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backWednesday 29th January 2025
The day I left game development and why I came back.
A fresh start for something I love.
I left game development and game artwork because I had a huge mess last time I did it.
My wife and I created the graphics for a small visual novel. On the meantime I was also working on the engine which is very simple but works perfect for the purpose.
All that work went to trash when a third party offered to translate it. oh my... I'm supposed to be the guy who speaks English but won't go for a translation because I feel that it won't be easy. Big mistake.
The person who translated the game had a very poor English. The plot and the entire game story finished up like a soup of BS. Terrible English, perfect Spanish and no translation to other languages.
Back then, we where scammed by another individual who actually steal our material in matter of digital property. Oh no.
The mess finally exploded and us -my wife and my person- as well as VA studio -the people who ported it for Microsoft store- ended up trying to recover it and do the right thing: Remade all that chaos and make it right. That's it.
That happened back in 2019. We decided to stick to our design and development works and forget about that mess.
Since then, a lot happened. I had my spoon of ravenous poison from a few life facts. my wife had a back injury that causes a lot of pain. you know. Shit happens.
VA studio disappeared from the face of the earth.
I got a simple system admin job because I'm having a hard time as a designer/artist with AI around.
I was talking to a friend about this a few weeks ago. Is crazy. everything here is crazy. even the crazy right wing nazi maniacs on the government. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm a guy who just don't vote. that's it. Things here went from a extreme to other.
We where talking about that and I pulled out what happened with that experience.
That day we had a cup of coffee, talked about our stuff and I went back home.
On the meantime, I lost my Facebook account. No. It wasn't Facebook or meta. It was me. I deleted my account. I felt overwhelmingly tired and stressed when my wife started to feel the lower back pain. As she started -after months seeking medical attention- to improve on her condition. I wanted to be at his side and help her in veery possible way.
On the other hand I had to fix a lot on my house. Things that where screaming for attention.
I had to shake my head. I created my FB account again, I started to take things in the more relaxing mindset possible. Just work, eat, sleep and repeat.
The past week, a well known person send me an e-mail asking for cool machine games. The name we gave to our small game development project.
He played the old fail from Microsoft store and asked me to remade it. Obviously, I can't since we lost the rights over it thanks to a fu** head.
I got help to recover my work. I thought it would be a mess but it was a smooth process. Someone just told me "You have the right over your work again"
I came back to the remake idea and started to think on how much it can be improved without a third party.
I talked with a close friend who holds the name for "Va studio" on Microsoft store.
I've got a lot of good news. I asked my wife if she wanted to go for it again and she gave a thumb up for it.
After a few days settling what relies on who and having all clear, transparent and over the table we decided to remade that visual novel/graphic novel and go for more of them.
Of course, this time we'll get a decent person to translate it to english. -no I'm not going to do it- and other languages to start with the right foot.
With all settled up, I started to think how that should be and figured a lot between the old one and new ways to illustrate it.
I decided to go for chroma key fabric, a DSLR and make matte paintings to work over them with vector art and try to get a B&W noir style.
At the same time, the engine needs work to be able to work in several languages and also on the graphic side. Basically, I can use a lot of game engines to do it but I still think that a all the projects that we have in mind can be done with our own engine avoiding propietary software or obscure licences. I figured what we needed to change pretty fast, so I'm working both in code and graphics and so is my wife who is making an entirely new UI/UX and rebuilding a lot of Javascript code.
I'll be posting our progress on my social accounts -currently, Facebook and Bluesky- to show how are we doing it on the art side.
I don't have a bottomline to this. The only thing that comes to my mind is: "Well, a second chance is a second chance. And you are the one giving yourself one"
The most important thing is that I decided to port the game by myself if it's necessary. I don't want a mess with a third party again.
Cheers and thanks for reading. As I said I'll be posting RAW work on social media. Don't expect to see any AI here because it will be none of that. The golden rule for me is to avoid them to have quality content.
Cheers! And thanks again for reading.