You know that your team is doing great work when they take an IP without the typical elements related to the entertainment world and turn it into an awesome game.

In advergames, you often face the dilemma of having to choose between “shipping bland cheap games and cash the check as soon as possible” versus “creating fun experiences that will likely go unseen by the client”. The second option is more expensive, thus reducing your profit, and will make you argue with the client endlessly because you are focusing on gameplay rather than on stuff like “adding more logo”. Still, HeavyBoat does the right thing (IMHO) and works towards always creating truly fun games. This is not simply  a motto to pitch to clients, but a genuine way of finding meaning in our business.

This recently released chicken snack advergame (yeah!) is as a vote of confidence in doing things the right way.

Go play!

When you fire someone in your company it’s because management failed in at least two things.

1. Failed in the screening process
2. Failed to explain the organization’s culture, that’s assuming you even had one

I strongly believe if we can succeed in these two steps we’d never need to sack anyone.

It often takes you a long time to take yourself seriously.

I’ve loved music and videogames since I was a kid; no surprise there. But I’ve never seriously considered anything close to a “career” in any of those fields. After all, I’m not a videogame professional and I’m not a musician. How can I be? I never really studied games or music, and going simply by instinct doesn’t sound very serious to me, which -being a “serious person”- is a sort of thing that does matter.

On the other hand, my pals at Heavy Boat are professionals in the videogame world. Some of them -gasp- even studied this stuff! And yet, sometimes it feels they don’t take their achievements very seriously either. We tend to minimize our little feats, it seems. After all, we’re just playing, right? How can you take seriously something that’s fun?

In the end, what we did do to move forward was take each other seriously.

I started as a kinda-regular visitor to the Heavy Boat office back when it was no more than a single small room. Friends and relatives crammed in there together to celebrate the one-year anniversary, toasting under a cloud of mild amazement that it had all survived that long. It was also quite crowdy when we raised our plastic disposable glasses to commemorate the second anniversary, but the place was now considerable larger, as was the number of Heavy Boat employees. You could say I was one of them from the start, but I’d always been the man who wasn’t there; as there was obviously no need for an in-house sound designer. When and if that need came true, then they’d better hire a professional… we’d taken this little experiment quite far, so whenever the time came to get serious, then I should step out and let the grownups take over.

There’s even more room and people in Heavy Boat now, only a few months after the two year celebration. Heck, there’s even enough room for me coming in, doing my stuff in part-time fashion, and coming back home to the rest of my activities. Looking back we have more than 10 games under our belts, and from my little corner of responsibilities, I think you could say they at least sound… decent. Some of them might even sound quite good, which -come to think of it- must imply that I’ve have actually studied videogames and music in some unorthodox fashion, ‘cause… where does all this come from, then?

So that’s probably the thing. They’ve taken me seriously, I’ve taken them seriously; but now that after more than two years I should probably start talking about us (yikes), well… then maybe what we’ve all always done was to treat our work that way. After all, this is serious business.

Which doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.

Guillermo Crespi

Screenwriter, Professor, and bonafide Heavyboater.

Stop rubbing your eyes, it is another game and yes, it looks awesome. Go fetch!

CartoonNetwork IP’s games keeps growing around here, and there are more to come.This time is a revamped version of one of the first titles we developed back in 2010 when we were just starting sailing this boat. It’s been a long road since then and this was kind of a fun time travel.

Special thanks to Jeremias Babini and Guille Crespi! Their talent and OCD made this game what it is!

You can play it here! Go shoot some meatballs.

——-
Update. Someone with very accurate aiming did this map. Cool. Found it on the TotalDramaWiki 

Two months ago CartoonNetwork published five games on their new mobile site, and HeavyBoat was there developing the titles with loving care. It was a fun project to work on, five games with four different IP on two technologies. Good times.

