A bit of history

13 years

Hi everyone, I wanted to take this opportunity to share a bit of what I've been doing on the side lines during these 13 years ever since I started working professionally as a developer. Through these 13 years I've been honing my skills and working towards my original and main goal, which was to become a game developer.

Humble beginnings

The first thing I started with was a blog under the blogger platform, there I started sharing some of the stuff I was learning in school, at the time I had already moved into college and we were being taught C and functional programming, which was interesting since in high school I learned OOP with Java and had already even had some experience creating websites with PHP (back then PHP was like the hottest thing and everyone were always looking for free PHP hosting), and also Java servlets with Hibernate and SOAP services (back then it looked really cool to be able to work with services like that but that's because I wasn't aware of REST as it was just starting to bloom). Aside from that I also shared a bit of my own takes and experiences according to the time, even doing some game reviews and shared even some gameplay videos on my youtube channel.

The Chronicles of Magastria: The training

During 2012, between May and September, there was a Blackberry sponsored event, I believe for all of Latin America (could be wrong and could have been only for Mexico but I honestly don't remember well), which consisted on having new developers try to make an App or Game for their newly released Blackberry Playbook, the event was called 'Reto Blackberry'(Blackberry challenge, if we were to translate it to English), said event was a stepping stone for me, I had the opportunity to create a game for the first time, one that I was gonna be able to play on a device that wasn't a computer and there was a chance to win more prizes. During that event, I was able to create 'The Chronicles of Magastria: The training', which required a lot of effort as I developed that in C, using a library they provided that was a wrapper for the GLES API, which was something completely new to me at the time, not to mention I also created the sprites using Paint and the music using LMMS.

But more than that, it was also the first time I had experienced working on a big project on a tight timeline, with low resources and even went to the live hackathon they hosted in Mexico city, where I finally got the chance to test my game in a real device, which was a huge thing for me since my machine barely had enough ram to run the simulator itself, not even accounting for the debugger and such.

In the end I didn't win at the time, and got some bad reviews on it which were a bit discouraging at the time, but ultimately I decided to not give up and use that as a learning experience to get better and improve. What I did get was a free Blackberry Playbook which was awarded to any developer that uploaded their app/game to the Blackberry Appworld.

Sadly as the Blackberry Appworld is no longer available and I haven't remade the game yet at the time of writing it's not possible to try it out, but I can share the tutorial included so you can more or less see what was about and what the gameplay was supposed to be like.

Crimson R Games

As years flew by I started to learn more and get more familiar with modern technologies, the mobile boom was happening at the time and I decided to join, not only due to professional reasons but also for my own sake as at the time publishing a game would usually require to go to a console or something on PC where the market was saturated with lots of good games back then, but mobile was something new that no one had full control at the time, which led me to learn Android and iOS development and also to start using Unity 3D. During that time I created my own google play developer account, you can find my apps here

Since I know that my last app there may be deleted soon since I haven't updated it I'll add an screenshot of the games/apps that I had published but that had to be taken down:

Some of those were created with the I believe now extinct or with a name change Titanium Appcelerator until I migrated everything to Kotlin and the games were developed with Unity, all of those were 100% my own effort, only for Razor-X I decided to buy some assets from the Unity Asset Store, which I will go into more detail later.

crimsonrgames.com has had plenty of redesigns and updates across the many years I've been maintaining it. You can find the below screenshot courtesy from the Internet Archive, this shows the many versions of the website, coming from a blogger blog to the react powered website from the time of writing this.

And some of the screenshots that show the site's evolution:

And the current one at the time of writing:

crimsonrgames.com is more than a website to me, it's the name my "one man army" game studio has, even though it hasn't ever made a single dollar it's my pride and joy, as it lets me do what I set myself to do when I was a kid, which is making games.

As a little trivia, Crimson R Games takes it's name due to some important inspirations:

• Team Rocket's logo from Pokémon
• Rugal Bernstein's invitation from The King of Fighters
• Crimson being the name of one of my favorite antagonists, Crimson from Digimon world 2

Technically speaking all of those are "evil" references and while I can say Crimson R Games doesn't have a secret evil agenda nor anything like that, it's a funny coincidence, if anything I always liked those symbols due to their powerful image more than what exactly they represented.

Razor-X

Razor-x was the second big project of mine, and while a bit more successful than Magastria, it obviously never reached big numbers (iirc it was around 100 downloads max on Android and 2-5 on iOS), but it was another good learning experience as it was my biggest project with Unity 3D and also allowed me to understand the implications of working with 3D and imported Assets, which I did get from the Asset store.

