Milico en el centenario

Back in 2014 I was working in the videogame industry and had gained some more experience with Unity. From time to time I made some prototypes or some very specific scripts solving a problem just for fun.

One day, while watching the most important soccer match in Uruguay, there were some violent incidents during the match. This happened most of the times these teams played each other, so it was no surprise that it happened again. But then I thought  'hey, I could make a game about this!'. Pretty controversial topic I know, but I found our game idea really funny in my early 20s.

Here's the news from that time, pretty sad that this kind of things still happen from time to time:

But back then I just wanted to make something awesome and that everyone would get to know in my country, so we teamed up with my roommate who is a graphic designer and always liked games as well.

We discussed different types of games and mechanics, but we needed to keep it simple otherwise it would be too much for a team of 2. We decided to go for a 2D platform game, where the player would control a police officer getting into the stadium.

Character design and animation

My friend started drafting the main character, and after doing some magic with photoshop layers and stuff my friend was able to create a sprite sheet with each part of the character. I decided to go with 2D skeletal animation because drawing all the frames would take too long, and animating the 2D character was pretty simple. At least to get something working, of course that getting a highly polished animation is a lot of effort. Here's the first animation I created for the character:

The weapon is for some reason drawn behind the armor, but this was fixed in the production version.

One of the biggest benefits of skeletal animation was that I was able to combine different animation layers. This made it easy for the character to do an attack animation while walking, as I just had to override the base walking animation with the animation values in the upper part of the body.

Enemies

Then we used the same techniques for the enemies, but there was one problem. Enemies could have different skins, and that was something that the Unity tutorials didn't include. But fortunately I had taken the videogame courses in college and had some good understanding about the graphics pipeline, rendering and how textures were used to get a colored pixel on screen. So I started trying to change the texture for one that had the same elements in the same positions so that I could reuse the UV coords, but colors would change when using it. This led to one of my most famous questions in the Unity forums: skin change question. And after so many attempts I got it partially right. I say partially because it worked for me, but later someone else told me that my solution wasn't good enough for his case. But solving that problem made me realize that I knew how a lot of stuff worked, and that made me feel good.

Gameplay

Player would go into the stadium using his shield to protect from stones and "butacas" which means seat, but not any kind of seat, it's specific for those you find in a stadium, theaters, and that kind of places.

Player could also hit the enemies with the stick, and could do some combos which would give extra points and damage.

It's a survival mode, because we didn't have the time to make a huge scenario and create a nice and progressive story, so just kill enemies while you can. Of course difficulty increased with time.

Hitting the "butacas" while flying would turn them into friendly projectiles, getting what we called "BUTACA KILLS" which gave the user a huge amount of points. On the other hand, if the player missed and got hit by a butaca, he would be badly damaged. That was a nice meaningful decision we integrated into the game. Butaca kills had a nice mortal kombat style feedback, which I personally recorded and edited with Audacity. Yes, I'm really proud of that.

Sounds

Just an indie approach for sounds: 

• Downloaded Youtube videos recorded by people in the stadium to get the songs.
• Hit some pots with a spoon to get the sounds for the shields. One of the best memories I have from this game lol.
• Recorded my own voice for the Butaka Kill SFX.
• A lot of editing and noise reduction in Audacity. Got some nice new skills with this!

Platform

The game was originally developed for Facebook, and run in the browser with the Unity plugin. We used Facebook itself to store player scores and to be able to share them. 

I also integrated it with Parse, a backend as a service that was later deprecated, to store additional data about which team made the best scores and a global ranking.

The world changed, so new platform

I don't know anyone who plays Facebook games in desktop anymore, so yeah I had to migrate this to mobile. 

Parse was deprecated. My login was broken. Keyboard input wouldn't work anymore. Everything was a mess. It took years for me to get back into it and do the port, but after all, I got it working. 

Fought so hard with plugin integrations for Android/iOS. Paid my dev programs, my friend created the icons. Got the apps setup in the stores. Added some adds in the main screen and the rankings, setup all the accounts.

Applied for an indie program in GameSparks, which was now acquired by Amazon. I totally recommend GameSparks, I had a working backend really quick with my global rankings in very little time.

We redesigned the input with my friend (yeah we're still close friends and dream with making videogames!).

And here's how it looks!

How did it go?

Game was published in Facebook, and we got more than 1000 players, which was awesome for us at the time. Some people wrote about our game in blogs, and there was a Milico post in Taringa, which for us was like some kind of Reddit back then. We contacted some news agencies and try to get it moving, but it didn't viralize as expected. But we got so many messages telling us that the game was awesome and that we had to extend it and add bosses and new levels. That was pretty satisfying.

What about the mobile version then?

I finished the mobile release candidate in 2020 while in quarantine because of Covid. Had too much free time in Madrid and decided to finish with my project.

But I wasn't the same guy I was years ago.

After all this effort, and given all the social problems in my country, I decided not to publish the game. 

I talked with several people about it, and the topic is very delicate. Social polarization, fights, discrimination, this everything my country needs to get rid of.

So sometimes I wonder what it could've been, how people would talk about it in WhatsApp and get the game viralized and the world rankings would get moving. I also added a team ranking and challenges, were each session would add points to your team, and I would've loved to see how that went.

But the most important thing here was to prove myself that I was able to release a game, and slept much better since then.