Gains and Losses in 2016

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I'm pretty sure, I wasn't the only one who had a wild 2016. Much as I'd hate to use an unoriginal description, it really had been a roller coaster ride. It's why this year, I won't be doing my annual goals thing. I hadn't been mindful of my goals lately (except maybe for the "finish at least 2 projects a year" thing), and just let 2016 lead me to wherever. I'm actually thankful to Instagram's #2016bestnine for showing me that there had been a lot of ups, despite all the loved ones I have lost.

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2015 Year in Review

Whew. It has been a long long while since I actually blogged. August 2015, to be exact, and it was a recipe. In any case, I had loved my 2014 so much that my goals for 2015 have actually been whittled down to SIX.




Because I am running a video game development studio, I have no choice but to be social, haha. So that's no longer one of my yearly goals. What remained are the following...

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Indie Game: A Bird Story

Another super backlog. I played this game last year, before I resumed production on my own game (hence the delay in writing this blog entry). A Bird Story comes from the creators of To The Moon and its ending gives a bit of a clue on who's going to be the protagonist for TTM's sequel.

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2014 Year in Review

Since whittling down my goals to 8, I feel like 2014 has become one of my best years ever. I mean, sure, it had snags (megalomaniac ex-lessor included), but the rewards tripled after that experience.

I've decided to make my 8 goals permanent every year. They're flexible enough to keep me motivated in reaching them on or before the end of the year. So these are the status of my 2014 goals:


8. Travel at least twice a year. 
Preferably 1 local and 1 international destination.

One of my teams (Project K) and I went to Sagada to do some research for one of our educational projects. It was my first time to go to Sagada and it was loads of fun! Baguio was awesome, too, since we were able to visit Bencab Museum. More of that story here.

For the second out-of-town trip, boyfie and I attended a wedding in Sta. Rosa. Sure it's not really much of a trip distance-wise (since my parents live in Tagaytay), but it's the first time I actually spent a lot of time in Sta. Rosa. The reception of Sajean and Jov were held at the Chateaux de Paris Grand Clubhouse.

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Indie Games: Millennium Sequels (#2-5)

This review is for all the sequels following Millennium: A New Hope by Indinera Falls. The reason why I thought I should place them all in one space is that I played Millennium 2 to 4 for two days straight. In fact, I finished 2 to 4 in one day. Millennium 5 took me quite a few days of grinding, though.

The sequels are:
Millennium 2: Take Me Higher
Millennium 3: Cry Wolf
Millennium 4: Beyond Sunset
Millennium 5: Battle of the Millennium

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Indie Game: To The Moon

In a nutshell? Video games as ART. 
And I'm not talking about graphics art.

I confess: this review should have been written 8 months ago. But it had inspired me so much to work on my own game that I had completely forgotten to blog about it. To The Moon's creator, Kan "Reives" Gao, has just released a short game A Bird Story, and I was immediately reminded to write about this beautiful indie title. (Because apparently, the protagonist for A Bird Story is going to be in the sequel of To The Moon.)

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Mobile Game: Run Run Super V

This is one of the three Pinoy games I had been looking forward to in the next two years (also because the second book I'm writing is related to it, har har). When Altitude Games first announced the formation of their company, I was ecstatic. If you had grown up watching sentai shows, you'd see why:

The project's name is Run Run Super V. As a game developer myself, this looks like a dream project. I hate free-to-play (F2P) games with a passion I can't even begin to describe, but this is one of those rare F2P gems I would not mind creating or playing. One look at the title screen and you can definitely see that the devs had a lot of fun making this game.

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Indie Game: Millennium: A New Hope

Where do I even begin raving about this title by Indinera Falls and published by Aldorlea Games? Millennium: A New Hope is yet another RPGMaker game that first appeared in casual game portals like Big Fish Games and then later Greenlighted by Steam. As of this writing, I am patiently awaiting a Steam sale (Halloween?) and the release of the last 3 Millennium titles because right now, only the first two are available on Steam. (It costs $5.99 in Steam, but $9.99 in Desura. Strange.)

Click thumbnails to enlarge images.

Anyway, I was just browsing through Steam and stumbled upon this last week. The story is about a young peasant girl who aims to change her country's leadership. Basically, she goes around looking for strong warriors to champion her cause.

