Portugal Makes Games? #2

It seems like Spring is finally sticking around in Portugal with temperatures approaching 30C this weekend. Hopefully you’re having a similar experience where you are, and what better way to enjoy the Sun than to do it while reading great news about our sunny little corner of Europe?

We have a long road ahead of us in Portugal when it comes to recognizing videogames as one of the cultural pillars of entertainment, but the latest edition of ARRISCA C showed us that we’re already making progress.

ARRISCA C is an initiative that aims to promote the creation of companies and startups focusing in innovation, especially in technological spaces. The winners were announced last week and an upcoming videogame took second place in the “Inovação em Cultura, Turismo e Património” (Innovation in Culture, Tourism, and Heritage) category.

#31 Luzyahdas: The Botafogo Odyssey is the next game from Loading Studios, the minds behind multiple titles that focus on highlighting Portuguese culture. The studio describes their next game as:

A fresh take on ‘Os Lusíadas’ by Luiz Vaz de Camões. A project that blends Portugal's cultural legacy with Cli-Fi, bringing classic literature into the entertainment and edutainment market in our unique way.

There aren’t enough videogames focusing on the hundreds of years of rich Portuguese history, I’m extremely excited to see what Loading C does with one of Portugal’s seminal works of literature.

João Antunes, also known as EIRAS, is one of many examples of the talented and accomplished Portuguese people we have in the gaming industry. He’s worked on some heavy hitters like AGAR.IO, Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora, and Star Wars: Outlaws, among others. He’s been at Studio Ellipsis since 2024 and is the Senior Gameplay Developer on Nightholme, a game we highlighted in the first edition of Portugal Makes Games?.

Portugal Makes Games? The First Edition

In the midst of building his fantastic CV, though, Antunes somehow found the time to develop Employee 925 by himself, a short indie title that’s sure to stick with you for a while.

RTP Arena, the gaming vertical of the Portuguese public broadcasting organization , interviewed Antunes on his eclectic journey through the videogame industry. The entire article is in Portuguese, but your browser can probably translate it well enough. I’d like to highlight a quote that will likely resonate with a lot of creators in the industry:

Digo sempre mais ou menos o mesmo a alguém que quer começar: faz os teus próprios jogos (pequenos e rápidos), vai ao máximo de eventos que conseguires e tenta falar com o máximo de pessoas nesses eventos (para perceberes como as coisas funcionam e para que saibam que existes) e não desanimes se tiveres de te adaptar às oportunidades ou falta delas.

My translation:

I always say a similar thing to someone who wants to get started [in the videogame industry]: make your own games (short and quick), attend as many events as you can and try to talk to as many people as possible in those events (so you can understand how things work and to let them know you exist) and don’t feel disheartened if you need to adapt to the opportunities or lack thereof.

There are few videogame studios as tenured in Portugal as Camel 101. They’ve existed since 2009 and are still publishing games to this day. Their upcoming release is Dead Stop: No Vacancy, the first of a series of short, episodic horror games.

Camel 101 have been successful at doing exactly that: shorter games focusing on immersion, that don’t waste your time and don’t cost you a fortune. But when I spoke to Ricardo Cesteiro, the studio’s co-founder, a few weeks ago, he told me that their first project was meant to be an entirely different experience.

The first project we started doing was a shooter/RPG which was something gigantic and which we obviously weren’t able to do, but it was an experience.

Cesteiro described this fondly, while gesturing with his arms open to reinforce the notion that their initial project really was massive. This is now a funny anecdote, but I believe it has a lesson behind it.

Cesteiro loves RPGs, as many of us do, but that doesn’t mean that RPGs should be the starting point for the games he makes. If you love reading high fantasy books spanning multiple entries in a series, you still probably shouldn’t start off your writing journey with a 300k word tome.

Looping back to what Antunes said in his interview with RTP Arena: start with small and quick projects to learn the ropes, and see where you go from there. In Camel 101’s case, they’ve honed their craft of creating short horror experiences to near perfection.

That doesn’t mean that initial ambition isn’t entirely gone, though. When I asked Cesteiro what kind of game he would make if time and money weren’t a part of the equation, he smiled, looked out his window, and said: “maybe I’d like to one day make an RPG, but at the same”, he laughed, “I would find it quite scary to do.”

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