Becoming a Gamedev – Runferendum

During my university days, together with two classmates (Xutre and Víctor), we decided to start making games. At that time, we still didn’t know much; I think we were in our first year or at the beginning of the second year of our Game Design and Production degree.

The first idea we had was to create a video game that would be controversial and grab attention just because of its theme. At that moment, the Catalan Referendum was taking place, so we created Runferendum, a side-scrolling game where you collected votes while dodging Guardia Civil officers or M. Rajoy shooting “black cards” (among other things).

The game wasn’t polished at all and was quite a mess in terms of programming, but the art was cute and the theme was humorous.

App icon:

The game featured a main character jumping through Barcelona. With the votes you collected, you could buy different skins. We made versions inspired by the castañera, the Catalan donkey, FC Barcelona, Sant Jordi, the Tió, Puigdemont, and a few more.

You could also collect items to recover health: crema catalana, caracoles a la llauna, fuet, and pa amb tomàquet.

The game reached over 5,000 downloads and was even mentioned on a TV3 program, so we achieved what we wanted.

That’s how OSBRO Games was born, a multimillion-dollar company currently expanding worldwide! Just kidding. It was simply the studio name we created with our classmates, and all our university projects were released under that name.

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This is just an anecdote, but the conclusion is that making video games based on your own culture and current events is fun. And even though we didn’t earn any money from it, we learned a lot.