Casual Game Developer

Developer Profile: Mondo Robot.

Charles Goran,
co-founder of Mondo Robot

Mondo Robots is a new studio consisting of three people. They are currently producing Tiki Magic Mini Golf in Unity. We talked to co-founder Charles Goran who has been creating art, interactive productions and casual games for 17 years.

I'm owner and Art Director of the newly formed Mondo Robot, currently working on it's first title. Prior to Mondo Robot, I was Art Director with Anark Media Corporation, Design Farm and Food.com. I have 17 years of art and interactive design experience, as well as the hundred yard stare to prove it! My first gig was developing interactive marketing materials for Apple using HyperCard and VideoWorks II ...

I have a formal education in fine art. I attended the San Francisco Art Institute and the Musicians Institute of Technology in Los Angeles.

I started developing casual games in Flash and have been moving into 3D for about the last 5 years. I enjoy being involved in all aspects of the design process, Art and asset creation, programming and audio production.

Work in progress shot from Tiki Magic Mini Golf.

I believe creating games and interactive experiences can and should be an art. Creating good art does not take allot of money or people. Some of the best movies are created on a small budget with allot of talent and creative vision.

Having the right tools can make all the difference.

Tiki Magic Mini Golf. Let's see...I was playing mini golf with my son and thought how fun it would be to make an mini golf game with extremely crazy, Rube Goldberg style courses. I've always had a fondness for Tiki art and style and I'd been looking for a good vehicle for that style. This seemed like a natural fit.

We currently have a 4 month plan of attack. The first two months are all about creating the 3 themed curses and getting the mechanics in place. The final two months being comprised of heavy tuning and testing. We will also be developing a companion website for sharing game stats.

So far, we have been using Lightwave for modeling and texturing, Photoshop, .NET for some of the programming and Unity of course. It's been great being able to tap into the .NET tool set and seamlessly bring that into Unity.

Another Tiki Magic Mini Golf shot.

Simply put, Unity is the tool I've been waiting for. The best part of the Unity experience is seeing your vision come to fruition in the blink of an eye, and perform with breakneck frame rates. Like I said before, having the right tools can make all the difference. For us, Unity makes the difference.

I think the biggest challenge for us right now is just keeping the the scope to a manageable level. With Unity, the development time is so fast, it's tempting to just keep adding features!