Hello World!
Welcome to Hobbi Games. We are a small Philippines based team of game developers who wish to create games that people would love and enjoy. We all have full time jobs and this little venture is something we do on the sideline. Speaking for myself though, I'd be willing to quit my day job and work on Hobbi Games full time. Hopefully that day would come real soon! :)
To introduce ourselves, I am Lorie Jay Gutierrez, founder, CEO, and owner of Hobbi Games. I'm a professional Software Engineer by day, ninja graphics artist, programmer, composer, and game designer by night. Aside from programming, I like to draw, play music, play video games, and play tennis.
The co-founder, and the person actually responsible for the name “Hobbi Games”, is Jacquelyn Gutierrez. She’s a programmer mainly responsible for the backend and platform specific features (Achievements, Leaderboards, etc.). She’s got a professional background as a Facebook game developer. In case you’re wondering about our surnames, she’s my wife. She also likes to play tennis, and dancing.
Jayson Cerbas is a hardcore gamer who currently works as a Senior Software Engineer. He started learning game development using XNA Game Studio, cross-platform game development using Cocos2D, and Unity3D. Aside from programming, he also likes 3D Graphics modeling and animation, playing a guitar, playing video games, playing basketball, and collecting/playing Magic: The Gathering trading card game.
A bit of history here, Hobbi Games was founded by me and my wife sometime last year (2013). Since playing Age of Empires from a friend’s house way back then I've been aspiring to become a game developer. Having to set priorities in life, I had to choose a different path, and am living it right now, but I've decided that it’s time I follow the road I've always wanted to follow. Anyway, all this personal stuff is better written on its own article. :)
After Hobbi Games was founded we worked on our first game, Duende!. It was late October 2013 when I started drafting the designs in my head. By November I had some sketches out on paper, and by December the coding started. Having just heard of Unity 4.3 and it’s new native 2D support, I decided to go for it. Before Unity 4.3 I’ve already messed around with Cocos2D, Android SDK, and Unity3D for developing games on the mobile platform. Unity proved to be the easiest to develop into, so I went with that. I had to learn C# along the way, but being familiar with Java, and professionally experienced with C++, I didn’t have any problem at all. It also helps that my good friend Dr. Google always have the answers.
We worked on Duende! for about a month. I was mainly working on the core gameplay and graphics, Jacque works on the platform-specific parts. When the core game was in place we decided to contact our closest friends who were also into game development. Incidentally these were my former officemates from my previous work. I figured I only needed an extra hand for Duende!, since it’s a relatively small game. That was when Jayson joined the project. He worked mainly as the level programmer/designer and helped shape Duende! to what it is today.
Despite working as a team, we don’t really have an office. Of course me and my wife are in the same house, but on Jayson’s case we only communicate through chat and occasional meet-ups to discuss concepts that would be difficult to express in writing.
AJ joined the team when we're working on our third game, Super Tiny Monkey. Like Jayson, we only communicate via chat. He is based in Singapore after all. He’s mainly a programmer, but occasionally shares input regarding game design.
Hobbi Games is new, and young. I'd like to believe that we have a good thing going for us here, and we count on your support so we can continue making good, fun, and enjoyable games!
- LJ Gutierrez
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