It all started as a YouTube channel that uploaded random, comedic, videos, all of them of a cringy nature, the channel gather a some what large following (in 2008, youtube standards that is).
Ricardo persisted and started to search help online, he moved his game projects to Unreal Engine while in high school, the idea was to rebrand Sheldrybox as a game developer.
In this year he also meet Guillermo Benavides and Misael Valenzuela the three of them became best friends.
Now with a lot more of experience, Ricardo started to learn programming, design and animation in a formal way, going into classes and buying online courses.
He told Guillermo his vision and convinced him to joing Sheldrybox Studios, which he did, and started to do the same as Ricardo: Learning as much as he could about the different areas of game development.
Their first completed project was SMCX2000 a small platformer about a small carbon based being called Carbonae, it feature designs and programming by both Ricardo and Guillermo and music by Guillermo.
Misael Valenzuela joined the team after being convinced with the now shared vision of Guillermo Benavides and Ricardo Sotomayor.
One night Ricardo had a dream and came excited the next moring to Guilermo and Misael about a game he had a dream about, they thought it was a cool idea and started pre-production on the project in June 2014.
After a few months of the project being in pre-production they recruited Nicolle Acosta, and artist/animator, and Saúl Nuñes a programmer, to help with the game, then, Daniel Franco, Alonso Altamira and Marlon Garcia joined to help with design and media managment.
The project was codenamed: Project Reborn, now known as Beacon The Awakening.
The movie: INDIE GAME: THE MOVIE, was a huge inspiration for the team, they saw it weekly to boost their moral.
The game got his first animations, cinematics and levels, all of that took almost the entire year, since all of them were no that experienced in their respective areas.
During Q4 of the year, the team was invited to a massive event in their city called: Juárez Creativa, to give a presentation and have a booth in which they could promote their game and sell merchandise, they worked non stop during 2 months straight with 12 hour shfts in order to have everything that needed for the event: Merchandise, prints, T-shirts, and a Trailer, the talented artist Mariana Mendoza and Juan Garcia joined the team to help with all of this.
The event was a huge success with thousands of attendees and put Sheldrybox Studios in the map, however, the team realized something, they were not fulfilled.
They worked incredibly hard to create the entire game from scratch in less than a year.
During this year, the entire team was constantly invited to give speeches and workshops thanks to the good impression they gave in Juárez Creativa, by the end of the year, Mariana left the team to pursue work in a different industry, but she left enough for the team to continue working.
Money was necessary for the publication of the game and growth of the company, seeing that they didn't had a lot of option, they took their second most crucial desicion and made a Kickstarter.
The Kickstarter launched on June 20, this attracted the attention of several local, national and international news outlets, it took a lot of work, but in the last day, the campaign reached 108% of it's goal thanks to over 100 backers.
Now, they are working on publishing the demo, which will be playable by small group of people across the contry through a live event in several cities.
The game was schedule to be finished by December 2017. with an early launch in November.
Articles about us
- El Norte de Cd. Juárez, Oct. 2015 -
- El Diario de Cd. Juárez, Jul. 2017 -
- Level Up, Jul. 2017 -
- Revista Millenials, Aug. 2017 -
- Mexico Industry, Aug. 2017 -
Videos and interviews
Interview: Late night con Badía
Our friend Badia from the podcast "Leyendas Legendarias" invited us to his late night show for a quick interview about our project.
Talk: T-HUB - PRESS START: Desarrollo de videojuegos
A long form talk we did about the videogame industry and our experience in it, this talk was a way of promoting our project Kickstarter and was possible thanks to a direct invitation of our friends at Technology Hub, Juárez, Chihuahua.
Interview: Technology-Hub
A Interview we did about our projects and the challanges we faced as young game developers in México, this interview as a way to promote our project Kickstarter and was possible thanks to a direct invitation of our friends at Technology Hub, Juárez, Chihuahua.
Interview: I LOVE JUÁREZ
A Interview we did about our project Beacon The Awakening and its kickstarter, this interview was a way to promote our project Kickstarter and was possible thanks to a direct invitation from our friends at I Love Juárez.
Spot: GAMERTAG
Our friends at GamerTag made a cool little promotional video of our project Beacon The Awakening.