Introduction

Well, technically my first game was a kind of local multiplayer Snake clone I made during a Summer when studying Computer Science. But it was just for fun. EggOrama was the first game I actually released in an attempt to become a professional game developer. But let’s start from the beginning.

A little bit of history

I always loved video games, and wanted to create them since I was a child. That’s the main reason why I decided to study Computer Science (there were no specific game development degrees back then – but anyway, I wanted to become a versatile computer engineer). At the beginning of 2011, my first job as a software engineer ended, and I knew it was the time to try and create a game for a living. Back then, smartphones were becoming more and more popular, there were some pretty successful small games designed specifically for them, and it was easy to publish something on those platforms, so I thought that was the perfect opportunity for me to step into the game development scene.

The great dilemma: the tooling

The first question one must ask themselves is “What tool or engine do I use to create the game?”. It was a kind of dilemma in my case. There were less options than nowadays when it came to choosing a game engine with low or no budget, but still, there were some. I briefly explored a few tools, but chose none of them. I loved computer engineering and programming, and particularly, graphics programming. I (sort of) needed to make the whole thing from scratch, to have that experience at least once in my life. So, I ended up deciding to create my own game framework. Of course, this decision came with some drawbacks, that we will explore later. I also know that some other devs may consider this a dumb decision. But despite all that, I don’t regret it.

The second great dilemma: the platform

If I was going to build the game framework from scratch, probably the main drawback was the increased difficulty to release the game on multiple platforms, because the “application layer”, as I call it, had to be coded for each of them. The game framework was designed to cover as much as possible in a platform-independent way, but the application layer will always be platform-dependent. Despite being relatively “thin”, the application layer involves a considerable amount of work, so I had to focus on a platform to start with. I chose iOS, because at that time, it was usual to buy games on iOS, while Android users were more used to free games, and monetising them seemed more complicated. But, the idea was always to make it multi-platform. In fact, back then, Windows Phone was still a thing and I was considering it as well.

The team

At that point I didn’t even know what the game was going to be about, but one thing was for sure: I wanted to make a 2D game, probably structured in short stages, and probably with realistic physics, like Angry Birds or Cut the Rope. I knew I could potentially code the whole game by myself, but at the very least, I needed a graphics designer and a music composer in my team. I had no budget so I looked for people who would want (and who would be able) to be part of the team so any revenue we might get from the game would be split among the team members.

I first talked to Héctor Pardo, a friend of mine, and suggested him to be the music composer. Together we started brainstorming how the game could be. And while I started to build proofs of concept to test what we could do, he started composing some music that might fit into the kind of games we were thinking of.

Before finding a graphics designer we had an approximate idea of how the game would turn out to be. But we needed someone for the visuals. I found the one in an event called Japón en Granada (Japan in Granada): Javier Jiménez. He liked the idea and joined the team. He quickly started to make some designs that I could use to prototype. He not only made the graphic design and all the textures we needed for the game, but also contributed to the character designs – names and background.

Programming was a huge task in this project. It quickly became apparent that I needed some help coding it, in order to progress more quickly. We talked to be José Palma, one of the best programmers I knew, about the project. He liked the idea and joined the team. With this, the team was complete.

To Be Continued

If you reached this point, thank you for reading. It is a short post, but I wanted to focus it on the origins of EggOrama, and leave more technical stuff for future posts. Also, it was difficult to prepare this blog post, as finding old resources linked to the beginning of EggOrama’s development was hard (and there are some resources I couldn’t even find). In any case, I hope you enjoyed it. In the next post, I’ll cover more technical stuff. See you there!