Reggaeton de Capibara - The Development Story!

In Reggaeton de Capibara, our friend capibara hits the party with his girlfriend, but he falls in love with a dancing capibara and decides to conquer her heart without his girlfriend noticing. Featuring 8-bit Reggaeton, Merengue and Cumbia, with awesome pixel art representing fauna from Latin America!

You can play online here

Reggaeton de Capibara was as submission to the Latin American Games Showcase jam 2025. This is its story.

The days before

February 8, following up on our participation on the Global Game Jam, Mauricio Betancourt pinged me back on the idea to participate on the newly announced LAGS jam; I told him I wasn't sure because that would be just after the 7DRL Challenge and I'd probably be exhausted and super busy with work, but still it was possible. I told him if I participated I would like to have a role as game designer on the team, however that role was already set for friend Carlos Rocha, designer of Cristales and many other games.

Still, I told him I could join as a dev - contributing with any time I could spare.

Mauro managed to assemble a team before the jam, with Carlos and two great artists.

Day 1 - Friday, March 27th - Ubidots Party

Fast forward to March 28 - The theme was announced while I was at a client's end-of-fiscal-year party: "Ojos que no ven, corazón que no siente", a Latin-American saying I'd roughly translate as "ignorance is bliss", applied often (but not always) to love relationships; the other half of the judging criteria was for the game to reflect your Latin American identity.

Initially, I thought it was an ok theme, and was set to continue with the original plans.

But... some time around midnight and while listening to old school reggaeton from the 00s at a traditional party spot, I thought there's nothing more Latin-American than reggaeton and couldn't get that out of my head... Reggaeton, and the mischief of people, especially younger people, that deceives others in love as long as they don't find out.

Day 2 Saturday, March 28th - Considering the idea

Next morning, with a light headache, I pitched the idea to Mauro's team

"Reggaeton del Capibara", un juego arcade en el que eres un joven capibara que tiene que conquistar a dos capibaras al tiempo bailando reggaeton en una discoteca, pero no puedes dejar que ninguna se de cuenta que estás conquistando a la otra.

...however, they ignored it. We instead discussed some other ideas instead that were less obvious to the theme. Some weirder ideas. At this point of time, the plan was to strengthen the idea, while Mauricio built a strong framework over which we could build an awesome entry. I would be on stand by for coding work.

Back on January, when I did GGJ, working in two entries in parallel didn't end up well... I questioned myself if I would go ahead and repeat the same mistake. I didn't want to, but at the same time I didn't feel like challenging the idea that was evolving in Mauro's team; I had no strong arguments about my idea being better than theirs... but still, there was something inside me that wanted to make it.

Besides, one thing that was clear to me was that Music would be an important part of this idea, so if I were to make it we'd need some music artists into the team, and we were already at the 5 persons limit.

So I contacted my musical jam friends to see if they would be interested (Gecko and Dinti), with whom I), they were all onboard (probably because they love capibari). I also contacted Awa, since I thought this could work well with pixel art; he was in too. So basically I put back together a bunch of the team that had already worked in Rogue Monster Theolodorus mere weeks ago.

Gecko mentioned it would be great to create 8bit chiptune renditions of traditional latin party music like merengue and reggaeton. I thought that could work and fit well with the pixel art idea.

Day 3, Sunday, March 30th - Let's get it started

As usual, as a first step to get things going strong and keep everybody in the same page, I set to make a design doc with the core idea, the artistic statement, and a raw list of responsibilities/asks per role.

I also contacted fellow illustrator Armyboy (we worked together in Magical Mirai Procon24), to see if he would be interested in doing some manga-style capibaras, for the events that happen inside the game. He's busy but hopefully he can get in. That would complete the team, since it's max 5 people.

The main idea for the game is there would be two mechanics at work: a rhythm game mechanic where you had to tap a button accurately, synced to the music, and a "reaction" game, similar to Samurai Kirby, where you had to very quickly tap another button, when girlfriend capibara stared at you.

I went into coding the rhythm part which I thought was going to be the hardest challenge right away. This was a first for me... the closest thing I had made was 404 Rhythm Not Found, and for that one I didn't really code anything on the rhythm mechanics. So I just started experimenting randomly; I knew I needed some kind of script with the timestamps for the taps, and sync that with a music track.

At first, I experimented with beats per minute calculation, and manually trying to create the beats script. That was an impossible approach. After many iterations, I ended up with someting much simpler: a recording tool that just stores the timestamps every time I click while listening to the sound, so the script is basically a macro of my reference playthroughs

Day 4 - Monday, March 31st

Now that it was much more clear to me how the rhythm game was going to work, I set to add some structure around it; I added game states for title, in game, game over, and a little bit of UI.

This day I also switched away from the idea of dancing with two capi-ladies, instead your girlfriend would be drinking some refreshment while you tried to conquer the sexy capibara.

