Medellín, Colombia. November 29, 2022

Organized by Rocket Ride Games, the first “Colombia GameDev Summit” took place at the Click Clack Hotel, offering food, drinks, and a very decent lineup of speakers for a great afternoon of game development experience sharing in the famed city of Eternal Spring.

Swedish indie game publisher Raw Fury had people fly to Medellin to meet with the local developers and share a little bit about their selection process.  Mea Nilimaa, Games Scout, opened the talks with recommendations on how to have a successful pitch, and some of the pitfalls developers commonly fall on when contracting with publishers: what happens if you fail a milestone delivery? what are your rights over the IP and subsequent sequels? and the other projects your studio is working on?

After the opening talk, there was a section featuring founders from Colombia game dev companies.

Luis Correa, a local from Medellin and founder of C2 Game Studio, shared the journey of “Project Monolith”, their ambitious action-adventure game that started development many years ago, was a recipient of an Epic Megagrant, and finally got a publishing deal this year. Luis shared the ups and downs of indie game development, and some tips to overcome the inevitable loss of motivation and push forward making the best use of the resources you have at hand and the skills of your team.

Isaac Cortissoz, CEO of Killasoft, from Barranquilla, gave a talk about their workflow which is based on a solid pre-production phase where all the fun decisions are taken and tools are developed in order to have a smoother (and boring!) production stage where you are just executing a well-laid out plan. A very intriguing talk that created a lot of conversation on the scenarios in which these ideas can be applied. Killasoft is currently working with NetFlix on a videogame for the hit series “Money Heist” (La Casa de Papel) as well as their game INNER.

Then we had old-guard indie developer Carlos Rocha from Dreams Uncorporated, makers of the hit award-winning jRPG Cris Tales published by Modus Games in 2021. He was very happy and excited to go back to having talks with a live audience and shared the journey of Dreams, how they evolved as a studio through many games exploiting and refining curious and unique game mechanics, and their process to discover and develop “seed” mechanics for their games, sometimes finding marvelous inspiration when looking the “normal” things with different eyes. Carlos revealed he hoped to continue developing games until his deathbed.

Gamedev legend Eivar Rojas, founder of the Efecto Studios (the second largest game development company in Colombia) and Red Minas Coffee (the most sought-after coffee brand by game devs worldwide, someday), shared their experience signing with publishers, the different stages of a publishing contract and what to look after when you are in each one of them, as well as their tips to grab the attention of a publisher and to know when to pitch based on the stage of the project, the target platform and monetization model.

The event was organized in a chill informal space of the modern hotel, which allowed the assistants to have conversations in between the talks while drinking delicious soda and cocktails. Talking with fellow developers we were really happy to see so many new faces, some of which may be active actors in the continued growth of the local industry.

A second part of the event featured (either by design or coincidence) a number of women in leadership positions in the Colombian game dev industry.

Sandra Castro from the “Tan Grande y Jugando” game development community, shared her updated GDC’22 talk ‘Breaking the Gap”, with insights about the role of women in the video game industry, the many efforts currently underway to improve it from the perspective of the Latin American game dev industry, and how we all can contribute to improving the situation from our respective positions as founders and workers of the industry.

Marcela Rincón shared her experience as Talent Management Lead for Teravision Games, the biggest game development company in Colombia, makers of the acclaimed VR game “Captain Toonhead vs. The Punks From Outer Space” and the gamescom’22 hyped “Killer Klowns from Outer Space: The Game“. She talked about the many roles that are required to develop a videogame besides art and gameplay programming (the two disciplines traditionally more sought after to enter the company), inviting people to consider specializing in these other roles and strengthening their networking to get into the industry.

Finally, María Carolina Visbal and Paula Buitrago, from Colombian game development-specialist firm “IE Law Bedoya Visbal” closed the event talking about the importance of having the support of a specialized lawyer assisting your team from the onset of any M&A or publishing deal, so that you can see all the possible outcomes and drive the negotiations around them, and prevent missing small details in the law that can become big risks.

As always this was a great opportunity too to meet with friends from the industry from all around the country! Many thanks to RocketRide for organizing the event, and I hope this is just the first of many!

The early 2000s were witness to the birth and first steps of the Colombian video game industry. A handful of indie game developers, packing more passion than knowledge, decided to venture into the unknown and laid the groundwork for the studios that came after them.

