eGameZone and Beljogos

Xtreme Games launched eGameZone Networks in late 2002. Finally, our 6 games were published in eGameZone. It was very gratifying to see that this became a reality.

But when our games were published, Alberto Hoshino was already devoting himself entirely to the medicine course at university.

I continued to study game programming and then founded a local group called Beljogos, with the goal of encourage the development of games in the state of Pará, northern Brazil.

Beljogos became the main reference on game development in the state of Pará. It serves as an integration point between students, professionals, universities and companies. The group is responsible for organizing the events about game development in the city of Belém, capital of Pará.

I'm also dedicated to preserving the history of game development. In recent events of game development in the city of Belém, I have done a small exhibition of old game machines such as Atari 2600 videogame, ZX Spectrum compatible computer and Nintendo 8-bit (NES). I have the complete collection of Input Magazine in Portuguese, which explains programming in BASIC and Assembly.

The image below is of one of the exhibitions that I did in 2012 with my son Lucas Romero.

ROGUE and Tai Yang

In 2001, Xtreme Games announced it was developing an online digital game distribution system called eGamezone Networks. Our six games from RH Games Bundle were among the games that would be published in eGameZone.

This motivated us to continue the development of our games. I have started the implementation of an object-oriented 2D game engine in C++ that would be used in our next games.

The name of the engine was ROGUE (Romero Game Utility Engine). The engine would contain C++ classes to handle animation, backgrounds, tiles, sprites, game states and resource files for image and sound. ROGUE would also contain a generic 2D map editor to be used in the creation of the levels of the games.

I was developing the engine slowly while waiting for a real return on eGameZone. We defined a game that would be used as a pilot project to test ROGUE. The name of the game is Tai Yang Odyssey, which is based on Chinese martial arts movies.

ROGUE and the game remained in an early stage of development without any documentation, so I will not provide any source code. Below is a sketch of characters of the game Tai Yang Odyssey, made by Alberto Hoshino.

High Sphere

Every 5 years a mysterious green planet approaches becoming visible. During this period many strange things happen and it is possible to feel a more intense energy around. To this planet was given the name of High Sphere.

After a revolution that overthrew a great tyrant, a young woman stood out because of her strength, determination and leadership. Due to some incidents, an ancient prophecy was remembered and it seems that many things are going to happen before the next appearance of High Sphere.


High Sphere is a project of RH Games that involved the creation of a fantasy world that would be used in the development of our RPG games.

I had many ideas of adventures and characters for these RPG Games. These ideas about High Sphere were spread in my Development Diaries.

Alberto Hoshino drew and wrote about some characters from High Sphere. This material can be seen in this file: HighSphere.pdf

Xenorunners

Xenorunners is a racing game project. Every year there is an interplanetary event in which eight planets send their best pilot to compete in a amazing race, where the challenge is not only to complete the track, but also survive the dangers of the tracks and the attacks of the other drivers.

The race contains eight tracks, one on each planet. The planets have different features, for example, there is a volcanic planet where fire is the predominant element. In other planets there is a predominant presence of water, forests, ice...

We did a Game Design Document of this game for our internal use. This document is available in this file: Xenorunners.pdf

The eight cars have their own strengths and weaknesses. The table below shows the distribution of 12 attribute points for each car. The names of the drivers were provisional.

Beland

Beland City is being controlled by a criminal organization led by a great entrepreneur. However the authorities do nothing about it because of the high rate of corruption in the institutions.

Two fighters are determined to stop the entrepreneur at any cost, each has their own personal reasons.

One is a mysterious fighter known only as "Master" who always wears a jacket with a large "M" drawn on his back. The other is a capoeira fighter known as "Santos".


Beland is a game project in the Beat'em up genre, the same genre of games as Final Fight and Street of Rage.

The idea for this game came before the RH Race game. We have been slowly working on its Game Design. We defined the levels of the game and did the Storyboard of all levels. Alberto Hoshino drew several characters of the game.

The Storyboard of Beland with sketches of the characters and the game levels is available in this file: StoryboardBeland.pdf

Game Ideas

The first games of RH Games were developed with two main goals. The first goal was to gain experience in game development. The second goal was to try to publish through Xtreme Games. We would try to develop a more complex game only if we had the certainty that it would be published.

But as Xtreme Games suspended game publishing because of Hasbro Lawsuit, we were in a difficult situation. We had no idea when this lawsuit would end and whether Xtreme Games would publish new games again. Our only option was to wait.

We had many ideas about different types of games that we could develop after RH Games Bundle. We did a sketch containing all these ideas.

The images below are from the sketch. Each image file contains 3 games. On the left is the title of the game and on the right is a concept of the game screen.

We evolved the game design of some of these games as will be seen in the next posts.

Hasbro Lawsuit

In 2000, we signed a contract with Xtreme Games to publish the RH Games Bundle.

Unfortunately, something unexpected happened...

Hasbro Interactive acquired the rights of the classic Atari games and has filed lawsuits against companies that were shipping games that had some resemblance to the classic Atari games. This action of Hasbro generated outrage in the game development community as can be seen in this article of Diana Gruber.

The game development community started a Green Ribbon Campaign as a form of protest against this lawsuit of Hasbro. The participants of the Green Ribbon Campaign used the image below on their homepages:

 

Xtreme Games was one of the companies mentioned in the lawsuit of Hasbro. As Xtreme Games was a small company, it decided to suspend new game publishing until solve this problem with Hasbro.

While we waited for the unfolding of this story, we continue to work on the Game Design of other projects, simply because we loved doing it.