Nika and Agatha are two 7-year-old girls but they do not have the usual tastes for little girls of that age. The first of them likes technology and wants to build a giant robot to destroy the world and the second, disenchanted with existing religions, has founded a sect in her mother's butcher shop, carnivorism, which seeks to make animals happy when they are sacrificed. Nika and Agatha are the brainchild of Mariona Valls, art director at Mango Protocol, the studio that has produced the three Psychotic Adventures games released so far: Mechanika (pronounced "mechanical"), Agatha Knife, and Colossus Down. .

Valls has lived video games as part of her entertainment since she was little. He remembers when Duck Hunt entered his parents' house on a clone console "because my father used to shoot clay pigeons and I think he was amused to recover that hobby that he had had to give up, and that same year, when we moved house, they bought us a Game Boy to me and my brother", although she points out that now she plays more than when she was little. With the same naturalness as videogames, the taste for drawing came into his life and his first memory with colored pencils is "on a little stretcher table that they had in my house, on a little chair, and there I spent hours drawing, and They enrolled me in art school. When I was 10 or 11 years old, I already said that I wanted to be an artist," he tells us by video call. Be careful, because in this interview there are some details of the characters and the history of the Mango Protocol games.

Artist, teacher and designer

"What's more, I was clear that I wanted to be an art teacher," she specifies. And she was clear about the steps that had to be taken: After the Artistic Baccalaureate, she studied Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona and then the Certificate of Pedagogical Aptitude, which today is a master's degree But, unexpectedly, he ended up working at Papabubble, a candy store, "my adult life has been a bit based on carambola, things that I haven't controlled very well but I've clung to them", he explains between laughs when seeing the reaction to this fact. When she finished her studies, she felt that it was not the time to prepare oppositions to be an art teacher and she wanted to continue training. She had created her own brand of clothing and accessories, Mavako, and she decided to study fashion design. While he was at it, he won a contest in which the prize was to exhibit a work in the candy store and the day he went to disassemble the employee asked him if he was looking for a job, he met with the boss and spent five years, first as a shop assistant and then designing the candies. Meanwhile, for two or three years she made a parade with Mavako at the Barcelona Manga Fair and at the Japan Weekend in Madrid.

But the sewing ended when Javier Gálvez, producer and screenwriter for Mango Protocol, as well as partner and partner of Valls, proposed that they create a video game together. He had studied Telecommunications and then took a master's degree at the UPC "and he had a lot of confidence in me, I didn't have that much and he told me: 'we try, we do Mechanika as a test project and we'll see if we can work together and we like the experience and then We see. We started with very few pretensions and then it got a little out of hand, and here we are, ha, ha, ha," explains Valls. When they started the game she was still at Papabubble and working on the game at the end of her work day.

Psychotic Adventures, a final year project

Psychotic Adventures was born as Valls' final year project, "he had made some stories, some brooches and some dolls that explored the fan phenomenon and pop culture", he tells us, "Javi had stayed with the idea of ​​that material, of the girls, who were very punk and told me: 'what if we take this universe and translate it into a video game?' And what I did was a more or less bespoke story to fit into a game and that's where the idea for Mechanikaz came from." Neither of them had experience in video game development and the process was complicated especially for Valls: "he had an idea but I had never drawn digitally. I graduated in 2007 and at that time I think there were 4 computers in my faculty. I did everything with paper and markers and the computer was not touched. Everything I have learned about digital drawing I have learned in these years playing games and at home. It is a very unepic story. I had been working for years but not in the field of video games. And neither did Javi because when he finished his master's degree he began to write resumes and they didn't pick him up anywhere," explains Valls. They decided that creating one of them would serve, at least, as a portfolio.

