Hello again!

As promised, today I’ll present a more complete review of what we’ve seen in Rio during the SBGames. Yesterday we had our weekly meeting and basically discussed about the Symposium. Undoubtedly the most important aspect of our participation in the event was the networking we did there: game industry consultants, the Brazilian Ministry of Culture (MinC), publishers incubating programs, fellow developers, students and researchers. Secondly we agreed that the panels, as Bruno said three days ago, were the highlights of the event. Two of them, on Game Development Education and Governmental Policies, promoted some good discussion, but sadly also highlighted some misconceptions that are still deeply stuck in the minds of many in the Brazilian Game Industry and Educational System. Some of these include: the belief that is by trying to do the “Next Halo” – as put by Jason Della Rocca – that new developers will prevail, that there is no opportunity in remaining independent and in small business, that games should be viewed as simple entertainment industry goodies, that the artistic aspect of a game is limited to it’s visual aesthetics, that sound design is something alien to game development, that Game Design has more affinities to Product Design than with Chess, and so on. But don’t worry, as a coin has two faces there’s always the bright side. We discovered that the MinC has a very interesting opinion of Games and their artistic value, found some small developers and starter teams with some nice ideas and made some good acquaintances. Jason’s keynote was a very interesting and provoking exposition. Talking about the trends and the innovative cycles that permeates our industry, Jason urged the Brazilian developers to ignore the mainstream box (big budget, big teams, blockbuster AAA titles) and look for other ventures (indie, casual, advergames, etc.) to flourish. We hope that those wise words will be heard by the Brazilian developers.

Other remarkable pieces of the Symposium were the Indie Game Festival and the VideoGame Art Exhibition. Despite the short time we had to appreciate all the material in them, both seem to be great initiatives and had some good material to present. The sad part is the huge disparity of the contents. The Art Exhibition presented some concept arts and visual assets with artsy aesthetics (although in general the final assets tend to completely destroy the most beautiful and experimental concepts trying to look “realistic”), a nice character design competition (with both good ideas and childish-awesome-super-ultra-characters) and specially good exemplars of games with artistic meaning, such as the indies Passage, Gravitation and I Wish I Were The Moon. On the other hand, the games in the Indie Festival, as we were able to percieve them, lacked in general the deeper meaning and potential to transform a player through reflection and/or more experimental mechanics that are among the key features of many indie games done around the world. Many of the games in the Indie Festival had more garage-made-like, low budget features, and a clear desire to be a mainstream game, instead of focusing on innovative and experimental ideas, creative freedom or meaningful experiences. Once again we spot the evilness of the “Next Halo” Syndrome, even small teams tend to believe that the best way to go is, with a team of less than 20 people and a small budget, try to do something that will compete with EA, Ubisoft and Activision-Blizzard. So, remember Jason’s words and let’s start thinking out of the box or, even better, show us that there’s already more than meets the eye in the Brazilian industry. As I said in the first lines of the post, the greatest treasure of the Symposyum was networking, and people we met in this and the past SBGames give us hope that the second option is true. Some of them are our friend Guilherme Xavier and his team from Donsoft, the developers of the great winner of the Festival, the promising Capoeira Legends.

So, creative minds, bold designers, indie developers from Brazil, we call you all, we ask you to show yourselves!

So you heard that in 2016 we’ll have the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Pretty cool, uh? But 2016 remains a year far far away by now. For what that matters, the next big thing in Rio is SBGames 2009, between October’s 8th and 10th. The Brazilian Symposium on Games and Digital Entertainment is in it’s 8th edition and this time will focus in the so called Convergence issue.

I’ve been in the last edition, Belo Horizonte 2008, and the event turned out to be much more interesting than I’ve anticipated. A good surprise indeed. So this time all the Adugans are going, and the expectations are considerably high. Aduge will be flying to Rio this week and we hope to send you some news from the new Olympic city soon.

Wanderer above the Mists - Caspar David Friedrich

So, we said we have a new project. We even posted a production update of it. But… we still didn’t present it properly did we? Well, let’s correct that. Presenting: Tsar Project.

Most people upon contact with a new game simply ask “what kind of game is this?” and are satisfied by the fairly superficial answer. Simply put, Aduge’s current project is a challenging stealth game set on XVI century Russia. We could go on and on about the game’s mechanics and features, but this wouldn’t present Tsar Project more than it’s outermost layer. To most players this would do, but the target audience of our studio isn’t most players. When it comes to Aduge’s projects the more correct question we’d like to hear is “what is this game about?”. This type of question let us explain why Tsar Project is a challenging stealth game set on XVI century Russia which is the heart of the “problem”, so to speak.

