This weekend I participated in the MolyJam 2012 international game jam. I took the opportunity to organize the Guadalajara venue, even if I’ve been here for less than two weeks and never organized one before. I had a lot of fun doing it and the few people that showed up seemed to have a good time and learn a lot.

Thanks to Anna Kipnis and all the MolyJam organizers, it was an amazing event.

I made a game about holding to your mother’s hand, you can play it and/or download it by clicking the image:

I went to IndieCade. It was great.

Then I worked on a lot of stuff. Did not finish much.

Shit happened. Then I went to GDC. It was great.

Now I moved to Mexico.

This is an “I’m still alive” post. I’m still alive.

I’ll be attending Indiecade in sunny Culver City, California this week. It’s my first time in the United States and in a conference/festival like this.

I’m really looking forward to meeting people, so if you’re around feel free to call me shouting from across the room. In return I’ll give you one of this sazzy garlic-flavored cards I just finished making:

So I’ll eat up and get ready for 17+ hours to get there.

After realizing most local indies were a bit down for not finishing projects, Martín G. proposed that we recreate the experience of the original EGP team (see here): each creates a game in one week, in their own, but we encourage each other as a group and have a weekly meeting where we showcase what we’ve made and decide on the next week’s theme.

For our first week we decided to follow the same theme as the current EGP, wich was Story Game. I came up with a game called Trout!

I really suck at creating stories. Every time I write I feel what I’m making sucks so I get easily discouraged. Of course, I hated the theme “Story Game”, but that made me look for creative ways to avoid creating a story myself.

I had a lot of time to think about this while doing long queues for my US visa paperwork. I decided the best was to make a game where  the player makes the story, via some kind of system of entities with behaviors that create a sequence of events, or something.

While browsing around I thought of improvisation: making a story on the fly. That seemed like a perfect match for what I wanted to do. I started to watch a lot of improv videos and came upon THIS. That looked like a lot of fun to watch and to do! Only later I realized that improv games are very common in theatre, and there’s hundreds of combinations and rules. So what if I could make a game that captures the fun of making up a story on the fly and make it accesible to people to play together in a party?

So I bring you Trout!:

Download Trout!

(requires Adobe Air and optionally a microphone and camera)

Future screenshot

Since I haven’t been productive lately, I kinda forced myself to finally design a new website where I could put all my games in a simple pretty list, instead of them being scattered through blog posts.

There’s still a few tweaks to be made, such as the fact that the black color scheme depresses me a bit. But it’s pretty much done.

I didn’t implement the comments in the theme, I’m not too sure about that, so if you’re screaming for being able to comment let me know (I’ll leave to you finding out how since you’re so eager to speak up).

Sleepy.

Dependant is now available to play at Kongregate. This is mostly symbolical for me since I’ve been dreaming about some day having a game on the site ever since I started playing web games. Enjoy!

Also this week a game I’ve been working on with Miguel Ángel Pérez Martínez and Mattias Häggstrom Gerdt was released.

Previously known as Cubesome, Cardboard Box Assembler has just gone live on the Adult Swim Games portal. Give it a spin!

After months of waiting, my first independent game, Dependant, is finally out on the internets.

Play it here, and let me know what you think.