I'm Francisco Pereira, known as gammafp. I was born in Nicaragua in 1987, and I'm a developer and the creator of NacatamalOn. I was part of the Phaser Studio team, working alongside Richard Davey on the Phaser ecosystem, where I created tools such as Phaser Launcher and Phaser Sandbox and contributed templates, examples and documentation for the community. But my story with video games started long before that, with a second-hand NES that my parents worked hard to give me one Christmas.
A second-hand NES
I remember looking at the screen and discovering that I could control the “little guys”. Until then I had watched cartoons; now I could decide what they did. To me, that was magic.
In Nicaragua there were people's houses where you paid to play on a console for a while. I went too, just to watch others play and discover new games. Hearing a cry of pain when Simon Belmont got hit in Castlevania amazed me. I would come home excited, trying to explain every detail I had seen and heard.
The Super Nintendo brought the exploration of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, the music of Donkey Kong and the hand-drawn look of Yoshi's Island. I was fascinated by their worlds, their sounds and everything they could put on a screen.
Later I saw someone playing GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64 and went home saying that now we could “control the movies”. That is how real the jump to 3D felt to me.
From music to video games
My path to programming took quite a few turns. I taught myself the piano and moved to Spain to continue my music studies. I had to put them on hold for work and took whatever jobs I could to get by.
Later I met my partner, now also my fiancée. Thanks to her support I was able to start studying
computer science. I began programming small games like Tetris and Snake, building my own engines
with Canvas. Through trial and error, I was starting to understand how to make the thing that had
fascinated me so much.
During my studies I met my good friend Juan, known as cornobufo, who shared my love of video
games. One day he came over, excited to show me Phaser, which was on version 2 at the time:
“It's like talking to the PC to make games. Look at this: this.add.image”.
That way of making games won me over.
My time with Phaser
I started studying Phaser and taking an active part in its community, which welcomed me warmly. Over time, Richard Davey, its creator, noticed my contributions and got in touch to work together.
For someone who admired his work so much, getting that message was a dream come true. That first collaboration ended, and I kept working on other projects around Phaser and games.
Later on, Richard secured funding to grow Phaser and we worked together again, this time as part of Phaser Studio. There I was able to contribute to its ecosystem and build tools to help other people make games. I learned an enormous amount from Richard and from the experience of working on an engine and its tools.
My community and NacatamalOn
My personal work as gammafp has its own path too. Through my community on YouTube I have shared tutorials, experiments and what I know about game development.
NacatamalOn belongs to that independent path, and it has been developed outside my periods of work for Phaser. Its first API took shape in 2022.
To build it, I gathered lessons from many places. The talks by Mr.doob, creator of three.js, helped me understand how graphics engines work. Without knowing it, he became a kind of teacher to me.
I also started studying WebGPU, which struck me as a very sensible approach to modern graphics. But I still struggled to connect the maths I had learned with what I needed to build a renderer.
That is where Juan helped me again, recommending the 3D graphics courses by Pikuma. Those courses put a lot of ideas in order and let me keep going. They also connected with a way of thinking about 3D that took me straight back to the era of video games I loved so much.
A nacatamal console, switched on
The name was born from jokes with my friend Deybis Meléndez, from Nicaragua. I was looking for what to call the engine; I had considered “Avocato Engine” and told him I might end up calling it “Nacatamal”, after the Nicaraguan dish.
He said: “Call it NacatamalOn”. It sounded like a giant nacatamal, and it also had that “on”, as in switched on, like a console. I immediately pictured a nacatamal console, switched on. And the name stuck.
I am not currently working for Phaser Studio, and that free time has let me put all my effort into NacatamalOn.
With this project I want to bring into the present what excited me about the era we now call retro, using today's technology and everything I have learned over the years. I am still driven by the same curiosity I felt in front of that NES: finding out what we can do on a screen, and learning how to do it.
If you want to talk to me about a project, a collaboration or work, write to me at francisco@nacatamalon.com or find me on LinkedIn.