Don’t take my word for it, here it is…

The first one was the logo and it was a bang! No one really expected I actually tattooed our logo. The tattoo artist asked: “What if it goes wrong?” and I answered in a very zen way that “it is the symbol of the path we already travelled.” I got a discount!

Let me tell you that Marco, who I believe was impressed with it, decided that the best thing to do about it was to mock me… it’s a guy’s thing! So he did this:

And the caption reads: “Tattoos – it’s really sissy stuff” but it didn’t end there… Marco just sent me this wonderful image I had completely forgot.

I’m 100% sure but I think this is Diogo’s birthday cake two years ago!

Looking to all these images it strikes me that our logo is a lot how we symbolize how much we care for this project to the point we have it on our desktops like everyone would have I guess… on our avatars like many people would have… but we also have it in our skin, in our every thoughts.

To make a long story short I wanted a cool name for it, mostly because of the directory name. Yes… I’m a fashion victim, code wise case you are wondering… anyway, I was in the middle of a brainstorm and I thought of really cool names, mostly of work of people I admire and that was already done, like Lachhh’s engine, Photonstorm’s Pixel Blitz…

…Crytek’s engine… Unreal… yeah, I was aiming high (or not)…

Then I looked at a chat window I had open with Marco. Both of us have Vortix’s logo with different colors on our Google Talk avatars (which will be another great funny fact by the way) and I rememebered why we have that logo. It is the evolution of a design school project of Marco, which he explained here.

The direct translation of that project is “Naughty Pixel” but I wasn’t really up to use the word “naughty” since it doesn’t really take me to a technology context if you know what I mean and I can only imagine what keywords would search engines index us to. So I looked around for similar words until I found “bold” which I imagine as something strong, determined and hopefully not that bugged, so “bold” it was…

…and Bold Pixel Engine it is…

Vlad out!

Me and Vlad decided to show you our current project. We don’t know how it will evolve (read previous post) but since we like what we see we decided to share it with you and get some feedback.

It’s the first time we are disclosing any info about a yet to release game publicly, so this is kind of a new experience for us.

Game name is Mechs and Drones: Annihilation or M:A:D for short. It’s a real time strategy game and we have been around it for sometime now but in the middle of contracts and even Atomik Kaos 2, it only got the deserved attention in the last couple of weeks.

When I posted about conceptual design, I was talking about M:A:D. Right now we have all structure and unit micro AI working along with path finding. Enemy AI is the current step.

Here’s a huge logo pic, more pics (and screenshots I heard) later on.

See you soon for more M:A:D stuff!

Since it’s Saturday and I’m having a nice relaxed weekend, I decided to start-up a funny fact category, just for kicks.

When I was younger, so much younger than today, I used to play guitar in bars. Usually the evenings ended on some 24/7 establishment that had either hot chocolate or beer, depending on how the night went.

So I was drinking a hot chocolate and a cat approached me. To make the story short, the cat followed me home and was my pet for about two years. I named her Vortix for no particular reason and the same name was later on other things and finally on Vortix Games Studios.

Naughty Pixel

Some years ago, while I was still in design school, I had this project in which I had to create the logo and all the stationary for my future company. I remember thinking I would like to do Web Design and Multimedia stuff. At that point the “naughty pixel” was born.

This logo featured a winking smiley face, tilted. The idea was to give it a friendly “come and play” look.

Years later, VGS was born and while struggling to find the perfect image to represent our vision, we knew we needed a character.

Tests with Vlad's toon

“Vortix” was the name of a character Ricardo was always drawing on any random piece of paper. The idea of a devilish character was appealing, but once reduced to smaller sizes the features and fur were lost, turning it into a blob with eyes. That’s when the naughty pixel was rescued from a dusty desk drawer and brought back to life.

Our first logos

The corners where rounded to remove the harshness of the sharp outline, the wink was removed to make the face clearer and the nose removed for simplicity. This left us with a friendly face but all it did was smile. A couple of months after we settled on the new not-so-naughty-anymore pixel we gave it a small face-lift to help him stand out a bit more as a real thing, instead of just a shape. By adding the tongue we gave it a certain “determination” or “defiance” to it that, while keeping the smile, makes it look like the little pixel is really focused on playing. We also un-tilted it for better use in smaller formats such as icons and avatars.

Final tests and logos

We’re pretty happy with the result!