First Startup & The Mobile Hype

I joined forces with my former boss in the studio from the previous section to launch a new startup focused on development for mobile devices. Little confession, I never was (now even less) a big fan of phones, but back in 2010 it was pretty obvious that it was going to be a great source of business for years to come.

Mobile Games

The company was short-lived, but it gave me the opportunity of seeing first-hand the other faces of the business beyond looking exclusively at coding and developing features for the requirements of others.

We created two titles:

• Godcheckers: a greek-mythology inspired take on the classic board game, for Android

• The Hungry Pigs: a shameless attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the game "Angry Birds" by Rovio Entertainment, a spin-off where the pigs were the protagonists, for iOS and Android

In retrospective, there were a lot of lessons regarding the creative concept. We should've been more original, authentic, I actually had a folder of original designs for at least two other games, but we aimed at something that we thought had economic potential because of the success of others (back then Rovio had barely released its second game, the franchise was in its infancy).

However, technically speaking, this project was very fulfilling for my still-premature programming hunger at the time. I built a multiplatform environment to work around the limitations of the moment both for iOS and Android. So the core of the game was written in C/C++ with OpenGL, and I created interfacing libraries on top of that to get to the particular layers of Objective-C and Java for each platform. I also created a custom XML rendering engine and level editor to store and manage the data of every level, and plenty of other micro-challenges that you only face when implementing game dynamics and its whole system from scratch.

But the time came to leave the nest, find out what happened next.