Yeah, I know… long time, no writing. 2011 started great, didn’t finish that well for a lot of reasons, mostly unrelated to Vortix but we are catching up and have some stuff rolling. Here’s a quick update.

As you might have noticed in the last post Marco and Pedro are working on some cool stuff that involves kicking, punching and 3D!

In the meantime I’ve been messing around with some cool stuff too. First and on top of our priorities is a new game that if it is as fun to play as it is challenging to put, should be a great game. I’ll post my thoughts on some of the challenges we will face as we walk the dev path.

But that’s not all… Doing R&D has become almost a hobby of mine. Weird to have a hobby that involves coding when I’m not coding but it’s fun and I admit that I like to maintain codebase and have codebits ready to evolve when needed.

I’ve played around with client-server stuff, dual-screen stuff, multi-platform stuff. Right now multi-platform is my main focus and haXe and NME the weapons of choice. This means that I have a lot of duplicated code but it’s getting pretty!

And this is the quick (or not) update and the promise of more blog posts with less interval.

Hi everyone, long time no see. Vlad here!

We never had one person to take care of our sound effects and music. Sometimes we hired, sometimes we got some sound packs and both me and Marco have made some music for some of our stuff. But the truth is that we were never 100% satisfied with the results.

When Marco was producing Hajime, we had the opportunity to work with Francisco Furtado. The result was amazing. Hajime is a much better game with all that vibrant music and amazing sound design. We spoke about future games and projects and Francisco agreed to cooperate with us.

After Hajime came The Adventures of Dear Explorer and with it a fantastic work and environment was created from the dungeons and sound and music carved in each wall, skeleton, boss… it’s almost unfair that we don’t let the rest of the world know about Francisco’s work. It is truly a work of love and high quality.

So I invite you all to visit his page at Bandcamp: http://franciscofurtado.bandcamp.com/ where you can check the OST for both games and much more.

Cheers and thanks Francisco, hope we can do more and more of these.

Talk to you all soon,
Vlad out!

Projects

Lot of stuff happened… Hajime finished and was sold, we worked on Warlords 2 and Async Racing with Ben Olding, we finished two major contracts and started a couple of other ones.

I must say that project wise I have split feelings. On one hand we did put a lot of stuff out. On the other hand most of our time was used with client IPs, which can be heaven or hell, but never our heaven or hell.

Couple of other small victories I reckon… not entirely relevant for the company has a whole.

Business

I don’t know the exact figures of 2010 yet, but I’m pretty much sure we grew more than 100%. This would mean that 2010 was the year of our stability. While this is somewhat true it is not that black and white. Right now my predictions are that we will match 2010 in the 1st quarter of 2011 and still I’m not happy. My biggest concern is related to passive income. We have not yet found a way to have a steady passive income and the rest simply has too many variables, plus taxes…

Yes, 2010 was good, but we are growing and in a very decisive year in VGS, so we need to really be less dependant of overall market… stuff…

VGS Most Valuable Player

I bet we are the only company in the world with more than two people where 50% of the people are named Pedro Santos. While none of ‘our’ Pedro Santos are in fact and legaly employees of Vortix, both of them have the same spirit of the three guys that started up Vortix: they put their effort into something and make it happen, which is a rare thing nowadays. In my opinion ‘The Pedros’ share the MVP place in 2010.

The Flash Game Space MVP

I really have to make this special note here… There’s this Ben guy better known has benologist. He bootstrapped something we know as Playtomic, which is pretty much awesome and that I won’t describe because you either know it or you should follow the link. When devs were bitching and whinning about blocked links he put pressure on portals and created Portal Blacklist.

And still managed to release games… no doubt, my personal choice for Flash Game Space MVP.

And one last word

Marco, my partner, friend and brother. You are one in a million mate. If we find the other 6000 that are like you, we’ll rule the world! Keep up the good work!

Pre is a great coder and a great example of a entrepreneur. We met him and two friends of his when they launched Orion’s Belt, a MMO browser game. The game got some visibility and won a some accolades and it resulted in getting the three of them contracted by a company to proceed with the game development of version 2. Marco did the graphics for the game’s 2nd version already as a Vortix Games gig.

I think everyone felt that sooner or later something would happen that involved people from Vortix and Orion’s Belt. It just did. Pre decided to make a big change in his life and pursue his own goals and business and started a project with us that has nothing to do with anything that anyone has seen from us. It is highly inspirational and motivational to find people that embrace risk, just like me, Marco and Diogo did and go for it. It is even more motivational because what we are trying to achieve is the original plan that brought Vortix Games together in the first place.

So give your warm welcome to Pre and wish him and us luck for the project ahead of us.

So life is treating us so-so. A couple of contracts are approaching the end and after speaking with Marco we concluded that we won’t be doing contract work for a good while. We have too many good stuff right now to work on that has caught way too much dust.

Looking back over the past few months, a lot of what we did was neglected because of contracts. They were alright in a way, some for the money, some for the knowledge, some for something else. But unlike our own games, there’s always a part that is missing, regardless of how good the project is. We feel that has to stop and that what moves us forward is our ability to pursue what we want: pride and happyness.

I also feel that both can go hand in hand with stability and stability is what we found in the past months. We need to step up and do our thing. We need to improve what we did for us.

Project wise, that means that we have to put Hajime on FGL, we have to decided what we want for M:A:D and we have to have time for our most promising game. Code wise this means that I have to reflect if we want to keep Bold Pixel public considering that the current version suits our needs more than it suits the initial user friendliness. I strive to keep things simple, to impose convention over configuration as a standard. Right now I’m not that sure that this will fit developers needs to the point that BPE is helpful.