I also went ahead to implement a first version of the "reaction" minigame, with the goal to complete the initial vision of the game and starting testing ASAP how well it felt (especially directly in mobile). To this same end I added some test sprites, "cinematics" (i.e. the sprites reacting to in-game events), a simple score based on tap accuracy for beats, and the possibility to take damage for missed beats.

While I was doing this, Inti created a first version of 8bit reggaeton track, and Awa sent some concepts for pixel art.

Day 5 - Tuesday April the 1st

I never got a response from Armiboy for the illustrations, I figured he should be busy. I thought we could instead have a UX person, Sara Rios, help with ideas to make the game better for the player. She was happy to join!

I decided to switch build target to Web mobile; since it was going to be important to get the game in the eyes of as many people as possible so they could send a rating. As I did that, I discovered timing sync issues and had to change how music syncs to the script to use the audiosource playhead directly instead of keeping track of playtime in parallel. That was probably a good idea.

As awa continued pixelling more sprites, I added more details to the pixel art assetlist as I saw new needs coming while implementing; I populated the scene a little bit with the first batch of assets I received, to start getting a feeling of the scale of the game.

I changed how the stare mechanic triggers, to tie it more with the rhythm instead of it popping up randomly, and also made the indicators pause while staring mode.

Dinti sent an improved version of the reggaeton track, as well as the awesome merengue track which I particularly loved.

Day 6 - Wednesday, April 2nd

Sara sent some ideas for improvements on the UX, starting by deciding if we wanted the UI to pair the scene pixel art, or go for illustrations. The team voted overwhelmingly for pixel art.

She also had the idea to have the beat indicator be a disco-ball, and add a discotheque lights effect into the scene (sadly we had to pull it out at the last minute, for the jam entry, since we didn't have the license to use the one she brought in as an example, and no time to replicate it ourselves). She also did some exploration on the UI elements and colors.

Me myself, I couldn't put any code in this day... it was just too busy at work.

Day 7 - Thursday, April 3rd

Another day where I couldn't put any work into the game, but Awa managed to do a big push and send a package with animations and stuff!

End of day, I found out the team Mauro had assembled had disbanded due to lack of progress. I was up to help during the weekend but it wasn't to be.

Day 8 - Friday, April 4th

Only this day I am able to provide a playable build to the team for them to evaluate the experience. I tweaked the gameplay to prevent music from stopping since it was just too disrupting of the rhythm game flow, so you still had to react quickly to the stare, but music went on.

I felt we had a game already (with lots to improve), which was good since if all went wrong this could perfectly be a jam entry. More importantly, it didn't feel like we'd have to do any drastic design changes; this was probably going to be mostly it.

Gecko sent some sound effects, and awa sent another bunch of pixelart which I promptly integrated; we were only missing the animated capi-ladies.

I decided that, instead of just drinking something, the capi-girlfriend would be talking, gossiping with a friend, which is also a very latam thing, I think.

The game worked, but the "reaction" minigame wasn't really adding anything to the gameplay, and that was bugging me. I went to bed hoping I could find an answer to make it better in the land of dreams.

Day 9 - Saturday, April 5th

Saturday at last... I could finally devote some quality time to this... or could I? Life had other plans.

I continued improving the UI, but more importantly I finally settled on the gameplay: The player would never stop dancing, but if the girlfriend was staring, he would have to dance alone (a separate button), if they failed to do this, it's instant game over.

Day 10 - Sunday

Early in the morning, awa sent a final pack of art including some props for the scene, and UI assets to give the player additional feedback. Then, around 5pm I got the third track from dinti, it was a cumbia.

Due to life, I ended up only being able to work in the game at about 5:40 PM, with the deadline looming at 7:00 PM and still some things to do; I managed to integrate Dinti's track, add a little bit of onboarding, move the camera around a bit, and add the disco ball with some feedback when pressed. (Come to think about it now, I could have added a pulsing animation as feedback).

You can check out a bit of the gameplay we ended up delivering here.

The Aftermath

Sometimes I think, if you managed to submit a game to a jam comfortably, maybe you shoot for too low.

Here are some of the things I wish we could have done in time for the jam:

• Fixing a random critical issue where beat globes don't appear. We didn't really invest any time or roles in QA.
• Integrate the remaining art from awa (especially the level props)
• Add some movement to the capibara so it's more visible when he moves between dancing alone and with the sexy capibara.
• Tweak the reaction mechanic so that the player still has to react quick and move away to dance alone, when being stared.
• Improve the tap maps for the first song, remove a crazy segment in the end.
• Improve how the NPCs are randomized to avoid repeating and using the main characters
• Implement the disco lights effect
• Add the score messages (Perfect! Excellent! Nice. Boo. Miss!)