All of us who enjoy video games as a favorite pastime have been interested at some point in working in this industry. I cannot deny that it was also a personal dream when I was younger to be able to participate in the creation of the worlds that I enjoyed so much. Unfortunately, for many young people (and not so young) in Latin America, this is nothing more than an unattainable dream.
For Ramón Zárate, a gameplay engineer at Los Angeles-based Uncapped Games, the path that led him to developing video games was also difficult, as he shares with us in an interview with P360.
Battle Aces is a real-time strategy title influenced by classics such as Starcraft, and the Uncapped Games team is made up of veterans from Blizzard, Relic, among others.
Still without a release date, they can add it to your wishlist on Steam and find more information at its official Battle Aces page.
What we know so far is that it will be a free-to-play title in which we will unlock units the more we play against other people in multiplayer. Personally, I'm excited about the release of a game that features the experience of the people responsible for real-time strategy gems like Company of Heroes (a title very close to my heart), Starcraft or the Dawn of War series.
From Cuernavaca to the world
Originally from Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico, Ramón Zárate spent his childhood in the state of Tabasco, where he remembers reading articles about Mexican developers in the magazine “Club Nintendo.”
“I have always liked video games… they have been very important in my life, but the perception I had was that it was not realistic (to work in video games) in Mexico, so I did not seriously consider it,” Zárate shared with Península 360 Press.
He decided to study mathematics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and as he himself admits, “curiously, the subjects I took made me believe that I didn’t want to be a programmer.” By the time he finished his university degree, he had realized that what he really wanted was to make video games, although he admits that he felt it was a risk. An academic career was “a guaranteed future,” but it was not what he was passionate about.
“There is a lot of prejudice, like you are abandoning (the mathematics degree) and taking the easy way out.” Ramón says that although it was not openly stated, there was disdain among his peers towards video games, which even led him not to express his interest in working in the industry.
With a lot of dedication and perseverance, she won a scholarship to study for a doctorate in Vancouver, Canada, and thus began her journey across the American continent. With many uncertainties, but with only one goal in mind.
“I started with very small jobs, my first job was literally minimum wage, and I didn’t even program,” he recalled. Ramón soon realized that studying to specialize in video game development in Canada would have meant taking on a huge debt that would have changed his life. He had to take a leap of faith into the workforce and let his work speak for him.
How to start making video games?
Ramón told Península 360 Press that the biggest contrast between working in the video game industry and academia is diversity.
“You work with people from all over the world, from all kinds of careers and non-careers, all kinds of education, with people who have done everything and that’s amazing… it’s my favorite part of the job.”
Creating a video game is a collaborative effort of many people: artists, designers, writers, programmers, voice actors, animators; even our interviewee tells us: “I have worked with people who were in film or commercials and were hired for certain projects in very specific parts.”
“I don’t think there is one path to the industry, the most important thing is the interest in doing it,” Ramón stressed. “Of course, programming requires skills in the field, but the video game industry is so big that that is not the only path. You can pursue a career as an artist, designer, actor, or many other adjacent things. But, above all, the interest in doing it, the courage to venture and seek to participate in the creation of video games is the most important thing.”
For Ramón, Mexico is in a very good position to enter the video game development industry because “there is a lot of potential.” Unfortunately, what is lacking are companies and financing, because making video games costs money.
“The hardest part of making a game is getting a group of talented people together and giving them the resources they need,” said the Mexican programmer.
Migrating to achieve a dream
Ramón Zárate also acknowledged that he has had many privileges on his journey to the north of our continent: “Being able to migrate, for me, meant studying, being admitted to a university, having a scholarship, although there are still many challenges.”
Arriving in a place where people don't speak your language, being far from family and fighting for a visa to work, among many other things, are obstacles that he had to overcome. For him, having a plan, appreciating the situation you are in before taking hasty steps, is essential to tackle the challenges of migrating.
After living in Canada for 18 years, he admits that he still feels like a foreigner; even though his children were born in the northern country, he still feels “neither from here nor from there.”
In this regard, he said that he feels a “strange guilt” because sometimes he feels like an outsider. Faced with this, he repeats to himself: “I live here, I’m from here, I have an accent, I like different things and there’s no problem, it’s cool.” At the same time, when he visits the Uncapped Games headquarters in Los Angeles, California, he feels at home: “Everyone is Mexican, everyone speaks Spanish.”
Ramón, like many other Latinos, understands that migration is normal for humans, it is part of our history as societies and will never cease to exist. As he says in his own words: “as humans, no one is from anywhere, everyone has migrated, everyone came from somewhere else.”
Ramón's story is like that of many Latin immigrants who travel across the continent in search of a dream that drives them to fight against all odds.
Stay tuned for the release of Battle Aces, you can be sure we'll have more news about this game in the future.
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