10,000, so, I guess they will succeed. Anyway, if you can, support them! They are facing hughe challenges, as game development is still a sort of mine field in Cuba.

Savior , the first cuban indie game, got featured in an article published in one of the major official news site, Cubadebate.cu. There are no precedents, as far as I remember, because games without any educative components are a sort of taboo for the official media, except for highlighting how bad are they for children. Even when the cuban public can't contribute to the upcoming crowdfunding  campaign, this opens the possibility of more indie projects getting big exposure to the public. The authors agree that cuban players will probably get a pirated copy, and they are totally ok with that. The crowdfunding campaing, on IndieGoGo, will start in October, so, stay tuned, because I will let you know.

Fallout 4 is the source of hot flamewars in NMA forums, usually between old guys who played original titles, like me, and some new generation players. If you want to see people really angry, go there and post saying that Fallout 4 is the best game ever, and that 1 and 2 are boring turn based games. Let's face it: Fallout 4 is not a good Fallout game. Its oversimplification of the RPG system totally destroyed any relation of the title with previous games; it is just something different! The story is not that good and Radiant AI system sucks very bad. It is not even a  good RPG or game at all, ranking as a mediocre one from every point of view. At least, of my view. Fallout 3 was a bit dull and far from being the most brilliant game in the saga, like a mentally retarded younger brother,  but still was a good RPG. New Vegas, despite having to work on top of the foundations set by Fallout 3, was an excellent RPG and a good Fallout. I like Bethesda games like Oblivion and Sk...

Maybe it is because I started following E3 conferences recently: since last year, but I have the impression that this year is boring. The conferences revisit the same games presented in 2015, and even games already launched, just to talk about minimal content releases. So far I have seen EA Play, a totally insipid presentation with gameplay videos composed of a frantic succession of planes, to make us think that Titanfall 2 multi player is fun, or show really very little gameplay of Battlefield 1. Bethesda E3 conference was not impressive neither, and Ubisoft was saved perhaps by South Park: The fractured but whole . They even needed a lot of people to jump to scenery to tell us how fun is Watch Dogs 2 . The only thing that changes from one year to another are the indie games under the umbrella of large studios and maybe a new title, the other 80% is a little variation of the previous E3. And that 20% not always make worth the time spent watching an hour of boring presentation. ...

This time with Deathtrack, a racing game. In Deathtrack you drive an armed car through some circuits, trying to beat your opponents (who are also armed). I was a real expert on this game, capable of winning with any car (there were 3 available) without upgrading anything, except for the engine, maybe. Yet, seems that age hinders my gaming abilities and now it is really hard for me to complete the track among the 2-3 first places. Please share, and like! And perhaps there will be another retro video in a couple of weeks.