Going public

For the last several months, during my (very limited) free time, I’ve been working  on a game which started to form in my head ever since I visited the incredibly beautiful city of Havana, Cuba in October 2012.

I got enchanted by everything about it but especially its old charm - from the colourful 19th-century buildings to the imported american cars, the incredible white sand beaches and the overall good vibe of the cuban locals.

At that point I was already prototyping a top-down stealth game, and I then knew it had to be about Cuba. Given the stealth mechanics of my prototype I wanted to come up with a spy/conspiracy story that fitted right into the cuban theme and its whole retro atmosphere.

Between me and my girlfriend (thank you!) we came up with various crazy concepts but in the end we settled for a fictional story around the relatively famous Cuban missile crisis. To add a bit of humour into the mix we came up with a retired american cop taken right out of a Miami Vice episode. I uninspiredly called the game Project Cuba - and here are the main characters (more about them in an upcoming post):

Throughout 2013 I worked on this stealth prototype on and off (mostly off) and unfortunately only around Christmas I decided that it didn’t have what it needed to be a fun game and finally dropped it. However, I couldn’t just loose all the work I’d done so I decided to reuse the story, the characters and even some of the previous mechanics on my next project. I started working a new prototype on January 1st 2014 and after spending most of Christmas vacations playing Rayman Legends on my iPad, there weren’t many choices for me other than doing a platformer.

At the start of February, X-Team gave me the fantastic opportunity to focus solely on the game for a month and take a first playable demo to GDC14 in Los Angeles and I even got to do some cool stickers and business cards! 😀 I did some great contacts at GDC and people seemed to really like the one level I had. Unfortunately after GDC, due to various reasons, I couldn’t put as much as I wanted into the game so the development slowed down substantially.

This brings us to today where it’s the first time I’m publicly talking about my game and officially kicking-off my freelancer position at X-Team. From now on I’ll be working only part-time and dedicating the rest of my time to other personal projects such as Project Cuba.

Hope you stay tuned and soon I’ll share a bit more about the actual game!