I am currently working on the development of Caff, a community creation and management platform combining the best of chat groups and the best of classic forums.

In addition, I regularly publish about video content creation on OffStream.gg (Spanish publication) and I'm continuously working on expanding the Bubble Coffee icon set that you can see in operation in the navigation menu of this website!

In the past I have designed and launched three videogames among which Hop Raider stands out, a tribute to the lava levels of the classic Mario Bros in which the goal is to get as high as possible before being hit by lava; with a gameplay specifically designed for mobile.

You can check the different case studies of some of my projects, get the Bubble Coffe set or check my current stack from the menu!

The fun it brought to both those nostalgic for the early years of Pokémon and thousands of new players to be able to interact with the Pokémon world so easily while going on with your day got me thinking about an alternative to this game set in the Harry Potter world created by J. K. Rowling. And thus, the idea of Pottermore as an AR game came to my mind.

Although in this concept you don't have to catch creatures but fight against them, they share many similarities, such as the fact that you can fight against your friends or fight with the help of augmented reality.

As in the famous saga, the first thing you must do is to be accepted into one of the four houses (Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Slytherin, and Hufflepuff). From then on you can find treasures during your usual walks, get achievements and complete quests that, besides allowing you to learn more spells, will earn points for your house. Famous wizards from all over the world will ask you for quests that, if you succeed in completing them, will allow you to unlock collectible cards from these wizards.

Another new feature I wanted to introduce in this alternative was the possibility of accessing different stores depending on the time of day, as well as being able to buy, sell and exchange different products in the store or with your friends. Of course, you won't find the same products in  respectable stores in the morning as in the dark markets in the middle of the night!

The case was featured on Behance.

This powerful but fleeting demo of a web version of Apple Maps came to life as a result of a released API disclosed on the WWDC website in 2016.

Although, due to limitations of the API itself, we could not include all the features that the Apple Maps app had at that time, we were able to reflect Apple's own aesthetics in this demo, which allowed Peach Maps to work as a fairly faithful unofficial version of what in the future would be the web version of Apple Maps.

This project featured a search bar that gathered its results from OpenStreetMap and only used static files, making it easy to host on any server.

(opcional) Unfortunately Apple blocked the access to this API shortly after the launch. It was nice while it lasted!

MawKit was born from the need to include certain features to Hop Raider, such as ads, in-app purchases and achievements. The options to include these features in Cocos2d-x – the engine we used for both Hop Raider and Blimp Journey – were outdated and didn't work smoothly, besides not including everything we needed. So we decided to build a framework ourselves!

Written in C++, Java, and Objective-C++, MawKit uses callbacks instead of cluttered and global variables to manage asynchronous operations.

We developed it at the same time we were working on Hop Raider, offering a cross-platform implementation of these features (Android, iOS, OS X). When we developed Blimp Journey we took the time to refactor MawKit and make it open source. Sharing is caring!

MawKit includes features like:

• Achievements and leaderboards (Google Play Games on Android and GameCenter on iOS/OS X) – Earn trophies and compare your achievements with players from all over the world!
• Ads (Admob and AdColony on both iOS and Android – noop implementation for OS X as there is no oficial SDK for this platform) – Games can be incredible billboards!
• In-app purchases – To buy more currency or to show off an incredible swag.
• Mathematical helpers such as random number generators or ranges.

And many more! Get MawKit at its repository on Github.

Ever since I got my first Game Boy back in the nineties, I have been an avid gamer. When the smartphone arrived, I started to come up with fun ideas that could be accomplished thanks to this new interface. As time went by, I was lucky enough to find a multidisciplinary group of friends at university with whom it would be possible to take our project from zero to an average of five stars on the App Store.

Hop Raider was not our first game (the first one was River Bunch), but it was the first one we approached as a serious, ambitious, profitable, future-proof and multiplatform product.

We worked with many ideas, but we knew from the beginning that we wanted to make a simple game, easy to learn but difficult to master, very replayable and that would make the most of the interface of a smartphone; that's how we started to consider different alternatives among which infinite runners always stood out. The problem? Flappy Bird had taken the market by storm and the market was full of similar games.

But then we got an idea... What if the infinite runner was vertical and not horizontal? This immediately reminded us of Mario's lava levels and, after a bit of brainstorming, we started to think about how this could fit in with our goal.

Adapting a classic to new possibilities

We had a clear idea, we wanted a game inspired by Mario, infinite, easy to learn and designed specifically for mobile phones, would it be possible?

It was not an easy task, but eventually and after endless sessions of analysis and testing we came up with what seemed to be the solution:

• Procedurally generated levels, different in each game.
• Two objectives: coins (to unlock new skins and maps) and high score (maximum level reached).
• Pixel art style on a 16x16 pixel tile grid, like in the Game Boy Advance.
• Only one way of input: press anywhere on the screen to jump while the main character moves sideways at a constant speed.

Trouble in paradise?

The idea was good, the style was nice and the mechanics were well defined, but it lacked a real challenge — the spark that would make the player strive to be better. How could we add a layer of difficulty and challenge to the game? Well, on two fronts:

• Social layer that constantly reports how far your friends have gone.
• Variable jump length through different lengths of taps.

This way, on the one hand, there is an ever-present incentive to beat your friends' record and, on the other hand, as the difficulty increases so does the skill needed to beat the levels.

Thus, we worked on an algorithm that would generate levels in a unique and infinite way but in such a way that they would always be technically surmountable, taking into account, for this purpose, the two previous levels and their obstacles.

A complete and tested product that works

With all that said, we moved on to implementation. The end result was a product that felt complete, replayable, and well thought out, which was positioned as the best gaming product of the week on Product Hunt and with an unexpected and overwhelming amount of positive reviews on the Appstore and Play Store:

To date, the game continues to perform well despite development being suspended, so who knows if Hop Raider will have a revival in the near future?