Beta 2 Game Dev Saga - Part 7

TechArt

“Among many things, I create tools for devs, and check if something beautiful our art team made is aesthetically fine and performance-wise” Gustavo Encinas, Technical Director for Beta 2 Games.

Welcome back to the Beta 2 Dev Saga! Today the chat is with Gustavo Encinas, a very nice and good humored guy. But I’ll let him talk, don’t worry. Hey Gustavo, who are you, where did you come from…

Well, I’m from S?o Paulo, majored in Industrial design at Unesp, Bauru. Bruno was my classmate! (check our talk with Bruno on Pixel Art here). During college I didn’t care much about 3D art, you know? What I really wanted was animation!

But, then, it was term paper time and I realized it would take me about another graduation time just to make traditional animation by myself for it, so I thought “Hey, what’s with this 3D stuff?”, and here I am!

And how did you start working here at Beta 2 Games?

Well, after I graduated, I got to work in the advertising field. Very cliché, right? And guess what? I also had my big great swindling! My first job and that happened, can you believe it?

I was ready to quit. But this opportunity to work in Porto Alegre came up (Porto Alegre is the capital of Rio Grande do Sul estate), where I met The Boss. And I can tell you with capital letters: IT WAS A TERRIBLE EXPERIENCE.

We laughed.

I don’t mean because of him, but the company we worked with. Holy molly... The greatest thing was the friendship we built along with other guys.

One day, after I quit that studio, The Boss asked me if I didn’t want to join him at this game jam (Global Game Jam), and I loved it! After that, I participated in other jams, even if we couldn’t work together in them. I can code a bit, you know?

Then The Boss founded Beta 2 Games along with Diego. They made Mythos, some educational games, even that one about lovers for valentine’s for that mall in his hometown

So that’s more or less when I joined the team, but never as a dedicated worker, you know? I do it for our friendship's sake.

So, dude, what do you do? I mean, what is this “technical director” stuff?

Well, I laugh so I don’t cry when I think of it lol. I mean, I am an artist and I know coding a bit. And I like both, you know? So, for example, we need a tree for a map. There are 2424394 ways to make a tree. But there’s only a few that wouldn’t make a weak pc fry its circuits.

That’s one of my jobs, telling the artist to make that tree thinking about the performance.

Sometimes it is not that exciting. Sometimes it is just counting dots, when it’s a game with too many elements on screen.

Wow that’s really a lot of work, man!

Oh, but there’s more lol. I also engage in the model production, like, how can we scale the assets in a map, for example. Always thinking in that aesthetics x performance ratio.

I also develop tools. I made one that extracts the real textures of the buildings from google earth and make it polygons only.

For the Prince Island project, I developed a tool that creates islands, trees… In another project I made one that lets the dev draw whatever he wants on it, because it’s a procedural map…

The plan is to develop tools for Beta 2 Games, not for specific projects, you know? That’s what we are working with now, to create a Beta 2 Games’ library. Then devs can just set those things directly into the engine.

Wow, man, that sure is a lot of work. Have you ever thought about it? How much have you done? I mean, sometimes we don’t stop to think about the things we do, so we always think low of ourselves.

I guess you’re right. But it is always a pleasure. It’s fun working with you guys. It’s fun doing these things, although sometimes I’m really swamped.

The exchanges we have, the friendship, you know? I don’t feel I’m working when we are in a meeting. We are friends talking about games. And this is the greatest!