COVA is a group of Colombian video game companies seeking to provide an environment for collaboration in order for the industry to advance as a whole. As a member of COVA, last week we had the chance to have a booth in Colombia 4.0, the biggest tech conference in Colombia and one of the biggest in Latin America.

There, we had hundreds of people play NovaMundi and Ananias, providing us with a lot of feedback to improve them. There were many students that we hopefully inspired to follow their dreams to create their own games.

I also had a chance to finally meet Jose Manuel, the linguist with whom we have worked for many months in NovaMundi, and have a coffee with him and QuietGecko, an important part of the NovaMundi team (and who also helped out a lot in the event.

We were also interviewed by Canal13 Colombia (local TV channel) and Frecuencia Gamer, hopefully that helps more people know about our games and the things that are currently being produced in Colombia.

As always it was also a great chance to meet people from the game dev industry and build connections and friendships, even if this time I couldn’t attend any talks (and didn’t submit one this time, too busy!) or many social events, since I had to instead spend my time in the booth and the logistics associated with it. I got to at least spend some time with fellow indie dev 0xAFBF and part of the Indie Level Studio team in Bogotá.

However, I had the chance for some of the top speakers on the videogames track (including Mauricio Navajas, president of ADVA) to try out NovaMundi and give me their feedback on the pitch decks for upcoming projects. Carlos Rocha (dev of Cris Tales) also played for a bit and gave me some good ideas to improve the flow of the first minutes of the game.

And that’s it for Colombia 4.0, 2022 edition! maybe next time I’ll submit a talk and have a more relaxed time 🙂

Organized by XSolla, previously known as Game Developers Carnival (probably renamed to avoid confusion/issues with GDC)?

This year they opted-in for a cloud-based solution which I think was a great idea.

The basic premise remained the same from last year, a highly detailed 3d space where you can move freely visiting booths, attending talks and chatting with people including casual meetings but also B2B organized via Meet2Match. This year they incorporated improvements such as avatar customization and improved/streamlined info on the booths.

One thing that was removed or at least is not very prominent are the mini-games. No karting, no hang-gliding, you are here in business. I actually approve of this change since the games were buggy and half-baked last year.

As I mentioned, the jump to use a cloud-based solution I think is a step on the right direction, last year it was just asking for a lot, for business people to have readily available gaming rigs and pre-install a heavy client, etc. I had some big issues with framerate drops tho, which I believe could have been alleviated by automatically degrading the quality level so that the framerate remained constant.

This year it was a single world containing all the booths which was interesting because it felt much bigger. Here is a somewhat long video of my 2021 experience (apologies in advance for the drops in microphone volume in some spots)

December 1st to 3rd 2020, Colombia 4.0 is the biggest tech event in Colombia. This year they opted-in for an online format (of course), here’s a summary of my experience on it, which, as usual, is centered on its videogames track. They also had the (BIG) animation / SIGGRAPH track, as well as Music, Fintech, and more.

The Format

As with many long-standing physical events transitioning to online, it seems one of their key concerns was how to keep a notion of it happening in a “place” populated by visitors. Instead of using a full real-time 3D rendered client (like XSolla’s Game Developers Carnival with YourWorld), they chose a more readily accessible format using prerendered 360° views with embedded videos and actionable areas, which you could access directly using any decent browser without having to download any plugin (which is great).

There was a central hub from where you could warp to the track areas (each one with an auditorium), the business tables, or the area with the booths. The terminal areas allowed downloading PDF brochures and connecting with people via either Whatsapp or Whereby.

The online environment worked… once you had experimented a bit with it. It was definitively not suited to all audiences, since it required knowing in advance some conventions about navigating 360 views.

There was an area *inside* the world with some instructions on how to navigate, but since it was part of the world the visitor had to know at least the basic of navigation in advance, and additionally it was pretty easy to miss (especially if you were there in business to check a talk).

One definitive downside to it was how hard it was to get to the talks since you had to navigate the world all the way to the auditoriums and then click on a link. A more straightforward directory with links to the streaming channels would have helped a lot with discoverability, as I think reducing the friction to get to the content should be a primary concern in this kind of event.

Some of my favorite talks included “Publishing for Indies” by Steve Escalante, “Intellectual Property” by Patrick Sweeney and “El equipo de programación ideal y otras leyendas” (The ideal programming team and other legends) by Luis Villegas. I’ll post links to them as (if?) they become available.

