OPEN QUESTION: So, how's it like to start on Game Development??..

When anyone starts liking games really much, they start thinking something like "Hey, I would've added this here...". It's really nice realizing how much you could've done for a game you love, and as a programmer I can tell, is quite hard telling yourself  "Ok.. never mind, now I get why they didn't do it... makes complete sense". Making games is, honestly, HARD. It is not basically Fun, but rather tiring and time consuming.The fruits of your hard work, though, make you feel like it was all worth it. When you start a game, you have this empty screen that is of no help to you. You start getting assets, sprites,sounds and more and the game starts looking like a game. You put this here, then add some behavior and BAM! something completely new happens. Sometimes you get awful errors, but I have to tell you, that's the most fun to fix.. When something unexpected happen, all I do is laugh. For example, When I started making the Dragon Ball Z game on Unity 3D, Goku, for some reason, used to fall through the platform. I had many laughs with it, though at some point it got frustrating. 

Making games, is, overall, awesome, but not because you like video games, you like making them. There's a real difference in playing and making them. If you think you like to make them, you can start by trying Scratch, a visual based framework that will let you create simple to medium complexity games without writing a single line of code. Is quite limited, but if you get to learn it you can do really cool stuff. Start by making something like a pong, then maybe a snake and so on. If you like it that way, you may like it when coding. 

The last point I'd like to touch, is that, sometimes, coding seems way easier than everything else. Finding Open source sprites, sounds and graphics that adjust your liking is not easy, and a big idea without great art just seems like a small one. Artists are really important when it comes to game development, so do not ever think of their work as easy or worthless. They are the ones that makes your game come really alive. You can code a box that behaves just like a superhero. It can fly, it can walk, it can move and attack... but is nothing more than a box. Take a great character and make him do the same and you will instantly realize that is just not the same to have the same code on a box and on a cool dude with a leather suit.

Thanks a lot for reading and I really hope you enjoy the article. It was really nice writing about it, and I may write a bit more when I have some free time. Hope you're having a nice Christmas, have fun!! :) 

Learning Unity 3D

Well, I have to admit that XNA is a great framework, but indie developers seem to love Unity 3D the most and I'm starting to get why. Unity is really easy to learn, it's really powerful when it comes to 3D, and have now implemented 2D also. There's also the fact that they have a huge asset store where you can basically get anything you look for to implement in a game. I'm really loving working with it and here's a small video of what I've been working on. It's just basic stuff as I'm just learning, trying to make everything I did on XNA now on Unity, but I believe is a great start and I hope some of you also look at it that way. This Unity version WILL be available on android, totally free and with no ads so far. I hope you enjoy this video and of course, I really hope you download this app when completed. ^^

Dragon Ball Z Basics - Unity 3D.

Thanks for reading this small article ^^. Hope you enjoy it.

Developed in XNA for College assignment!

So, one of us had this subject in school that was about making video games. The framework we used was XNA, and though the games I did were not something to brag about, for starters, I guess they were not bad at all. I used sprites from many sources except in the last one where I drew most of what I used including characters, backgrounds and animation as a whole using spine. Here are the 3 video games we developed. I really hope you enjoy watching them!

Dragon Ball Runner:

Platformer (Never picked a name for it XD)

Tower Defense:

Here is where draws are mine (Simple yet mine), and animations are also ours. Animations were made with SPINE which is an awesome software developed by: http://esotericsoftware.com/. If you're working on games, please consider them to create your animations as their software is easy to use and simply Awesome!

First Theme: Ezreal, The Prodigal Explorer. (League of Legends)

Here's our first release for those of you who are anxious or would like to enjoy using this new theme. It works with UCCW which is a custom widget creator that will help you have shortcuts to different applications and stuff. Anyway, take a look at it:

This skin can be downloaded here:

http://goo.gl/oc8wT

Totally free, as it will always be ^^. Thanks a lot for reading and remember to leave some feedback. We would love to know what do you think about all this and what you would like to see next. Besides League of Legends, We are thinking about developing some Dragon Ball Z Skin along with other animes. This is not for sure though. Once again, thanks for reading and leave your comments.

NOTE: Images used in the theme belong to RIOT Games. A direct link to their League of Legends website can be found here: League of Legends

JLRC Devs. Team - Out.-

Starting as a Developer!

First of all, thanks to all of you who are actually taking the time to read this or at least come into the blog. This is a blog dedicated to show progress, projects and different stuff made by the JLRC Developers Team that me and my brother started. For those interested, we're just beginning programming and don't know much about anything, but I believe that the only way to achieve something, is to actually start it somehow. That's the main reason why we decided to start off and pay Google's fee to become one of their android Devs.

Anyways, so let me talk about our plans.

Right now, we dream of making a game. We're working hard learning about programming languages, game design and stuff like that. But that's quite far away right now... So we decided to start developing skins and visual stuff (as they require basically no programming skills). We both know something about Photoshop and Illustrator, so we have a great start ahead. We'll be working hard to bring you quality work and make your android device more awesome than it already is. Everything we work on, is going to be free and will keep being free as long as we can. We'll have a donation button here in the web so you can support the cause if you enjoy using these skins/themes/images or anything we work on.

We hope you enjoy the blog and support our work. Thanks for reading and hope to see you here soon.