"People don't even realize it, but Mechanika's drawings are made on paper, scanned and then colored in Photoshop"

Gálvez was in charge of the programming and created his own engine for graphic adventures in Java, his specialty at the time. "At that time, 2012, Unity wasn't as cool as it is now. It was very difficult for us because to make a 3D game it was cool but for a 2D game, it wasn't. It didn't have all the tools and plug-ins that there are now and he felt much more comfortable making his mini engine, even if it was much more limited but with a language that he controlled", says Valls. It was not an easy step for her. In that first first game he clung to paper: "People don't even realize it, but Mechanika's drawings are made on paper, scanned and then colored in Photoshop, but the drawing is not done on a computer because I still didn't see myself capable of drawing fluidly on a Wacom, on a 100% digital medium. It was hard" he says as he pulls out a bulky file with all the drawings on parchment paper of the animations and scenarios made in marker. Mechanika served to start the transition to digital drawing. The two wrote the script although, Valls points out, the dialogues and the writing are Gálvez's, "I supervised the tone, the characters, as they are my visual creations, I give it the go-ahead, but all the humor and what is written It belongs to Javi", he adds.

An ambitious project, but it turned out

As there were only two people to create the game and taking into account their little experience, they thought that the best thing would be to opt for a graphic adventure, "a project ambitious enough to be something successful but that we could finish it, and it fit quite well with our capabilities at that time," says Valls. She and Gálvez spent about two and a half years working on the game in their spare time until it was released on Android. Not only were they able to finish the game and successfully launch it, but there was some criticism of the fact that they left the ending in abeyance: "It was pretty obvious to us that with a graphic adventure you can't destroy the world," he replies by commenting on it. Perhaps in our heads it sounded spectacular and it wasn't because you're not the only one, we weren't aware that we were creating high expectations in the player to think that they could continue the adventure after finding the pieces and building the robot. I think with the other two we have fixed it."

Video of the originals on parchment paper and calibrated markers of 'Agatha Knife'.

Seeing the world that she had imagined take on movement was very satisfying for Valls, as she tells us: "it was a bit of my dream. When I did the project I thought 'this is so cool that it gives an animated series', but I also thought ' Pff , how is there going to be an animated series of this?' least because we are doing the fourth game and maybe I have become a little desensitized but I do remember the first time I saw a gameplay that I was very nervous, because there was a person who was playing something that I had done and I was waiting to see if he laughed in a funny moment, if he liked the puzzle, if he connected with the game as I thought he would. Those first times that you have been consuming content but you have not considered very well that there are people behind who do it and you have your opinion and you go to the other side or, if you are the one who generates content, it is very shocking and you experience it not with anguish but with a little restlessness, we remember the first press reviews, the first YouTube gameplays, with youtubers with thousands of subscribers, it was incredible to think that they had chosen our game to show it to their community.

Mango Protocol also overcame a stumbling block that many new studios encounter: reaching out to the media, "when we already had the game we stopped - with the other developments it was different - and we went full throttle to the press and sent emails , not being very merciful and having many friends and many people. We did guerrilla marketing but very heavily and perhaps with the other releases we have made it more professional and perhaps it has given us less good results, I have to say it, but perhaps also in At that time, 2015, there were fewer games. We asked friends to recommend it, to write reviews. We got to be top 1 in Android in sales in Spain for a weekend or so, which is not much because in Spain it is not sold nothing but you entered the tops and there was the game. We also won a Three Headed Monkey Award, there were people from the jury in the press and in companies and people said 'look at the game of the drunk girl' and I think the key was to hi", explains Valls.

Greenlight for PC version

Mechanika came out on PC although the studio did not see very clearly that they could overcome Greenlight, the option that Steam gave so that the community of players could decide which games were published in the store, but after seeing the good reception that the mobile version had they took a risk and in a few days they managed to pass the Greenlight filter. Sales were good enough for the members of Mango Protocol to decide to continue developing the series; Valls points out that over time the game has continued to sell and has even made more money on the console version, which was published three years after the initial release. " The 'blame' was Pere Torrents -Valls maintains-, who was at Digital Chocolate and was setting up GameBcn. He came looking for us and said: 'are you the ones from the game of the drunk girl?, do you sign up for the incubator ?' and we said yes, it's another of the strange carambola of my life because for sales we were still not doing so well as to be super buoyant, we would still have made another game and we would have gone to hell, but what made 'click' was see that someone thought we could professionalize ourselves and polish ourselves to move forward".