I also posted a commentary on my own talk about procedural generation here (Spanish only for now).

The business area was, frankly, a bit too empty. There were not many attendees with whom you could connect this year. I think however all the infrastructure that was set up worked and will hopefully be of more use for future iterations.

Some booths from the Commercial Zone

Something similar happened in the area with the booths, although it is hard to know since there was no way to know about the actual traffic happening, other than the requests you got to talk via WhatsApp or video conferencing. Which in my case and as far as I know from other attendees were not too many.

I think this may have been caused again by unneeded friction put in front of the potential visitors including:

• A signup form which asked for a lot of information, and which had to be filled in order to visit the booths.
• Requiring them to know how to navigate the online environment.
• How the area was presented, with an overhead view of all the booths but no way to know what they were, and hard to keep track of the ones you had visited already (coupled with normal loading times to check each booth)
• There was an option to see the list of exhibitors which made it much easier to find a particular booth but didn’t ease navigating thru all of them for a random visitor.

Ideas for improvement

I believe an event like col40, which is aimed at a wide range of potential visitors, should take advantage of existing, well-known conventions for Internet browsing, and strive to create an accessible “standard” online web experience, instead of forcing the visitors into a more “virtual” environment.

Direct access to the streams and past talks from the event’s agenda, as well as having a way to preview the booths sequentially, would be small changes with potentially big impact, even allowing the existing “virtual” structure to exist in parallel so that we can continue experimenting with innovation in virtual conferencing.

If you are curious, check out a video of my experience here: (it’s in Spanish)

Crossposted to Temple of The Roguelike

On October 3 and 4 2020, the fifth iteration of the Roguelike Celebration happened online. Last year I missed it (flying Medellín to San Francisco is expensive!) but I had no excuse this year.

The biggest novelty of the event was the MUD-like platform created by Em Lazerwalker, who has been part of the organizer team for some years now. She describes it as a playful text-based online social chat space, a hybrid between communication apps like Slack and Discord and traditional text-based online game spaces such as MUDs and MOOs.

The app was accessible via any decent web browser, and it integrated the different components of the online conference, including a virtual environment inspired by the physical spaces of previous years where you could move between rooms, pick up stuff, do fun stuff like dancing, and of course talk with the other people.

The main sections of the event were the Theater, where the talks took place, the unconferencing lobby and rooms (6 of them) where people suggested and voted for topics and then were directed to Zoom conferences for live video chatting, and the showcase hall where different roguelike projects where on display. There were also lots of other rooms for socializing, and even a dance floor with cool music from the previous years and a bar where you could get the classic roguelikecel cocktails.

The platform was also integrated with the almost non-stop video streaming, MCed by Alexei Pepers and Noah Swartz, and run in the background by Kawa. It included real-time high quality captioning made by Maggie of White Coat Captioning, and people could interact with the stream by posting questions or topics for discussion.

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The main chunk of the event where the talks, of course, and this time there were a lot of them both full size and “lightning” (10 mins). following the same format as previous years (single track, two days), being online opened the possibility of having speakers from all around the world discussing a wide range of topics, from technical to more mundane.

The videos have yet to be posted in the Roguelike Celebration youtube channel, for now, you can find the raw streams there. The topics included game design, accessibility, a lot of procedural generation, community management, programming languages, roguelike history, and more.

Additionally, as in previous years, there was an interactive game (Help me Steal the Mona Lisa), where players could interact with the streamer, helping him hack devices to infiltrate museums and generate enough income for his character’s luxurious life.

Finally, Noah (the creator of the event) announced this was his last year as part of the organizers’ team, as he has different requirements for his time these days. He shared how he had a hard time finding space and sponsors for the first event, and how now it has grown to have over 700 assistants. He’s leaving the organization of future versions of the events in the capable hands of the other organizers who have done a great job so far.

See you next year at Roguelike Celebration 2021!

May 11 and 12 2020, a virtual event organized by XSolla and MeetToMatch in the aftermath of GDC 2020’s cancellation due to covid19, using “YourWorld“, a multi-user environment powered by Unreal Engine, as the main platform. I uploaded my experience in a couple of videos here and here if you are curious about it.

Participating in the event was free (with an optional donation). Visitors downloaded the event client (Windows only, around 7GB) and used it to log into the world. A pretty good machine was needed for the client to perform well (even my GeForce RTX 2080 didn’t have it easy!).

