AXYZ's 20 seconds of fame

The Game Design career was shown on the news here in Chile, it's all in Spanish but it's not too long to watch and maybe you can spot a familiar game.

Indie Statik's List

We were mentioned in this Indie Statik's article among many great IGF entries. You can click on the image to go to the page.

Here Are 50 Very Cool IGF 2014 Entries That We've Never Heard Of

IGF submission

Today we uploaded our build to the IGF's page. We submitted it to the main and student competitions, so all we have to do now is wait till January to know if we are in. Updates on the blog will be very slow from this point on, but any news regarding the IGF we'll let you know.

Thanks for all your support!

Website

Spaceship Level

Here is a video of the Spaceship Level, you probably remember it from the Trailer, tough it was not included in the Demo.

AXYZ Demo (English Language)

The AXYZ English Demo is available now!!!

Sorry for the long wait.

As told before: The Demo supports both mouse/keyboard and Dualshock3 control inputs. The DS3 is the way to go to fully experience AXYZ, there are instructions inside the compressed file to set up the controller.

Enjoy:

AXYZ DEMO

Nothing new

Hey guys, just writing so you know that we are still updating this. Right now we are on Winter break (Yay South Hemisphere!) so we are really not doing much. Last week, on the day after we uploaded the Demo, we handed over our project to our school, meaning that we only have to make our presentation to get our degree but they have to call us for that, we have heard that presentations could probably start by the end of the year. So, I am pretty much free for the rest of the year to work on AXYZ and maybe on another project that we have in mind, Francis still have classes to attend during the second semester but the idea is that he passes them all so we can present together.

The English Demo could be ready in a couple of weeks. First they told us the studio was closed for a week, but we didn't realize that winter vacations start right after, and since the studio is part of our school...

This is what we delivered: 

Two copies of the project's book and two discs, 

both containing digital versions of the book, the demo and trailer.

AXYZ Demo (Spanish Language)

The AXYZ Demo is finally here!!!

As I told you last time, this Demo is available in Spanish only at the moment, sorry. The English one will be uploaded as soon as we have the English dialogues edited. Although if you are an English speaker user, you should still be able to play, understand the gameplay and complete the Demo.

The Demo supports both mouse/keyboard and Dualshock3 control inputs. The DS3 is the way to go to fully experience AXYZ, there are instructions inside the compressed file to set the controller right but, just as the Demo, they are in Spanish. Anyway, if you already know how to use motioninjoy, you should open the DS3 instructions to know what changes you must apply to the control's options.

Have fun:

AXYZ DEMO

Signs of life

Ok people, the good news is that I am alive. The better news is that we finished the book and will proceed to hand it over to our school on Tuesday. The Great news is that we will upload  our first demo next week. The bad news is that it will be completely in Spanish. Yes, I know I said that we have already recorded the English dialogues, but right now we only have the Spanish ones edited and exported as audio files, and the recording studio at which our session is stored will be closed next week. We will keep you updated as soon as we have the English demo ready.

When suddenly...

Remember when I said that the idea was to finish the book by the end of July? Well, that is not an idea anymore, it's mandatory. We have been informed that we have till July 26 to finish the damn thing and present it to our school. If there are no more blog entries after that date then it means that I have died in the process. GG everyone.

Near the end

We had a presentation the other day and things were pretty good, we made an interactive showing in Blender which smoothly continued on to the stages 05 and 06, the ones that we are going to use when making our final presentation, since the time limit does not allow us to show the full game and those are the most frantic stages of the game. But before the final presentation we have to write a book explaining the development process, the idea is to have this book finished by the end of July and after that is only a matter of time till they call us to show our project, which could be at any moment during this year's second semester. So, we could say that we are pretty much done with the game in relation to us getting our degree, now we have to focus on finishing the first episode of AXYZ and submit it to the IGF.

I forgot to mention that the voices were already recorded in both Spanish and English, so the IGF submission and any potential video with voices in it that we upload will be completely in English, Yay!

Also, I am not so much into Twitter since I mostly use it to only tweet when there is a new blog entry, but I understand its potential to share quick project's advances, but that will mostly depend if there is actually a public for that, so if you want to follow me you can find me at @daniel_dvj.

Level 03 (Switch Tutorial)

The third stage teaches the player how to switch which platforms can move when he is in a situation at which there are two kinds of platforms (Red and Blue). We first stopped to think about how to implement the switching mechanic in the game, whether to have a station at which the player can go and change the movable platforms or have the player to switch them whenever he wants, we opted for the latest, assigning a button to perform the action. This is the last stage not to use the motion sensor, the platforms move alone so the player can only focus on adding the new switching mechanic to his known abilities.

