Designing games is always a challenge for me. I face every new project thinking “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing”, I don’t know how I even got to this point, seems like I haven’t learned a thing in the last 6 years. But that’s the least of my problems, the really nasty part of designing a game is the middle stage, where you really have to come up with lots of critical decisions, 80% of which you’ll regret in the future. And right now, with the “Toy collector game” I find myself deep in the mud of decisions.

So, let’s exorcise it with a bit of sharing. If you don’t care about game design, you can stop reading here and resume browsing for cute kitten videos.

The core mechanic in this game is an auction house. Your goal is to complete a collection of toys (120 units) and you buy and sell items for a profit on the auction house with the rest of the players. Bare in mind that it’s aimed for an audience that doesn’t really play games, so it has to be extremely easy to get into.

- How to balance the game for novice and pro players when everyone has the same goal (completing the collection)?
- How to add depth to an auction where everyone is dealing with the same items?
- Is a social game with an ending viable?
- Why would you ever want to complete the collection? What’s in it for the player?

As you can see, this are all very basic and fundamental problems. The most important question I must answer is “What the hell are we doing with this game?”, the only answer until now, is “Just trying something new”.

Back to thinking.

We are developing a web-based game aimed to 40 and up year old Argentinians.

There you go. It’s about argentine collectible toys from the 50′s (mainly), it involves simple puzzle solving (really simple) to obtain different toys, auctions to sell them and it’s free to play. Talk about niche? Bam! This is madness.

We are designing a game for someone who doesn’t even know that such thing exists.

I would love to see people who have never been interested in playing a videogame getting involved in this one about toys they’ve almost forgotten. We might create something that trigger a situation where a 50 year old dad says to his son “Did you knew that there are collectable toys games on the internet?”. The hipster son would rolls his eyes trying to come up with a way to explain the Internet (completely) to his father, and you can’t put a price on that.

It’s risky. We may lose some money along the way, but in exchange we are not only following a vision, but learning from actually doing new things, trying it out, taking risks, failing, leading.

Catering to those forgotten by the fan-boy-remake game devs out there is an adventure that we are happy (and scared) to embark on. While we develop beat em up on the side, of course.

Our very own “Jumping Finn Turbo” listed on a Kotaku’s “Best of 2012″ list?

You heard it here first! Stop rubbing your eyes and see for yourself. It’s Tina’s “WTF” pick! There can’t be any better way to describe it!

In our latest project, after a few sprints, we noticed that the velocity achieved so far was below acceptable. In other words: we’re falling behind schedule.

What I tried (and may feel counterproductive at first) was to limit the amount of wip tasks present at any given moment to less than the amount of devs in the team, which requires them to work in pairs for some of the tasks. I think it encourages the team to gain focus in solving the most important tasks first.

The biggest obstacle I’m finding with this approach is that is very hard to break the old habit of working alone. It also affects the work rhythm most people are used to, that is: code something for several minutes, watch something in YouTube, Facebook, twitter, blog, etc.. and then code a little more. Repeat until day is done. Changing your work rhythm is a very stressful exercise, but the results can be marvelous.

Last month we launched the “HeavyBoat Mentoring initiative” in a game dev event in Buenos Aires and it got a great response from the community.

What is it?
It’s the best way we found to add something meaningful to the education of aspiring game devs in our city. We believe that learning occurs while doing, anyone with enough interest can build a game with today’s access to information and tools online. This leaves devs with only one thing missing: a goal. And that’s why we started this thing.

How it works?
We put together a team of 3 aspiring devs (artist, GD, coder) that never met before, give them a deadline and guide them throughout the process of developing a game. During the last two weeks the interested devs sent an email telling us why they wanted to participate, we chose 1 artist, 1 coder 1 game designer and had our first meeting yesterday in the studio!

The goal was to leave the studio with the idea for the game and set the first steps of game development. The final deadline is in three months ,we are gonna meet again every three weeks to check the progress and will guide them by IM and email in the meanwhile. Hopefully, their passion and our guide will end up on a great game getting made!

We hope some incredible individuals and teams will find this experiment a great way to make their first steps into game development.

Will keep you posted about the progress!

“Ben 10 Omniverse” is the new Ben 10 series, airing soon in Cartoon Network worldwide. In “Ben 10 Hack” the players can hack their way into Cartoon Network servers and watch the first 4 episodes one week before release.

Hack away!