However, it was only the enemy ships and some of the collectables, but I did model the Razor-x itself on blender, I do believe that sadly my original blend file got lost somewhere, probably could find it on one of my old computers but for practical purposes it's okay to consider it lost as I would rather re-learn blender and make it again. But anyway, I also worked on making the music, this time I actually did it using Garage band and apple loops (I believe that's what they're called still), which is a key point as even for the trailer of my game which you can find on crimsonrgames.com, had some copyright claims which I had to fight back with youtube, which fortunately I won(although in the end youtube decided to add Ads to all videos so in the end someone else is profiting it even if basically its nothing.), but it was an interesting experience to have.

Monika After Story

I was never a fan of mods back then, as I never really tried them out, usually as someone who played mostly Nintendo games or older arcade games I got used to not mod any games and just enjoy them as they were, however that changed after I played Doki Doki Literature Club, because I wanted to continue the Act 3 "gameplay", mostly cause it was a very interesting idea to have a "sentient" being talk to you through a game, in fact that gave me a lot of ideas for having an AI chatbot added to games to roleplay as NPCs. With that idea I wanted to try it out and since I had already checked out some basic Machine Learning concepts such as Natural Language Processing I thought adding that to Monika would be cool. So I investigated a bit and found this mod, to which I tried to raise my first contribution by adding a basic system that relied on NLP to allow "Monika" to interact in a more natural way with the player, and while that never saw the light per se as it required a gargantuan effort to make it be decent(this was back in 2018, LLMs were not even something we could find easily as we do now), but since I was a skilled developer they offered me to join as part of the Dev team, which I did and I helped for a couple of years (I'm a bit foggy on the actual dates), and that was an invaluable experience, keep in mind, I'm a born and raised Mexican guy, my first language is Spanish and while I was self taught to read and write in English (thanks Pokémon), interacting with other people in real time without relying on google translate was a big deal for me, in fact I was really nervous back then, not to mention, it was an Open source project which was my first time contributing to, so it helped me understand the whole process and follow a more open approach to contributions opposed to what I had done professionally before, which was having just specialized devs committing code to the code base directly. The project was well organized and led by ThePotatoGuy (Hi Potato!), and I did learn a lot, I ended up contributing the calendar system, and helped solidify the affection system, even had the chance to do some minor contributions in the dialogue and the art(quetzal plushie my little kid). I also made some good friends there and was one of the best experiences I've had. I'll always be forever thankful for having had that opportunity as that was one big stepping stone for me, in many senses. It also made me feel good that something I was helping create got to be enjoyed by basically millions(as far as statistics go, I remember we had reached a million downloads not counting all the youtube videos made about the mod and such).

Thanks guys!

CRB-5

As I moved on deeper and learned more stuff, I realized my games and my "brand"(yes now I call it a brand), needed a face, the same way big names like Nintendo had Mario(no copyright infrigment intended please don't sue me), I thought it would be good to have a mascot, and for that Crimson R Bot 5 or CRB-5 for short was made. CRB-5 was created to be the mascot of Crimson R Games, and while she did fill out that purpose, I do think I made some bad mistakes with her, the first one of course was the name, like sure it "makes sense" from a project perspective but let's be real, that's a completely forgettable name, heck, I even struggled remembering what it meant just now, and I'm the one that created her! Anyway, that's completely on me and while CRB-5 isn't gonna disappear per se, but I need to figure out more stuff to do with her. I haven't actually uploaded her to my Pixiv account yet, I plan to do in the following days but I will share here a quick clean draw I did when I created her, funny enough she also has a chibi version and her own little mini game made on Godot for the web.

The colors of love

The last one of my "big three", Colors of Love is a visual novel that you can actually still play, please check it out on crimsonrgames.com, the game was done for the valentine's VN game jam(at least I remember it was called that), and I got a couple of downloads on it, I mostly wanted to give it a shot at making a full Visual novel, since that would challenge me, as my forte is developing and programming, the visual novel relies more on visual presentation and solid story writing, while it wasn't exactly a walk in the park to make, I had a lot of fun and I plan to remake it as an RPG next, so I can incorporate more elements to the story and delve deeper into it. I won't post spoilers here, go play it if you feel like it, it's not that long and sadly I did let a couple of bugs go cause of the rushed nature of the Game Jam but it should still be enjoyable. I did make the art of the girl and she's a live 2d model, that was also a very good learning experience, I should probably make some commemorative art too and post it soon.

The journey continues

First of all, if you've read all of this semi web novel, allow me to congratulate you, I honestly didn't expect this to be so long but I guess it's hard to summarize 13 years of pursuing my dreams. I am currently working on more games, I'm honing my skills still, even though my job is more demanding and I tend to use my time to rest and relax, this fire burns, and as such my passion for my life goal will never stop burning. I will continue on this journey until my last breath, knowing that I did in life what I set to do, not because of having a successful indie game that makes millions but because I've had a lot of fun making what I've been making and enjoying the experiences with others through my whole life. If by any chance this helps inspiring someone or any of my little games does, even better. With nothing else left to say...

Thanks for reading!