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.