Author Archives: Toni Sala

About Toni Sala

Indie game designer and developer

New Sokoban – The art of making art

Posted on by
6

In today’s post I’m going to talk about art asset creation for New Sokoban. My artistic skills are limited and I am an autodidact in this field. So, I needed to create the art for New Sokoban taking into account this limitations. My idea was to create abstract assets playing with plain colors and some basic effects like shadows and border strokes.

I started with the game screen because I felt that it was the most important one and that it would set the artistic path to follow. In the following image you can see what was my first try.

New Sokoban Art creation - First try
New Sokoban Art creation – First try

Continue reading →

“Creatinology”

Posted on by
3

“Creatinology is a mental illness that makes people’s brain creativity skills constantly fight to their brain technology skills“. Of course, this doesn’t exist (yet) but if so, I would have it for sure. I have been a lot of years working in a technology environment where people only were interested on if “it works or not”.

So, in some sense, my professional education is technology predominant. When my brain tries to think about work (even if the work is making games) it is difficult for me to avoid trying to solve the technological problems first in my mind. “Is 3D or 2D?”, “Needs animations?”, “Particle effects? If so, how would I implement it?”. This are the kind of questions or thoughts that I still need to train my brain to avoid when thinking about making games or, in general, any kind of app.

Continue reading →

Designing New Sokoban

Posted on by
4

In this post I would like to explain a little bit what New Sokoban is (or should be). I’m going to describe in a few paragraphs the first steps of the design process. However, I have been working using an iterative methodology, constantly revising all the aspects of the game, including the gameplay design. So, actually, the design phase could not be considered to be absolutely completed yet 🙂

Continue reading →

My first iOS game – New Sokoban

Posted on by
2

This is my first post on this blog, apart from the Welcome! one. Here I would like to summarize the process that drove me to the point of starting the development of a game inspired on the classic Sokoban logic game.

New Sokoban first prototype vs current version

New Sokoban first prototype vs current version

Continue reading →

Welcome!

Posted on by
5

My name is Toni Sala. I was born in a little Spanish town in 1982. Since my mind can remember, videogames had always something that attracted me. At the beginning were only a way to have fun but slowly became something more.

I have always had a creative part of myself but, I don’t know exactly why, I never exploited this creative potential out of my spare time. In fact, I got interested in computers when I saw a 3D animation advertisement on TV. That was incredible! “Can I do things like that with a computer?!” Some months later I managed to get a copy of 3D Studio 3 (not MAX yet). That was an awesome piece of code! Since then I have been working on some personal creative projects related to 3D modeling and animation, photo manipulation and coding. However, always in my spare time and never considered to publish anything. It was a hobby for me.

The year before going to the university, I new degree was started in a university of Barcelona, Spain. It was basically a standard Computer Science degree but with a multimedia approach. There was a subject about programming videogames!! That was my degree 🙂

After completing the degree I started to work at the university as a researcher. However, that was not for me. And about one year and a half ago I started a new project with a university colleague. It was and iOS project. We called it “paintingWalls“. That was really exiting 🙂 The app got a huge success. We reached Top 10 Paid Apps in 8 countries including Spain, France and Italy!! Top 3 Paid Apps in Spain!! 🙂  And, in fact, currently is still selling quite well. I guess that there will be some posts about paintingWalls on this blog 😉

And now. Now I am working in a new iOS app. But this time, finally, is a game 😀 Provisionally named “New Sokoban“. And, this time, it has real chance to get published. Actually, I thing that it is in a 60-70% of development approximately. [EDIT] It finally got published! That was amazing!!

So, in this blog I’m going to explain stories about my experience on iOS developing. Wow! Very unique! Yes, but each experience is different and may be interesting for someone… I hope 😉

Ok so, welcome everyone!!