MeetToMatch provided matchmaking using their regular platform but providing meeting points inside the virtual worlds. Of all my meetings, around 50% of them were rescheduled to more traditional video conferencing tools such as Google Meet and Skype, due to the participants being unable to log into the client (because they were on MacOS, or didn’t have a powerful computer or internet connection).

Besides meeting with people in the virtual world, you could visit booths, where you could see a video and imagery provided by each exhibitor, as well as chat with them if they were present. Conversations happened instantly, with you just getting close to whoever you wanted to speak to (it seems a headset was required). Your avatar (which was picked randomly based on your provided gender) would start talking, doing some conversational gestures, and lip-syncing with your voice.

There were 6 worlds labeled A to F, all of them had an identical layout and activities, but different booths. They also had a big central circus arena where it seemed some talks or special content would be shared, but as far as I could see, they were just sharing the video from an exhibitor.

Recreational activities included hang-gliding, kart racing, and the “Scream Tower”, with the first two keeping track of the high scores on a per-world basis. The games were simple but fun and challenging.

In general, the game world worked well although there were some evident rough edges and buggy behavior. The platform is still under development and I believe it is promising; still, I think future events should also consider more accessible technologies like lightweight multiplatform environments that can be loaded from the browser even if they provide a less immersive experience (maybe in parallel with a full environment like this one). Making the event easy for people to access should be a top priority (I think most business people don’t have a gaming level windows PC with them, and some indie devs don’t need that either).

Some ideas for improvement:

• Avatar customization (and persistence to your profile) including uploading a picture of you.
• More control over conversations including clicking on a person to start a conversation with them, setting yourself as available for conversation, being able to mute your mic.
• Show more info in the booths beside the video and the pictures there. Maybe being able to download a flier and keep it in a virtual bag.
• Being able to share documents with the person you are talking to (so you can show your company’s catalog or your project’s deck).
• Coop games or activities you can do with someone while talking (instead of competitive single-player activities).
• Improving environmental sound detection, which seems to use the camera instead of the character’s position.

 

MEDMI 2019 – A conference on technology and digital marketing, November 16, 2019, at Medellín, Colombia.

Sergio Roldán kicked off the event discussing the growth of Medellín from a spot in the valley to a mostly unplanned big city, and the strategies it has taken to transform into a growing technology hub, investing in the citizens, including improving education facilities in the most troubled zones.

Natalia Silva and Daniel Arbelaez talked about Service Design, the importance of understanding the elements that are really relevant to the persons in a process, including the people participating behind the scenes, not just the final clients.

Diego Noriega thinks “How” to make a company grow is not as important as “Why”, and with “Who”. Having a lot of money brings the need to spend it and may accelerate failure. Moments of failure, however, can be the biggest moments of learning.

Andres Ramírez, a director from Asobancaria, shared a history of innovation in the financing and banking sector in Colombia, and the latest advancements in fintech and ePayments.

Maria Camila Muñoz, Pablo Santos and Juan Esteban Saldarriaga, discussed the interaction between fintech companies and banks; instead of competing, fintech providers provide access to resources via improved user experiences and lower barriers.

Ivan Obando shared the process of producing his movie “Me llevarás en ti”, including ideation, planning and financing, and some of the elements that have aided its success (local historical hero, romance, involving local celebs).

He also voiced his concerns for national productions to have proper exposition, and how he’s working with government agencies on this topic, proposing incentives for cinemas for keeping national pictures on the billboards for longer times.

A representative from GRIN Colombia said the company hopes to transform cities by improving mobility, increasing employment, making people value public property and creating safe spaces.

In the Innovation panel, Monica Zuluaga and Andres Ramirez discussed how, from their corresponding perspectives in media and banking, large traditional companies are adapting to the consumption habits of born-digital consumers, by distributing content through different channels and by creating alternative means to access services for people for which things such as going to a physical bank are extraneous concepts.

Companies need to move quicker in modern times since even small companies or startups can now compete directly with bigger ones via a greater understanding of their users or audiences.

Eduardo Guizar shared how he wound up working in the Curiosity project in the NASA, following his childhood dream of making robots, after watching a Star Wars movie. He never abandoned his far-fetched dream, secretly developing robotic engines at his home in Mexico.