It was our first time with HTML5 and it tuned out pretty well. Both “Toonix Tap!” and Ben10′s “Extreme training” were developed in HTML5 and they look and play awesome. So, if you happen to have an iPhone or iPad, give it a try on the CartoonNetwork mobile site.
If you have an Android phone or tablet, don’t get too upset, you can play another three great games: “Volcano Scape”, “Gumball dodger” and “Sword fighter”.

Start playing!

All in all, working on those five games was a great game development experience for the whole team. The coding minds of HeavyBoat will be writing about HTML5 soon enough.

Cheers!

Having a clear and informative log can serve for many things: finding bugs, the culprit of a change or just for the fun of reading it in an orderly fashion. In order to achieve that clearish log I’m using a handful of extensions, each one of them for a given scenario.

Scenario 1: Automatic merges

If you’re using a distributed version control system, like git or mercurial, sometimes you’ll find that the majority of merges don’t contribute to the story being told, they are just automatic merges messages.

But, instead of merging I use the rebase extension like this: hg pull --rebase and by doing so I’ll have sequential information instead of branches.

Scenario 2: Wip messages

Another common scenario is when I’m in the middle of a feature and a teammate pushes something I need in order to finish it. Here, instead of committing a lame “wip” message, pull and commit again I use the shelve extension. This does the trick of saving my work in progress in a virtual shelve, and then I can:

Scenario 3: Recovering wrong commits

Sometimes I just forget to add some file to a commit or the commit is just plain wrong. What I do here is to use the rollback command to revert my working copy to the exactly same state as if the commit never happened, and then you can add or modify whatever you want and commit correctly.

Scenario 4: Cherry-picking commits

Sometimes when I’m in a middle of a new feature I find a bug, I squish it and keep going. The thing here is what message should I write on my commit, should I mention the fix or not? What about if I could pick the modifications I’ve made and commit several times? That’s when the record extension came in handy. With it you can visualize which diff chunk you want to add to the commit log. This way you can cherry-pick which ones you want to be part of one commit and which parts belong to another one, therefore differentiating the bug fix from the new feature.

Once again it’s been very quiet around here, the blog I mean. I keep telling myself that I will update this thing more often, and all I do is forget about it. Too much work, must build, iterate and ship those games! And in the meanwhile, no one knows what we do here. Sad story.

But no use in complaining, so let’s do a recap of the past months.

-A series of minigames developed for CartoonNetwork’s mobile site were published two weeks ago. You didn’t knew? Maybe because we didn’t tell you! No social networking Twinkie for us!
-About to launch a new soccer card game.
-Working hard on our first iPad game. It should be on the appStore by August.
-More HeavyBoaters! Fabian García, a veteran game developer jumped in not long ago. Pure awesomeness.
-New website on the works, should be up before June.

I’ll make a post about those minigames sometime this week. In the meantime, go check out the CartoonNetwork mobile site and give it a try. You’ll see three games from an Android device, and another two from an iPhone.

Thanks for not cleaning us out of your RSS feed yet.

Continuing from the previous post I’d like to write something about how we got the AI to play the best card from its hand.

The logic behind this is to give each playable card (and possible action) a value. Each value needs to be in the same scale so you can compare each card’s value, so the higher the better.

This technique is comparable to the one artificial chess players use: each piece has a given value, but it also depends on its position on the board and the game’s context. Luckily for me our card game is not that deep, but this kind of logic still applies.

Mini closing rant: The beauty of the lost art of reading technical books is that you can get ideas of how to do stuff. That’s something copy-paste coders will never do. Understanding how things get done gives you leverage on how to make a better game.

1- This will be incredible, best game ever. Tons of features, fast development, lets imagine the sequel!

2- This is boring, I’m working like hell and can’t see progress.

3- Fuck this shit. I have a new idea.

It’s inevitable, you can’t go around it. The three stages are there and you are going to encounter each one on your way to a finished product. My tip: don’t try to avoid it, it will only be a waste of energy. Say “Hello, how are you? Sorry I can’t stay to chat… I’m in a hurry” and keep walking.

Don’t ever think your next project will miss one of the three stages.

We are on stage two as I write this, and it sucks.