"The 'fault' was Pere Torrents, who was at Digital Chocolate and was setting up GameBcn. He came looking for us and said: 'are you the ones from the game of the drunk girl?, do you sign up for the incubator?' and we said yes"

Mango Protocol entered the GameBcn business incubator and Jordi García joined the team as designer of what would be the studio's third title, Colossus Down, while Gálvez and Valls were working on the second, which was already advanced when García joined. That second game was initially going to be similar to Whack a Mole. "that It was in the same universe, that it had a meaning, that it had to do with Nika's story, a virus had been released in a laboratory and the townspeople were infected... it was a free-to-play mobile game but I was very overwhelmed and, reviewing the feedback, people loved Agatha, and that she was a secondary character -which is not that she had much prominence-, but I suppose that her charisma reached people and I said 'I think that with this mobile game we're not going anywhere, that we have to take advantage of what we have, that the graphic adventure engine is done and make Agatha's story, and Javi agreed, so we left the mobile game and started with Agatha Knife", says Valls. In parallel, the team dedicated to Colossus was growing.

They took less time in this second development although the game was longer; Compared to the two hours or so of Mechanika, they went to about six in Agatha Knife, thanks to the fact that they already had more experience, the engine was already created and Valls was more comfortable with digital drawing. He affirms: "we were already more trained and we were able to polish errors such as that people had a satisfactory ending, that they did not feel cut off, that it was well narrated and that it ended. The development did not reach a year and a half."

Agatha, a character that had to be adapted to the game

For the second chapter , Agatha's personality had to be developed. While Nika had been created to measure to star in a game, Agatha was already in the original stories of Valls's career project, although her story was adapted and some visual changes were made: "we wanted to enhance her and the view is that I think who is still the most loved character above Nika, much to our regret, because in Colossus people want to play with Agatha, she has a place in the hearts of super special people, perhaps because Nika is a bit selfish and nihilistic and people she empathizes less, she's a bit of a villain, it's more difficult to empathize with someone who wants to destroy the world and Agatha is funny without wanting to be and she's more innocent, but one has a sect and another doesn't", says Valls.

Agatha Knife sold better than the first game, and it was released on consoles the following year, which gave continuity to the game. "I think that people perceived that the game was better finished and was longer," says Valls. She and Gálvez joined the development of Colossus Down, which closes the trilogy and in which up to 10 people worked, including four artists and animators and a game designer. Valls directed the artistic section and Gálvez went on to act as producer, "there are studios that don't have a producer and survive, but having people in-house and external people we have needed a lot of coordination, to be very clear about who was doing what and what had to be done first. Thanks to Javi we were super well organized during the almost 5 years that the development of Colossus has lasted", informs Valls. At the end of the time in the incubator, the studio went through several coworking spaces and then its own office.

The studio has self-published the digital version of all its titles

Mango Protocol has published its three games so far by its own means, although they contacted publishers for the last two but it could not be, "Mechanika not because we found that the game was already finished and we published it because we could but for Agatha and Colossus We have been looking for a publisher until almost the last moment. I don't know if we are very demanding. Have there been people interested? Yes, what they offered us did not seem worth it? Well, too. We are perhaps in a privileged situation and we have been able to 'afford' the luxury of self-publishing. So that you keep 30% of what we earn and you don't advance me anything or help me, you just stay to collect, I take it out on my ball".

For Colossus the Unity engine was used. As Valls rightly says, there is no point in destroying the world in a graphic adventure, "it had to be with action, we were studying which one fit the best and we decided that a beat'em up would be good and, since in this house we are fans of Castle Crashers, We decided to pay homage, although the game has mutated so much that it doesn't look like anything anymore. As the robot is made in parts, we thought it was cool that, just like in beat'em ups, you have different buttons for the hits, that those hits fit with the parts and weapons that the robot has. We let ourselves be carried away by people's feedback. If they wanted to destroy the world, then let them take the robot and destroy it," says Valls with a laugh.

