Why I’m making this game

The story of this little game covers my whole evolution as a game programmer and designer. It spans from my childhood to my first developer projects and continues today, after more than a decade working in the games industry.

It was the year 2010 and I had just finished my studies in game development. As many other graduates I decided to take the entrepreneurial path, knowing how difficult it would be to find a job in games in Spain. This is how Join2 Games was born: A few friends joined together to make games after graduating. With a bit of humility, our goal was to learn and build something small that we could add to our CVs. And maybe continue, if it was a success.

Seeing an opportunity in Windows Phone – which was still to be launched – we dedicated our efforts to those amazing devices which are just a fading memory today. A real a shame… I loved those devices.

Windows Phone used XNA, an abstraction layer over DirectX for the language C#. This was a popular system during a short time, as it could be used in XBox 360 too, but it sadly disappeared as fast as it came. It’s still worth pointing out that more recent games like Celeste still use it. 

Without an engine to help, we knew we wouldn’t be able to finish big projects and we started making tiny games. Our first projects  were Blaaps! – a very simple bubble-popping-puzzle game – and Super Jumping  Mike – an auto-scroll platformer. With the Windows Phone market being almost empty of competition, Super Jumping Mike managed to be quite successful, surpassing 50k downloads quite fast and reaching a quarter million downloads in around two years. Sadly, microtransactions weren’t that common yet, and the advertisement platforms weren’t fully developed. So over several years of having ad banners in our moderately popular games our revenue didn’t do much over 2k€. We learned a lot, however. We improved our process and developed some tools such as particle systems, sprite animations, and so on. All the basics I needed to cobble up a nice prototype one Sunday afternoon.

But let’s go a bit further back, to my childhood in the late 80s. I was still very little when my father brought home an Atari ST computer. My memory of it is quite blurry: From the floor I can see my father smiling and carrying a big box into the room we called ‘laboratory’ – as my father would use as a photographic lab. “It’s a computer!”, I had never heard that word before.

That computer was an endless source of fun and creativity. Thanks to it I took my first steps in programming with Basic, and was introduced to digital art through a paint software – probably Degas Elite – I could play around, even if I couldn’t fully understand it. And among the games I remember from that time such as Metro Cross, Arkanoid, Turrican or Lemmings – which I even got to work on the franchise recently! – there was one that stood out. In it you had to land a tiny skydiver in what looked like an island shaped as a wedding cake. Landing in the smaller top floor you’d get more points than in the lower floors. That’s how I remember it. But today I suspect this game never existed and it’s in fact a fake memory made out of different games. The fact is I have never seen it again. There is a classic Atari Sky Diver game, but it is not the one I remember.

Nostalgia is, however, more based on memories and feelings than in facts. So with that memory of the skydiver game and what I had learned developing Super Jumping Mike and Blaaps!, I put together  a prototype. A game that perhaps many would remember, but it never existed. As simple as it was, I had the chance to polish it over a week and add a few more detailed mechanics: Sharks, Spikes, Pteranodons…

The game was released at the beginning of 2011, to become a hit almost as big as Super Jumping Mike. Not amazing, a few thousand downloads. Not much income. But it was well regarded by friends and family that kept mentioning it over time.

During that Join2 Games’ chapter a couple more not very successful games were released – Tanks Classic, and Super Pixel Mike. In the end we all found a job in the industry after a while. Thanks to all the lessons learned and our improved portfolios, we have enjoyed good careers so far.

Sky Diver Classic never got to Android, as back then it wasn’t easy to port it and had to be engineered almost from scratch. It was published in iOS, ported to that platform by my friend and now MediaTonic’s Studio Engineering Director in Madrid. I like to think that maybe Fall Guys exists thanks to Sky Diver Classic. With time Windows Phone disappeared and iOS AppStore removed it, throwing Sky Diver Classic into oblivion. But it remained in our hearts, and my head, trying to find the right moment to come back. And so it did, a sunny afternoon of July 2020. A decade after.

As with the original, I was able to cobble up a prototype in an afternoon. And my goal was to finish it up quickly and launch it in Android – which I did. But my ambition and experience wanted to take it a bit further. As I mentioned here, I’ve been working on this project for almost 3 years now, and polishing it to the standard I want has been challenging. But it’s getting there. I can’t make any big announcements yet, but if you want to know how the story ends, you can follow me on social media and in this blog to see how it goes.