Amaweks company

Some of my motivations in developing this game

Something that bothers me a little in current action games is that they have too much text (or speaches). I believe that for you to build the narrative of a game of this type (either platform, shooting, etc.) the text is merely incidental. Another thing that bothers me is the excess and exclusivity of "game universe" references: games that only refer to other classic games, with little dialogue with culture in general, and become a caricature of stereotypes of their source of inspiration.

But let us learn from the classics, take a look at the example of Super Mario from NES: the game has very little text, mostly just the famous phrase "Thank you Mario But the princes is in another castle!". Of course, in part, the producers made this due to the little storage space technology of the time. But that does not stop us from realizing that the text is not necessarily one of the most exclusive properties of the game as a language (not in action games in general). So when creating the assets of my game, their environment, characters, their motivations and interactions with this world, I tried to translate this contents in images and sounds for the game.

Another observation is about the choice of style: a game that copies the main mechanics of Mario game. In part, I made the challenge of adapting the ARGS (Arcade Game Studio) to a game like that. The ARGS was not planned for a game like Mario, so I had to "play" with their functions, the interaction between the "actors", until I reach a mechanic similar to that of Mario. And the other motivation is the simplicity but effectiveness of this type of game as "game". Here, the "game factor" is very interesting: as few buttons (the jump serves both to overcome the scenario obstacles and to kill most of the enemies) and with well-defined interactions (pick up items, break blocks, etc.), the learning curve of the player is much shorter, and he quickly learns what to do, how and when interact with elements on screen, making that his interest in the game itself is not lost in the first minutes.

Finally, the creation of content tried to talk the elements of my repertoire in games (especially Mario), with other repertoires and references of cinema, literature, music. The player may not realize (and are not required to realize), but these things appear in the title, names and look of the characters and items. For the indie scene, my inspiration was "Maldita Castilla", from Locomalito, which does an excellent job in took references of classic games (especially Ghouls and Ghosts), but adds new narrative elements drawn from a literature and historical research. "Maldita Casilla" manage to not become a exaggerated caricature (even more exaggerated than) of Ghols and Ghosts, and updates that game style to an original content.

Well, this was my second attempt to game in which endeavored more, I hope I have at least managed to make a fun game.