As a young girl growing up in East Harlem, I didn’t see many examples of fat Latina women in pop culture, and things hadn’t gotten better by becoming a successful television and film actress in Hollywood with roles in houses like “Harold.” and Kumar “became. and “Devilish Maids”. In 2007, I was browsing the aisles at San Diego Comic-Con when I realized that one booth after another did not represent female or minority characters. The few times I saw them, they were either bad guys or half-naked female vampires. However, if you look closely at the crowd at this event, you can’t help but notice that the attendees are not just white people but all kinds of people in the world! A large number of the people who buy these comics are not represented at all in the entertainment they consume.
Drawing on my Colombian heritage, I decided to do something about it, and together with my husband, Antonio Hernandez, we created the character Aluna, a spirited young 16-year-oldthat Century Spanish princess accused of witchcraft and sent back to her native Colombia, from where she was abducted as a baby. There she learns the truth about her fate: to defend the mystical shard that supposedly contains the heart of her goddess mother Pachamama.
The goal was to organically create a hero who would represent a woman with ethnic roots who would please everyone, but who doesn’t belong to just one group. We chose the 16th century before Western colonizers created borders between countries like Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, and Peru. After extensive research on the indigenous tribes of South America, we determined that Aluna’s mother would be the Inca goddess of the earth, Pachamama. In the 16th century, Spanish conquistadors conquered and plundered the local population for gold and land, so we cast a Spanish sailor as Aluna’s father to represent a mix of the natural world and the more brutal, colonizing world of humanity. We created a demigod heroine who isn’t the usual demigod of western and eastern cultures featured in so many games and comics.
With a global audience thirsting for more Aluna, I partnered with my husband’s development company Digiarts and N-Fusion Interactive to translate the adventure into a video game. Heroes of Newerth made us a fan of top-down gameplay, where we move the character around a map to fight creatures and collect loot. I found Diablo and had so much fun playing for hours that knew this was the direction for the video game incarnation of Aluna.
In Aluna: Guardian of the Shards, players take on the role of Aluna as she defends her powers against the evil she faces in a New World of the 16. Players explore a wild environment of dense jungles, towering beach cliffs and volcanic canyons as they tackle creatures and bosses meet who are inspired by Inca mythology. The weapons are modeled on the historical South American and Spanish conquistadors of the time. The real world is enhanced by the mystical as players can customize Aluna’s fighting style by unlocking powerful magical skills in three schools of magic.
Latin American culture has so much variety and depth that there are hundreds of exciting stories to tell. We hope that players will have as much fun playing Aluna and exploring their world as we did creating it.
Aluna: Guardian of the Shards
Digiart Interactive LLC
$ 19.99
Mystical fragments rain from heaven onto earth and defy space and time. Superstition, mysticism and fear of the unknown enlivened a path that went beyond the land of his birth. We meet our heroine Aluna, who as a child was given the most powerful of these shards, which is said to contain the heart of her mother, the earth goddess Pachamama. Due to a number of circumstances, Aluna has to leave home and travel to the new world. Aluna fulfills her destiny, but also the evil that tries to fulfill hers. Aluna’s past determines her future and her enemies will stop at nothing to steal the Shard and take control of the world …