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Indie Game: Happy Birthday

I had been looking for short indie games to play to keep me relaxed when so many stressful things are going on. I found Happy Birthday on Steam Workshop while I was at it. Unfortunately, I couldn't understand how to download this gem from Steam (it says "Subscribe to Download" but it did not download when I subscribed) so I ended up going to its RPGMaker.net page and downloaded it from there. It's FREE and is only about an hour long.

 "Happy Birthday" first struck me as a point-and-click murder mystery game but since you're actually controlling a 2D sprite and not pointing and clicking with your mouse, it's considered a visual novel. The premise of the story is that you are an investigator who's out to unravel the events behind the brutal murder of a young girl on the night of her birthday party.

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Indie Game: Chronicles of a Dark Lord Episode 1: Tides of Fate

Instead of a title screen, let me start off with a trailer, just to give you guys an introduction to the indie game Chronicles of a Dark Lord: Episode 1: Tides of Fate.



It's ironic that I use RPGMaker (RM) as one of my tools in making games but Tides of Fate is probably the only RM RPG I was able to finish. I've played a lot of RM demos because I truly wanted to support RM users, but many titles (except for brilliant non-RPGs like To The Moon, Ninja Clause and Touhou - Wondering Souls) leave much to be desired. Tides of Fate, despite looking very indie, has a story and soundtrack that enable it to rise above so many generic looking RM games. Let's enumerate why I like this game, shall we?

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Raving about Child of Light

(Click photos to enlarge.)

Another long overdue review. Hehe. But I don't really feel so bad since Ubisoft's Child of Light has become so popular for being breathtakingly beautiful. And I mean it in every sense of the word: Child of Light is beauty beyond compare. It's not even just about aesthetics anymore. The story, simple though it may be, and gameplay are just as lovely.

Anyway, just to give you an idea of what this game looks like:

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Favorite Pinoy Game: Streetfood Tycoon

This blog post is WAAAAAAY OVERDUE. In fact, the game Streetfood Tycoon, which was developed by Filipino company Kuyi Mobile, had already won in 2012's Philippine Game Development Festival. It had also become pretty popular in...well, other countries.

Of course Philippine game developers know of it but it wasn't until the boyfriend and I started playing it that we realized how addictive it was.

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Board Game Testing: Sweet Sabotage

My favorite couple (a team of programmer/game designer and artist), Charles Cue and Ellie Licuanan of White Ravens, came up with a board game that will be due for release on February 2015 and they're currently on Indiegogo for crowdfunding. Just to give you an idea what the board game is all about, here's a YouTube video:

So Charles and Ellie contacted me and our former colleagues and set up a playtesting session at Tobey's Game Café.

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Through Andrea's Eyes (Hidden Object Game)

It's been a long time since I last touched a hidden object game (I haven't since resigning from Anino Games). I still give my all-out support to my former studio, though, because I have to be honest. In my 16 years in the multimedia industry, Anino Games has the best environment I've ever been in. I miss the people (so many of us introverts in there but we all had such good chemistry).

I downloaded Manila Rush a few weeks ago and I was happy to see that they had FINALLY launched Through Andrea's Eyes. I'll describe the game first and give my opinion later. You can click the photos to enlarge them.

You basically play Andrea's mother. At the beginning of the game, Andrea is shown to have gone into a coma and of course, you want to get her back.

The only way to do this is for you to dive into her head and find out what is causing her loss of consciousness.

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Why I am not bitter over Flappy Bird

During the break period in my Game Design class (around two weeks ago), one of my students asked me to try out Flappy Bird on her phone. Within 2 seconds, I handed back her phone, totally pissed with the gameplay, and not bothering to look at it again.

Little did I know that it would become such a hit a week later. That very same student (Mariel Barsales) even got this score:

Then came the articles about how the author has suddenly found himself making $50,000/day. An army of clones suddenly made their appearances on download sites and hoo boy...

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Manila Rush Endless Runner Game

I think I mentioned in my previous blog entry that Anino Games has launched an endless runner game during the Manila Game Jam 2014 at the Globe Labs.

It's been 10 years since Anino's first game, Anito, was released. It was actually the game that made me join the company 3 years ago and though I had left last year, I was still hoping that the pioneer game development studio in the Philippines would go back to its roots: indie game development and love for Philippine culture.