We’ll see about that in the next couple of weeks. Thanks for reading and the therapy session.

Vlad out!

Some months ago I had the opportunity to meet Servet Ulas through FGL forums and chat where he is known by the username Pixelful.

So after an informal chat Servet showed interest in doing is internship with us, which naturally filled us with pride. But since it’s easier to be said than done, we waited for some news and when the news arrived it was official: everything was ready for the internship to start and he has been working on a project since last week.

I have an admiration for people that make things happen and Servet did that, he took care of everything so that he could do a project with us.

I’m glad and feel fortunate that developers want to work with us. I hope that this experience is a rich one for Servet and productive for us. First steps sure make it sound that way.

Cheers!

Collaboration with Arne G. Strout

It really felt great to hear about a developer wanting to build on BPE to make it go further. That’s what I felt when I read Arne G. Strout blog post about BPE. Under the spirit of open-source, Arne offered a great deal of thought and ideas regarding our little framework.

In the meantime, v2 was already under way so we exchanged some ideas and I’m pleased to announce that Arne will be collaborating in v2 development.

Box2D integration…

Wrapping Box2D in a minimalist Bold Pixel Engine kind of package is no easy treat, but it’s done. It doesn’t offer the full potential of Box2D yet and it’s not integrated with blit, but it will and it’s working great.

Toolkit changes

Manager has been removed from the toolkit package and it is now the manager of all the engine. Again this is related to a minimalist approach. Box2D wrapping needed information about framerate and we could get it from the main movieclip that is passed to the manager. This also offers other possibilities like controlling mouse focus, quality, yada yada yada.

I’m cooking a Button manager. I know most developers don’t really like SimpleButtons, but I actually do! What I was lacking was a central point to control those… it’s being taken care of.

Scene and Music will now have transitions. This is possible mostly due to Greensock tweening library, which Vortix Games now officially supports by becoming a member of the Club Greensock.

And that’s it!

There won’t be many news in the next weeks, since we have a lot of work (remember that we kinda disappear when we are just starting up a contract project) and the rest of the bunch, like the Japan game, Bold Pixel Engine and so on.

Projects

We are now in the final ‘meters’ of a long race. This race was a nice and big contract project we are just just just about done with. As it is approaching the end we have more opportunities in front of us.

Less than a week ago all we had was this current project, the japanese themed game being coded by Pedro that Marco has spoke about lately and Mechs and Drones in a full stop. It was only natural that our option would be to pick up where Mechs and Drones was left, but suddenly another possible contract landed on our hands and the doubts start.

We’ve passed the startup phase with no investment capital but our own work, which is a huge victory. I wonder what we could have done with venture capital… We are currently in the consolidation stage, so these crossroads are always a doubt. Go for the stability of the project or the chance of a game like Mechs and Drones?

Bold Pixel Engine

A lot of stuff planned for v2. We’re implementing Box2D in it, plus camera and more and more behaviors. We will migrate all time based stuff to Greensock’s Tween Platform.

With this a lot of questions appear also…

Will the engine stay modular? By this I mean, right now I’m not dependent of the blit engine, but to implement Box2D I have to decide if only the blit engine will be served by the physics wrapper. I want to write a simple collision system. Should I implement it with sensors in Box2D? Or create a separate one?

I can even go backwards… should the current animation of the blit engine be able to be applied to MovieClips? And the list could go on and on…

I know what will decide all this: simplicity and minimalism. Whatever makes Bold Pixel Engine be more simple and minimalist will probably be chosen.

Sorting it out

Monday marks the beginning of March. I’m betting it will be a defining month for us this year. For starters the japan game will walk the extra mile in terms of content, quality and so on. Then, depending on what we will be doing, a lot of extra effort is needed… that’s what I think right now. We’ll see how it goes.

By the way… thanks for reading

There was this artist dude, who we will call Marco for no particular reason. He had his share of game development work done, mostly for startups and community contests. He had a gig set to go work on a game development company that was doing some nice stuff over the web.

Then there was this coder dude, who we will call Diogo for no particular reason. He was a student, a game development enthusiast. Somewhere between the geek and genius but with the aspect of a normal human being.

And finally there was this consultant dude, who we will call Vlad for no particular reason, who had a lot of experience managing contracts and projects, that loved game development, that had a crush for game design but that the best he could do was a text game in high-school and all the other gamedev projects failed miserably.

Well this Vlad fellow was tired of being a ‘suit’ so he started to read and do some game design stuff. One day he was frustrated of not being able to kick start a game because his coding ability was far lost for more than 10 years where Pascal was the king of the hill. A friend of his whose name is James said the the magic sentence that triggered hell: “If you ever coded, just pick code again and hire an artist.” And so Vlad did and he was lucky enough to meet Marco.

They worked on a game that was so bad it would never be understandable, Vlad’s fault by the way… but a friendship was born and that’s where it all started. Later on they were making plans about a lot of stuff but all around a game development studio. They then picked a project and started working on it.

In the meantime they decided to try to support several projects. Oh the failure… it was rather easy to find talented people, the problem was that talent and hard work rarely meet so projects failed one after the other. Until one day Vlad opened his mailbox and there it was… an email from Diogo, one of the many that Vlad and Marco met, saying that he was able to work hard and so he did.

Some months later, February 13th 2008, they all met and registered what is known has Vortix Games Studio. Their first game was almost finished and some weeks later they were able to show it to the world.

The rest is written somewhere along the lines of this blog. But the bottom line of this story is that Diogo, Marco and Vlad did it and February 13th will always be remembered as the day that they made it official to the world.

Vortix Games Studio is alive and kicking!