At first the only playable character was going to be Nika in her mecha "but at the first event we went to people started saying 'wow, how cool would it be', 'it's not bad but in two players it would be cooler' and we had to rethink the whole design of the game, consulting with the programmer that we had at that time... and the truth is that I am very happy with that decision. Listening to the players, to your community, is very important. We have a community that is very small but He is very faithful", affirms Valls confidently. "The two characters have a dialogue dynamic that is much funnier. It was very hard because the project was triggered, we had a game already designed and thought out and when we had been developing for a year we changed a lot of things and another character had to fit in, what would happen if she died, the motivations... because it is very clear that Nika wants to destroy everything, she is super negative and thinks that life is disgusting but Agatha is not like that, how did we make it logical for her to enter the story? Because in Streets of Rage The story doesn't matter and there are gaps in the narrative because the important thing is that it's fun to play and hit, but for us it was important to maintain the narrative, what makes them psychotic adventures are the stories, if people came for the stories We thought they had to stay for the stories in this third installment." It's not like there's a profound justification for Agatha's involvement either, but she does have an explanation that evolves throughout the game's journey.

"What makes them psychotic adventures are the stories, if people came for the stories we thought they had to stay for the stories in this third installment"

A more complicated launch for Colossus Down

Colossus did not come out perhaps at the most appropriate time. The PC and Xbox One versions did so in mid-December (in the middle of all the Cyberpunk controversy that took over all video game information) and the PS4 and Switch versions at the end of January. Getting media attention was much more difficult with the constant buzz of Cyberpunk news, but the game was due out in December and covid made it difficult to get windows on release dates to come out simultaneously on all platforms . There were no changes in the first months of the pandemic with the external workers, but the five studio workers went home and, says Valls, the flow of the project suffered "because even if you adapt at the work level, they were fucked up months, there were people who were affected at a family level, because it is useless for you to telecommute well if your father is on a respirator in the hospital. They were complicated months but we survived quite well," explains Valls, adding that later they were able to go back to work physically "with all the measures, with masks, separating the tables a lot, we had a lot of space in the premises". Now that the fourth Psychotic Adventures game is in pre-production, the team has been reduced to the core of three people (Mariona Valls, Javi Gálvez and Jordi García) who work remotely.

This year the three games are scheduled to come out in physical edition, and there has been an agreement with publishers. Agatha and Mechanika will be released in a joint pack released by First Press Games and Colossus will be released by Tesura Games.

Mariona Valls in 5 questions

1- Psychotic Adventures does not leave a puppet with a head, do I know where ideas like the concept of carnivorism come from, the sect that Agatha creates?

In the original story there is no religion or anything, but since her base story is that she is a butcher girl who is obsessed with meat we started thinking of funny puns for a girl obsessed with meat. It's like veganism but making the joke with meat, she has a similar sound, it seemed perfect to us and that's how it stayed.

We also make fun of ourselves, of things we like. There are cartoons of Halo and people think that we are criticizing it like we hate it and not at all, if we like it a lot! But it is a way of bringing humor to life, not only making fun of the things that others like but being critical of oneself and putting it on a scale so that it is balanced.

2- Where does the name of Mango Protocol come from?

It's my and Javi's favorite fruit and we wanted to give it a technological touch, ha ha ha. At the level of networks, a protocol is a communication and since we were two people, we did not think that there would be a third person, it seemed to us that it was very illustrative of communication between two sides. It sounded cool in Spanish, it's spelled the same in English and it sounds cool and it's pronounced pretty well in Catalan, so we thought it was a good name.

3- What artistic style do you like the most in a video game?

I like games that are stylized. I don't like realistic 3D, I like >Zelda or Mario type more and then I like 2D games; In general, pixel art doesn't appeal to me so much, I like it more that it reminds me of cartoons.

4- Which character or which series would you like to be allowed to reinterpret in your own style?

The ninja turtles. It was the first thing that came to my mind.

5- Who would you like us to interview?

You have already interviewed Ramón Méndez, right? Well, to Sandra Samper, doctorate in Game Studies, Luz Sancho ( Tequila Works ), Diego Vargas who is making a documentary on the history of the development of Spain ( Press Start ), David Jaumandreu ( Undercoders ) and Cristina Ramos, a programmer who has worked on lots of interesting projects and also makes his own games as a hobby.