It's time again for another update!

Last week we were at GDC (San Francisco's Game Developers Conference). As always it was an amazing experience and a great opportunity to say hi to old friends and meet new ones.

It was truly inspiring to see so many innovative, fun, and beautiful indie games that are in production or have been recently released. Talking to other indie mobile developers was a fantastic experience and made it clear that there are many other people going through the same things we are. GDC was a welcomed break that left us refreshed and more passionate than ever to finish Axle and show it to the world.

The current alpha Axle build that we were showing around at GDC was extremely well received by everyone that played it. It was also good to get some more solid play testing at this stage in production. Some of our system iteration has finally paid off, and one or two designs are headed back to the drawing board- because we want to make Axle as good as it can possibly be.


What's New: As for progress on Axle, we just keep rolling content out!
Since you last heard from us we have:

• Put together a system to create parallaxing backgrounds so that we can give our worlds some depth. We're currently in the process of painting those and assembling them.

• Finished a first draft on some more levels! (You'll see this one a lot in updates, we've got quite a few levels each a part of a unique machine with different obstacles and hazards)

• Made revisions moving towards a final draft on our music.

• Started testing the build of our game on different mobile devices.

• Finished cutscene system implementation

• Finished the tutorial

• Added more particle effects. Because fire, electricity, and explosions make everything cooler, and easier to see on a small phone screen.

Here is what the vfx for a checkpoint will look like. When you reach a checkpoint, Axle will push until he can get the gears turning and power up the next part of the machine. (We will be doing another art pass on the checkpoint structure itself, and the gears will turn with you, but we wanted to show off the lightning!)

Production Schedule: Making a game, especially one unique and robust as Axle, takes quite a bit of time and dedication. Unfortunately we are a bit short on the former. Our small team has to be employed full time in order to pay the rent while we finish up Axle, committing everyone to a tight schedule of nights and weekends. We've accomplished an amazing amount in that time, but it does make production take longer than if we were able to devote our full time to only this game.

While production will not be finished in April, we will be working as hard as ever to get you rewards and finish Axle as soon as possible.

We've come up with a pretty exciting schedule of when you can expect to receive content and rewards from us:

• First, once we have received them from the various companies which we ordered them from, you will receive the first round of Rewards. These will include everything but the Soundtrack, Art book, Background Pack, and Beta Party.

• Second, once we finish polishing one of our levels that we want to see your response to, we will share with you a section of Axle, a small beta, for you to both sample and help us test.

• After that we will be moving towards the end of production on Axle. Once we have a complete soundtrack and all the art done, we will put together our background pack, soundtrack, and art book, and ship them to you.

• Finally, once we feel we have a well-tested project that will work on your phones, we will ship the Android version of Axle. Digital copies of the game, watts, etc. will be given out at that time.

• After the Android release we will be working on user support and moving towardsreleases for other systems like iPhones, Kindle Fire, Windows 8 phones, the Ouya, and so on. We don't have time estimates for these yet, but rest assured we will keep you updated!

We could not thank each and every one of you enough for your patience and support. All of you have been amazing so far and it has been incredibly motivating to make Axle as fun and amazing as it can be!

As we said earlier, we will continue to keep you updated with progress, rewards, and anything else we feel would be interesting or useful to you.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please email us at [email protected] or visit us on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr.

Thanks again!
-The Axle Team

It goes without saying that the Axle team has been hard at work.

In addition to designing and implementing a whole bunch of new levels, the programming and design teams have been hooking up some new features:

• We now have a rough draft of our in-game store, which allows you to use the watts you either earn      or buy to purchase power-ups, extra lives, and other fun items.
  
• We have some new obstacles and hazards to dodge including electricity that bounces around gears and cogs that disintegrate as you roll across them. The visual effects for these hazards are still in the works, but we'll share some screenshots with you once we have something that looks cool.
  
• There are now first drafts for two new pieces for our soundtrack. We also have first drafts for the sound effects for the first three worlds. And let me say, these first drafts sound amazing.
  

On top of all that, we have some new gear textures!

We posted this guy from the toyshop levels on our Facebook page a couple weeks ago:

And here is one of the adorably devious little spiked gears from the same world:

Now that we are in a more visual stage of our production, we will be able to share with you more frequent updates to show the new textures, levels, gameplay elements, and anything else that may be fun.

In other news, we recently sent out some backer polls to everyone receiving physical rewards so we can start ordering and preparing them. If you have not responded to your poll yet, please do! The sooner we hear your feedback, the sooner we can order rewards. If you did not get a poll, it might be because you are not receiving physical rewards. If you feel as though you should have received one however, please let us know!

If you have any additional comments or concerns about your rewards, please feel free to send us a message here on Kickstarter, or to E-mail us at [email protected].

As always, thank you for your support, and feel free to contact us through blog comments,Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or E-Mail us at [email protected]!

Cheers!

-The Axle Team