Contact info
E-mail: mtq.universe@gmail.com
Telf: +582952356409 +582466376207
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcos-quijada/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1169010478
Please see my Video Portfolio It is more updated than this page
Cyber War (ongoing project)
After I saw the news about the DDOS attacks on Octuber 2016, an idea come to me to develop a table style game about hacking and take control over internet, so I stoped Astro World for some months to make this project first. I am developing it with Unity 3d and blender.
Astro World (ongoing project)
For this project I am working with Unity 3d and Blender. It will be like a space farm, plus others gameplays, I have a lot of work ahead, but I take a break to work on Cyber War that will be a lot easier and fast to develop.
Justin the Bee
This is my second game for android devices. With my new skills in Java and Libgdx I decided to make something more ambitious but fast, something that should take me like three months (that ended being more than six), I wanted this time make something casual, a 2d runner with insects was fine, plus a flying shooting mode, and with the twist that Justin can shoot, make jumps, double jumps, kicks, and uppercuts as street fighter. Then I wanted to give them some story and personality, for that reason I make them anthropomorphic, and the protagonist was going to be a ninja bee with a personality similar to Innuyasha, all of this just to increase empathy from the player to the game.
This time I was needed to make my own art, but I didn't want something similar to others games, first I don't like pixel art (I think is just one style overused), second I never had painted and I needed to paint something fast and that looks good, so I thought about those oil paints that artists make very fast and look beautiful. For that reason I ended using ArtRage which have a user friendly environment, and a final look like oil painting.
For my characters I couldn't use ArtRage, it was fine for backgrounds, but I wanted vector graphics that I could recycle changing its colors, sizes, etc. So I made pieces of my actors on Illustrator, then animated them with Spriter and make the final textures atlases with TexturePacker.
With a good use of color, tint and different skies, I was able to use the same background in more than one level. The game have ten levels based on four backgrounds (hive, meadow, autumn forest, and dead forest), a parallax effect with three different layers in some stages, also it have a little story at the beginning of every level. I wanted something funny, not epic, cause this is a casual game, so I included many jokes in the story.
I made too my own sounds and music, something funny and casual, with the sounds I'm almost pleased, but I only spent a week to make the music thus I feel it need some more polish and more music for different levels.
It is integrated with Google Play Services, and Admob Interstitial Ads.
It was very hard to optimize the game, it was consuming more than 300 Mb of Ram on android devices. I had tried different things cause I didn't want to lose my beautiful 60 fps animations, but at the end it was that. I was using many texture atlases of 2048x2048 for my characters (every one use 16 Mb of ram). In running stages, the main character has 8 animations (run, jump, double jump, uppercut, shoot, kick, and being hurt) plus 2 animation per foe (stay, and attack), plus another atlas for Story actors, plus 3 layers of 2 images each (for scroll) of 1024x512 of backgrounds... Well, the final solution was lower atlases to 1024x2048 or less, and load/unload only the necessary assets for the level.
I'm very happy with the final game, maybe in the future I'll add more enemies, stages, music, and is urgent to include a Facebook like or Firebase Invites. But for the moment I'm practicing with Unity cause I have some ideas for 3d games, and I can't get stuck on 2d games. I know I must focus on marketing Justin the Bee (I sucks on marketing, I feel like I'm not producing nor learning), my biggest mistake was not have a developer blog and not get involve within the community and social networks.
Doomsday Energy
This was my first game for android devices. It took me nearly a year finish it, cause I had nearly five years without program, and I used to program software solutions for companies, not games. So I had to learn Java, Libgdx, the game structure or workflow. As it would be my first game, I chosed to make a science fiction space arcade just to be loyal to myself and my likes.
I used Photoshop to make the sprites. I had to make the mothership two times, at the beginning it was like a island with a city and dome, but I didn't like it, so I make it again as the version you can see on the screenshots. The black hole was made with a rotating texture and a skew transformation, I love the final effect, it's smooth and almost see like 3d.
The game was created along with the story. One black hole was approaching to the sun, thus mankind created a mothership to leave the solar system, but they couldn't gather energy at the end, so, our mission is to push enemies on a collector who will extract the energy and send it to the mothership (We can see ten lights on the mothership that represent each container of energy), thus: Level one: fill two containers of energy to make the moshership take off. Level two: keep gathering energy to reach Earth's orbit. Level three: on Earth's orbit, gather full four container of energy to reach Mars. Level four: On Mars's orbit, fill all ten containers of energy to leave the solar system, but we lost the collector and the black hole pull us. Level Five: On the black hole, we push enemies to it and use the relativistic jet of the black hole to fill all ten containers of energy and leave the Solar System.
As I made the game I dreamed that the story premise could be good even for a Sci-fi novel or a bigger and better game.
It is a short game, not the best if you want high user retention on Android. The gameplay is good, but the final level is frustrating, I need a different approach. The game need more levels, with new enemies. but I feel that casual games could have a better chance of success on android, so I'll prefer focus on make new games.
Entidad Límite: La Armada Deidilio
(Limit Entity: Deidilio's Army)
This was my very big first creative project. I've had a great imagination since always, and I wanted to make a novel. It's only avaible in spanish, cause I don't have perfected my level of english to translate it (but I'm working on it). But I can tell you, develop software is hard, develop video games is even harder, these last three years making Doomsday Energy ang Justin the Bee have been very hard. But still, I think Entidad Límite is the greatest creative thing I ever do. Maybe is because when we write we are not limited as we are developing games alone. Thus I was able to make a whole universe, characters with personality, even I thought about a bunch of theories, tecnologies or biology, to make a Science Fiction Novel with equals parts of Hard Science Fiction, action and adventure.
I hope one day Entidad Límite can reach a lot of people, it has potential to become a movie or a big game. The saga it's not finished, I thought it as a trilogy, and I have an inner mind map of what I'm going to write next.
You can find it on Amazon, at 2.99 $. Contact me by e-mail if you want a free copy.
Skills and Others Projects
I've worked with many languages and programs, I'm a little rusty on some of them, and it's not as easy like drive a bike again, but I can get in shape very fast.
- Oriented Object Programing
- C,C++
- Asembler 6502
- Visual Basic.Net
- Visual Fox Pro
- Crystal Reports
- Sql Server
- Microsoft Access
- Microsoft Office
- Microstation + MDL
- Project
- Management Indicators
- Celtx