I’m kind of a weird person… at first I thought I was born to make social games. I was the only person I knew that openly stated that actually liked those kind of games. I even thought there was much to do and experiment in that area. So my first experience as a game artist was, as you might guess, in a social gaming company.

In the beginning it was great, but as months went by, I started to notice some strange things. Let’s put this in context: some of the biggest social gaming companies that operated here owned their financial success to some big investments, which allowed them to grow from groups of 15 employees to 100 or more in just a couple of weeks.

That hiring rhythm was kind of crazy. Week after week lots of people joined the company, everyone had their own way of working, and once their “area of expertise” got detected, they ended up stuck doing the same thing forever. In my personal experience, whenever I asked for a change I received arguments like “You’re the only one who understands how this task has to be done”, and so on. And even though I started as a junior, in a context where lots of new employees keep appearing out of nowhere it only took me a few weeks to feel like a senior. Months, in these kinds of companies, feel like years…

My expectations of innovating and growing started to fade as I came to understand how rigid the workflow was. There was no space to innovate, or even to object. Don’t misunderstand me, I was not expecting the CEO to hear what I had to say, but the spaces these companies provided to do any kind of suggestions were excel docs and weird and awkward meetings often led by people I’d never met before and who knew nothing about our daily work.

The CEO hearing all my nonsense

We didn’t have professional interaction with other areas such as programmers, animators, etc. We were only expected to draw what we were told to and that was it. I like to call it “the shoe factory” experience.

I won’t even talk about the originality of the games…pff! I was such a dreamer…

As time passed, my expectations migrated from working in well-known social gaming companies to working in a small company doing advergames and casual games. Luckily, I could make it into HeavyBoat!

I’m rediscovering what it felt to take some important decisions. At first I was all like “And what do you think about this?”, and all I got was something like “It’s ok if you think it’s ok. You’re the expert”. It was terrifying. But now I have not only the possibility to handle the art of an entire project by myself; I also found that space to make suggestions I was struggling so much to get in the past. I can even get an answer explaining why my ideas suck! I’ve grown so much, and just in a couple of weeks…

In the end, I’m thinking that it’s not about the kind of games you develop, or even the size of the company. The important thing is to be true to your philosophy and try to do the best to be up to it. And that’s the reason I joined HeavyBoat! Hope my presence will actually make a difference and help to lead us to the right port!

Oh! BTW…my name is Paula! Nice to meet you!

From CartoonNetwork’s blog:

“Attention, Turbo Nerds! Jumping Finn is making the leap to iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. The Ice King has kidnapped Princess Bubblegum (again!), and Finn has to get there fast! Kick, smash, and blast Finn all the way to the Ice Kingdom to rescue the princess. Help Jake, Marceline, Lady Rainicorn, and Blastronaut send Finn flying in Jumping Finn Turbo. ”

Last week CartoonNetwork published “Super Finn Saltarín”, our first game for iOS in Latin America. It climbed in no time to the 3rd place in the top 25 most downloaded apps in Mexico, and recently got to 2nd in Chile, in addition to being ranked 1st in the Games category in both countries! Get it in the appStore!

If you live in NorthAmerica or Europe, the game will be available really soon, so get ready for some nerd butt kicking!

The idea for this game grew from doing a simple porting of our flash game “Jumping Finn” to becoming a complete new game with a variety of extra features, new art, characters, scenarios, sounds and controls. It took many months to develop (much longer than what we’re used to), with new ideas being implemented all the time. Each iteration made the game better and better, until we finally got it done and it’s now sitting there waiting for the players to come and kick some butt! Enjoy!

At this point you are probably thinking that we are just trolling you, that this doesn’t make any sense. No news for several months, and now a series of posts with incredibly fun, beautiful and genre-defining new games??? Of course we know that’s what you are thinking… but we don’t blame you, it’s only natural to mistrust us. Anyway: it’s all true… and tomorrow we’ll have some really big news for you.

This project consists of a series of minigames developed for Cartoon Network’s Latin American new website. Small games specially designed for those multitasking kids that can’t keep their hands quiet! Get some quick fun while a video is loading… or even while you’re watching it!

Start multitasking!

Welcome back to the CartoonNetwork blog, spiced here and there with some HeavyBoat news! Enjoy your stay and while you are here, take a look at HeavyBoat’s new game “Pickle Farmer”. We’ll resume with more CN news in just a moment.

Protect your farm and slash some minions!

Note: even if it looks like it, this is not, I repeat, this is not CartoonNetwork’s blog.