Now, getting finally to the point of this post: Tsar Project as a game is about aloneness and patience. It’s not just a story about aloneness and patience, it’s a game about these concepts. This means that the game itself through it’s mechanics and challenges deals with these concepts.

Aloneness not in the sense of loneliness, but in the sense of distancing an individual from a group, up to the point he becomes a complete outsider. In Tsar’s case, the player will be immersed on the main character’s mind which is alien to the universe of the game itself, hence the feeling of aloneness. Other supernatural traits of this main character contribute to the distancing and the feel of aloneness, but the nature of these traits we leave to another opportunity.

This is a game about waiting and that is what makes it difficult in the first place. The more reckless or hasteful the player is, the more mistakes he will eventually make and this will compromise his/her task. It’s a true stealth game, where active push and aggressive behaviors end up biting the player’s hand in the long run. Waiting, contemplating, looking for patterns, reading behaviors, these are actions that rewards the player more than his skill at pressing buttons at the right time.

That being said, this is only the conceptual guide that drives the game development and design. But that is not the “right” meaning of Tsar Project and we still encourage players to play and interpret the game the way they want to. See you next post!

So yesterday we’ve told you about the Tsar Coffee. Now for the hard work: it keeps going on. Marcel just returned from the 4th Information Design International Conference in Rio, in the Tsar Project I’m in the last steps of the Character Design creative process, Game Design and Plot are tidying up the core events of the game, Vermon is working dutifully to implement a fine a.i. pathfinder algorithm, and Sound Design just finished it’s creative guidelines.

As the new fortnight beings we’re overlooking the administrative aspects of the studio and will go back to the Kremlin works tomorrow. And so those are the news from the last few days.

See you shortly!

March 2009: Aduge starts developing it’s new game, code-name Tsar Project.
April this year: We move to our new headquarters in the Azuri Building
May: The studio turns 2yo.
July: The Adugans buy an espresso machine
September: Still no welcome party? How can it be???

Not anymore. One week ago, on September’s 8th, the so long waited Aduge’s Coffee Party took place in the three rooms of the Azuri Building currently used by the studio; being them the Headquarters Proper, Sun’s Bedroom and The Kitchen. We’ve had some of our closest friends, many types of special Brazilian coffee grains, and obviously, games.

Ingrid and Marcel competently took the charge of coffee tenders, and, among normal espressos and cappuccinos, prepared some interesting variants such as machiattos, nutella mochas and our exclusive brigadeiro coffee. We had breads, pies, cakes and snacks provided by our beloved guests. And for the games, N64′s Super Smash Bros. and Mario Tennis and CPS3′s Street Fighter 3 Third Strike (tough we don’t have a proper CPS3 machine, yet, we do the best we can with an emulator). The most remarkable challanges were undoubtedly the 4 players Smash Bros. ones.

We would like to thank our amazing guests and certify you that it was a real pleasure and reason of great happiness to us all to see you around here, so,come back soon! And for those that haven’t visited the studio yet, be sure, we are awaiting your visit!

So we are back to work! And back to classes at Uni! After a month of vacation, some trips and field-researches (of which I will talk later on) it’s time to go back to the good and loved Adugan projects and the not so loved but necessary classes. Great.

NOT

Two days ago the Unis closed their doors. All of them. The education facilities are closed here in Curitiba until, they say, August’s 10th, but probably later. The reason?, you may ask, it’s the fear of Influenza A H1N1. The weather around here is terrible in the last few days, cold and moistly, and the numbers are growing fast. I should remember that I do live in an apartment in the old centre of the city, next to UFPR’s Design campus and it’s, oh!, Hospital! Yeah, the one place in Curitiba were most of the Influenza cases are being observed. By the way, that apartment is also Aduge’s Headquarters. Outside our windows it’s easy to spot people walking down the street wearing their panic (flu) masks, it’s sort of uncomfortable, to say least.

The classes are suspended and we can feel a heavy air around, but our work keep rolling. Mostly of it is being done alone, the Adugans staying comfortably at their homes, and here the beauty of the web is on our side. Tools like IRC, Google Docs, Gtalk, Gmail, SVN, Wikimedia, all of which are being used a lot during the workdays. We’ve passed through a similar situation when I was living in São Paulo and Marcel in Köln, however the funny (or not) part is that this time we’re all here in Curitiba less than 8 miles apart. I believe that at least we’ll keep our weekly meetings here in the HQs, but even if not, don’t worry, everything is just according to the schedule. This will eventually pass and we give our best wishes of hope (and good health!) to the world. This will pass. After all, we must be here to watch 2012 come.