GameLuv's list

Our time running for the IGF has run out but that doesn't mean we don't feel great whenever we see AXYZ make it into someone's list. 

Greetings to Katy and Shawn at GameLuv!

My Top 20 from the Independent Games Festival 2014 (Part 1)

It's over

We did it!
We finished our career obtaining a 6,5 out of 7 in our final presentation.
This is the beginning of a new stage in our professional lives.
We would like to thank everyone who accompanied us during this process and to all of you who kept visiting our blog, you all helped AXYZ to become what it is today.

Almost done

Tomorrow is the big day.
We'll present our project to obtain our Game Designer degrees.
I'll update as soon as I can once we obtain our results.

IGF Results

Well, we didn't make it to the finalists list. But we cannot say the experience wasn't great. Thanks to everyone who sticked with us till the end of the project and congratulations to all the finalists of the Main and Student competitions, you can check them in the links below.

2014 Independent Games Festival announces Main Competition finalists

2014 Independent Games Festival announces Student Showcase winners

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.