About programming issues.

So, I am having too much troubles trying to make the warp zone to work perfectly. The issue is that I can't make the game to save the information for what stage is next if you exit while in the warp zone, forcing the player to quit the game while in a stage to save properly, otherwise loosing the game progress. Well, I am certainly not going to deliver a product with that kind of a game breaking problem but I also lack the programming skills to fix it, so unfortunately the warp zone is temporarily gone from the game. There had to be a point at which the lack of a programmer in the team would have to really affect us and this was it. Hopefully the rest of the development will run without any more of these problems.

Level 02 (Running and Jumping Tutorial)

We sat down and watched what other games do for their first levels, it's always good to start with the basics before hitting your main mechanic.

Level 01 Early Concept

Sorry about the absence, there have been a few problems with the blog, more specifically with the video uploads, but everything seems to be alright now.

As the title says, here is an early concept from one of the stages, I'll try to upload a few more during these days to compensate for keeping you in the dark.

This first level is more of an initial cinematic kinda stage, you can move the character but you're in a very limited area and can hear this voice introducing you to the game's world.

Some alpha animation testing

About Gantts and Stoners

Hey guys, we are back!

So, were do I start? Well, we are already working with our project's tutor and established a Gantt for the rest of the development. From now on, we will have one stage finished every four weeks till the end of the semester. That means that by August there will be a total of 10 stages including the warp zone. Now, that is only the game that we will show to obtain our degree, the complete first episode will consist of 13 stages, which we will finish once the August deadline is surpassed. Oh, I forgot to mention, we were also given the idea to turn AXYZ into an episodic game, which we were totally OK with.

Based on the same feedback we have been getting again a again we are at one step of actually changing our target audience to the stoner demographic.

Updates

Taking a little break on the project's advances. I am mostly fixing the bugs of the new stages that I didn't have time to check because of the hurry we had finishing them for the trailer, and Francis... well, I am sure Francis must be doing something about the concept arts.

We should record the game's antagonist voice soon, now that our voice actor is back from the U.S. The voices will be recorded in Spanish only at the moment, but I will add English subtitles to future uploaded gameplay videos if they have dialogues. The idea is to add subtitles to the game also, but that is not our priority right now.

Meetings with our guide teacher are supposed to begin soon as well, so the development process should follow a more structured path when that happens.

AXYZ "Flip your world up" Trailer

GDC... sort of... nah.

A couple of teachers are going to GDC this year and they told me that if I manage to make a trailer in time, they will show it along with their stuff when they are walking around the place stalking people. So, I have to finish at least another level, capture a video of all six levels and edit it into a trailer. Fine, I didn't want to sleep anyway.

Evolution of an idea

AXYZ Gameplay

Here it is a little gameplay video from the fifth stage of the game, I decided to show this one because it is the first non tutorial stage and also the first outdoors scene in the game. Bear in mind that the dialogue is disabled and this is five levels into the game, in case you feel a little out of context watching it, enjoy.

Scripting... from hell

When you don't have a programmer in your team things can get a little complex, specially when you cannot find in the vast ocean of online shared scripts one that accommodates to what you intent to implement. Sure, you can find something that sounds like the thing, but does not quite do the business. So, what do you do in those cases? Well, you just have to find a way to survive. In my case, survive means that I have to spend the whole day reading a this mix of numbers and words written in this alien syntax that it is Python, try to figure out what the hell is going on, find one that sounds like it can work and change what I think might be the line that can save this whole thing. Luckily today, I was able to do the right modifications to be able to auto-save after you complete each stage of the game, without saving the object data, only the stage, so you can continue from the menu every time you return to the game. And that is a small victory that really cheered me up for tomorrow's work.

Sixaxis Tests

These tests with the Sixaxis motion sensor (The PS3 controller) were made while we were still working on another project (REBUILDER) and were pretty much the genesis of what would later evolve into AXYZ. 

Welcome!

Hey, first of all,  we would like to welcome you to AXYZ's blog. Some of you might have been following this since it was called "Project REBUILDER".

Second, I would like to apologize if my English is kinda crappy, it's not my first language, but we decided to use it since we believe this way we get to share our work with more people.

We are two Video Game Design students from Chile. Right now we are in our last semester and working on our final project, so we plan to use this space to share our advances with you and maybe post some early works.

You are invited to come by often, we plan on posting weekly news on how the project is advancing, and of course any feedback would be greatly appreciated.