![]() GameInvest was being inundated with companies wanting to commission small, often branded games for a small amout of money, which it couldn't afford to accept. "It was really difficult for us, with our wages here in Portugal, and with the competition ," he says. However, the boom in popularity for these kinds of games put GameInvest on the back foot against developers who were able to produce similar experiences more cheaply. Wise: Medical Mysteries, one of the games worked on by Codices during his tenure at GameInvest ![]() First he joined Gameinvest as a lead programmer, a studio with a focus on web-based casual games.ĭr. However, YDreams was struggling and began to cut its staff, at which point Codices decided to jump ship. YDreams' innovation turned a few heads, and despite Undercover 2 being a flop the BBC approached the studio with a view to licensing a mobile spin-off of the Spooks TV series, made in the same vein. You have to be ready to compromise," he advises. " I didn't like mobile phones at the time - hated them, in fact. Primitive mobile phone games were far from what Codices had envisioned when he dreamt of becoming a game developer. Impressed, YDreams eventually hired Codices, who ended up working on location-based sequel Undercover 2. They instead asked if the team would be interested in working on a 3D game engine for mobile as their project, to which the quintet agreed. "They weren't interested in PC games, they were more into mobile phones," says Codices. However, YDreams was hardly more enthusiastic than the university. In a remarkable twist of fate, this lecturer happened to have a friend working at YDreams, and put them in touch with the ambitious game-minded students.Ĭodices and his ragtag bunch of fellow wannabe-devs hoped to get YDreams to back their project, and thus ensure that the university didn't restrict them to non-games projects as they had originally planned. "I didn't understand that, but eventually I found the people I needed."Īfter being rejected on the grounds of their proposed project (an RTS game for PC) being too complex, the team of 5 students sought the advice of a more sympathetic university lecturer. "There were some cases where they said 'my mum doesn't let me work on video games'," he says, to laughter. For this, he had to gather a team of like-minded individuals. ![]() Spurred on, he set out to develop a game as his final project at university. While reading the Portuguese magazine Mega Score, Codices learned about a pre-Smartphone mobile game called Undercover, pioneering location-based gaming and developed by Portuguese firm YDreams. However, Codices was wrong some people were developing games in Portugal. "I realised you have to educate yourself if you want to make games," he reflects. This shows how far the Portuguese scene has come in just a few years, while also highlighting the value of events like this one. "I searched on what would have been AltaVista at the time, and realised there was nobody working on games in Portugal," he says, in his talk at Lisbon's Microsoft Game Dev Camp. When Nélio Codiceswas a Computer Science student and aspiring game developer, he quickly realised he had a problem. ![]()
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