War Guardian Chronicles: Origins and Plans

We haven’t written much about the world of the War Guardians, but this story was actually based on a series of fanfiction that I co-wrote with my Ragnarok Online guildmates. I couldn’t finish the fanfics because there were so many things I wanted to write about, but I got overwhelmed by the words. (I swear there’s a song about this dilemma by Gloria Estefan!) Some writers probably know this problem: that feeling when you want to tell a story but you get so caught up in describing things that you’d lose your train of thought and end up not completing the story. Becoming a game developer later in life solved this problem for me. I no longer have to describe people, places, and events because visual artists and musicians could help me build the world I envisioned without having to use so many words. A game designer like me could just assemble the pieces and then weave, weave, weave. Read More

Re-Writing Berbanya and Kristales

When we first started working on the Adarna series in 2014, we were itching to re-imagine the world penned by Jose de la Cruz. The first part of the corrido was set in the fictional Kingdom of Berbanya, where Prince Juan sets off to find not only the cure for his ailing father but also his missing brothers. After Juan rescues his brothers, sane readers might realize how dysfunctional the royal family is. Juan’s older brothers, Pedro and Diego, were so inexplicably evil that questions could be raised as to the values being imparted by this high school reading requirement. So we proceeded to re-write their story by way of Adarna, the first of the series, which was released in 2015. Read More

What happened to Mathoria’s Trading Cards

It’s been a few months since we have released Mathoria: It All Adds Up on Steam, and we have received a fair share of positive and negative reviews from players across the world. Most of them are about the gameplay and game mechanics, but some have also noticed something about one of the features we wanted to implement in the Steam release: the badge system.

Not so long ago, we have announced here that we will add a badge system in the game, where people will earn trading cards from playing the game and complete them, earning them a profile badge to brag in their Steam profiles as well as profile backgrounds and chat emoticons. We were very excited to have this “gimmick” in the game, but we have noticed a few weeks after that they are not dropping any cards. Read More