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Global Game Jam 2014 (At Benilde and Globe Labs)

For this year's Global Game Jam, the Philippines had 4 venues. These were: De La Salle - College of Saint Benilde (CSB) and Globe Labs for Manila, Nueva Ecija and Davao. Saturday and Sunday, I ran from Globe Labs to CSB then back to Globe Labs because my students, co-faculty and colleagues were separated in two venues.

The theme was:

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Whew! It's probably one of the most profound themes I have ever seen used in a game jam. It would probably take me a day to process it. Like the previous GGJ events, you cannot post about the theme until Hawaii has started because it's going to be the same theme used worldwide.

Anyhoo, let's take a look at what happened in Benilde.

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Possible Candy Crush Replacements

Ever since the death of one of my baby projects, Puzzle Pets Adventure, I had been on the lookout for new casual games. I briefly played Candy Crush, a match-3 game, and Rage of Bahamut, which is like a watered down version of Magic the Gathering card game, on my Android gadgets and let's just say, I wasn't too enthusiastic. For Candy Crush, it's the fact that the game is designed to frustrate you enough so that you'd do micro-transactions. (I thankfully never fell for it.) For Rage of Bahamut, I get distracted by the skimpiness of the women's clothing...and that it's heavily unbalanced. I rarely win challenges I did not issue and I end up bullying other players because I know that I'd always win on challenges that I do issue. Bullying anyone is hardly my idea of fun.

I heard about Puzzle and Dragons but it seems to be only available to iOS users or certain Android devices. The search led me to Pocket Monsters: Dragon Rage (PMDR, by Softgames), which seemed like the German son of Candy Crush and Rage of Bahamut. A few weeks later, my friend Rowena introduced me to Tower of Saviors (TOS, by Mad Head Limited), a game that's almost exactly like PMDR except that it hailed from Hong Kong.

I'll put the screenshots of both games side by side while I make comparisons, placing PMDR on the left and TOS on the right. You can click the images for a larger view.

Ok, let me rephrase how I described these two games: PMDR and TOS are like the spawn of Pokemon, Candy Crush, and Rage of Bahamut. Or Puzzle Pets Adventure and Rage of Bahamut, which makes me cry a little because these two are exactly the games I had envisioned developing before I left my last job as a video game producer.

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5 casual PC/Mac games of all time

I think I've mentioned before that the first time I was introduced/immersed in casual gaming was when I became a Producer for Anino Games. I have played many casual game titles since then (though I find myself veering towards mobile gaming lately). These games are targeted towards women aged 35-80, though there are many younger women who have been hooked. I remember my students liked developing them for classroom exercises back when I didn't know what hidden object games were.

For those who are new to casual gaming -- I actually prefer calling them "women-friendly" games -- I've compiled a list of my all-time favorites:

#5 - Death at Fairing Point: A Dana Knightstone Novel

I have to admit, I am no fan of hidden object games. I get impatient when I'm asked to look for items indicated on what I call "the grocery list". So when I landed upon Death at Fairing Point (developed by Boomzap Entertainment and published by Big Fish Games), which was listed under hidden object games, I was pleasantly surprised that the hidden object portions did not present me with the dreaded "grocery list". It's a pretty fun game with relatively easy puzzles that you can breeze through if you're after the exceptional story. I would recommend this for beginners in the genre.

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A great International Women's Day & Month gift

I was one of those people who donated $$ for Anita Sarkeesian's project about Tropes versus Women in video games. For those who have not heard of her, she was one of those women who have been bullied over the internet because she dared speak up about the objectification of women in video games. You can read more about Anita Sarkeesian here.

Yesterday, just in time for the International Women's Day (March is actually International Women's Month), she released the first episode of her series. The video is entitled Damsel in Distress: Part 1 - Tropes vs Women in Video Games.

While very basic, the video provided a rather interesting introduction to female video game characters whose roles had been diminished to damsels in distress over the decades. My gaming geek friends -- many of whom are males -- have discussed this and we do agree that the industry is still rather new and we're stuck in the same clichés that older industries (like film) have also found themselves struggling with when they were starting out.

Anyway, here's the first installment of the series:




Personally, I don't think it's just the representation of women that's problematic. Even men complain about the stereotypes that they're stuck with. I'm more concerned about the decline of innovation in video game content. The tropes she presented are actually just a few of the things that indicate that we're stuck with rehashed themes and we definitely need new content.

But anyway, since it's International Women's Month, I'd like to give this to all of you strong, beautiful women out there. You are unique individuals that can never be encased by tropes.

Happy International Women's Month!! =)

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