Gumboy Tournament

My name is Lukas Macura and I’m cofounder of CINEMAX, s.r.o. So I’m the producer of project Gumboy Tournament.

In 2006 we finished and released Gumboy Crazy Adventure. We got a lot of feedback from press and players and so we had a lot of ideas for a sequel. We began development and during prototyping new ideas for the sequel we found that playing multiplayer in a world of gumboys can be very addictive and also we found that we are able to make good bots for single player.

As I mentioned, I’m cofounder of CINEMAX; so CINEMAX is privately held – most of the games we are developing or producing are indie. We find that through the indie way we can implement our ideas and make games we like.

I think that for indie game developers it is all about the game in the first place. It’s about trying something new. Yes, it can be hard to find the money to fund this and it’s not guaranteeing profit, but personally I think that making a unique game is better than commercial success.

It’s good. Everyone can try and everyone can be surprised that implementing a good idea is usually harder that beginners think. Even with small games there are a lot of issues (mostly on gameplay) which must be solved and it’s really hard without any experience in making games.

For me, and I hope the same goes for our employees and freelancers, making games are fun, sometimes stressful, but still fun. Other entertainment industries often offer very boring work :)

Well Gumboy Tournament is a sequel; the original Gumboy was inspired by old game called Elastomania. Miroslav Adamus is big fan of this game and is also a very good programmer, so we invented the idea of Gumboy and showed off his first amazing tech-demo in 2003.

We find that for a game like this it’s really important to have good gameplay, so we spend a lot of time testing the game over LAN. However sometimes we have other employees not ‘test’ the game, but just relax and play. And I think that members of other dev teams from our company were really happy that they can join for testing ? It helps confirm that we are on the right path to making an addictive multiplayer game. (And feedbacks from IGF demo version players confirm it too). From a technical point of view, the biggest issue was multiplayer – synchronizing physics over LAN/internet. It’s really hard to use physics (elastic strain and spring power) for multiplayer gameplay; most multiplayer games use physics for just visual effects which doesn’t affect gameplay. We were definitely successful with this task (our physics engine is solid, stable, consistent and predictable) and I think that is the reason why the IGF jury chose our game as a finalist in the Technical Excellence category.

Communication with the press and our audience; we are very busy with developing the game and we don’t get a lot of time to focus on public relations, but we’re doing our best on it :)

We are organizing team-buildings and a lot of brainstorming. We discuss gameplay issues across the whole company, not just within the core game team. Everybody has had a chance to push their own ideas to our games.

It’s been approximately 16 months and we should have the final PC version in 1-2 months.

We don’t use any special tools. We use just Photoshop for preparing textures (no other 3rd party tools).

Making a unique game is big challenge, I can recommend to all developers.

Now we want focus on Gumboy for DS/WII/XBOX360.