Hello again Backers and Friends! We hope the summer heat hasn’t been too harsh on you all! 

Aside from the usual bug fixing, we have been adding some new levels and polishing up the old ones!

In addition, we have also:

• Added our in-game store! Now you will be able to use all those watts you collect in the levels to buy power-ups and extra lives for Axle!
• Finished painting all of the gear textures for the game! Now every level will have five to seven unique gear characters!
• Filled in all but a few levels for our last two worlds, Adventure and Military. 

Here are two screenshots from Unity of our last two levels in production:

Now that we are in the final stages of production, we have been entering Axle into more game competitions. If you missed our entry to the Geeky Awards, you can check it out here. We also just submitted to the Pax Indie Megabooth!

If you know of any festivals, conventions, or competitions you would like to see Axle at, please send us an email at [email protected] !


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


Thanks again, everyone!  

-The Axle Team 

Hello again Backers and Friends!

We've had our noses to the grindstone these past few weeks, gearing up for festivals as we tighten levels and stomp bugs for a fun and polished game.

Along with that we have been creating more art from the world of Axle.

One of the major things we have been working on is our story scenes that will appear between levels. I don't want to spoil any surprise, so we won't be sharing a lot, but below you can see one some of our rough drafts!

We have also been creating visual representations of all of our levels in the form of adorable little icons for our level select screen! This way we show what clockwork item Axle will need to repair next rather than saying it.

Below are our levels for the first world, the Toyshop. Can you guess what they are?

You can look forward to seeing these and more in our Art of Axle book, which will be shipped with our second round of rewards!

If you know of any festivals, conventions, or competitions you would like to see Axle at, please send us an email at [email protected] to let us know where!

As always, 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

Hello again Backers and Friends!

Since we've last updated the Axle team has been hard at workputting together the beta level to send out to our backers to help us test.

Within the past few weeks we have focused on getting Axle working on the wide range of Android devices that are out there.

In this time we have also:

• Set up our menus to work on various devices with a wide range of aspect ratios

• Worked on Facebook integration and leader boards to allow you to share scores between friends

• Tweaked controller physics so the game is easier to control and Axle's movement feels more natural.

• More level revisions!

• Usability testing

•  Added landmarks into levels - you can now see larger machine parts behind gears. This really helps the levels feel more like machines with pieces that work together. (We'll see if we can get some screenshots to share soon!)

• Sound! We're currently in the process of putting our sound effects into levels to bring the game to life.

In other news, a few of our backer rewards have arrived. They're looking pretty good!

We shared on Facebook the coasters for the $250 reward, and here they are again:

Hello again Backers and Friends!

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!)

Rewards:

Speaking of rewards - guess what we've ordered!

The rewards have been ordered and are slowly coming in. The only exceptions to this are the Axle Soundtrack, the Axle Art book, and the Axle Background Pack. All of these will feature content from Axle, and since we are still building Axle, to deliver those at this time would make them incomplete. Because we want to put as much content as possible into both the art book, background pack, and soundtrack, we will complete and ship those once we are at a point where we are done adding art and music to the game. Don't worry! You will still get your digital or physical copy, but just a bit later than the rest of your other rewards.

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!

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

First and foremost, a huge thank you to everyone who has donated, shared, and checking out Axle. Our team is so excited, encouraged, and humbled by your amazingly generous response! We made it halfway to our first goal and were featured by the Kickstarter staff within the first 24 hours, and as of writing this we already have over 100 backers and $10k. We're off to a great start!

We already have some great press from 8th-Circut, Flags Captured, and Panther Pause, as well as a mention from Giant Bomb!

We've already been talking with a lot of you about what you would like to see for Axle. If you check out the bottom of our front page we have started up a FAQ section.  In addition, we are also brainstorming ideas for digital rewards to put together some "Digital Only" tiers. Please let us know in the comment section below if there is something you would like to see!

More than anything it has been great hearing from you. We value you guys a lot and we are always open to comments, questions, conversation, and Bon Jovi song parodies. If Kickstarter isn't your dig, feel free to talk to us on Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter.

We have a lot of exciting stuff planned for the rest of this campaign, from extra goodies for you guys, to more bits of the game as we make it. Thank you again for your support! You are amazing!

-The Axle Team

Here is a high-def image of one of the pieces we had in our Kickstarter video that we didn't get to share on our main page!

Axle isn't the only gear in the world!  There are many different gears, each with their own role in machines.  Derpy, for instance, is a large gear in the factory, where he moves slow and steady.

We finally have a gameplay trailer to show everyone!  Check out the first glimpse of Axle in action!

With our big push on implementing and finishing assets, we finally have some great in-game screenshots that we can post!  You can see how the player is actually a gear and moves along other gears.  We have two stages, the Toy Shop and the Factory.  The next stage will be the Estate.  It is great to see this in the game now, comparing back to our original concept art.

The start of the Toy Shop level.

Axle on a dangerously heated gear in the factory.

The finish line! Time to escape!

Moving gears in the toy shop.

Death by crusher!

Axle's magnetic jump.

Spring break!  What a funny notion!

This week, we have been crunching to put together a couple of levels for the video.  It looks like we'll be wrapping everything up tonight or tomorrow.  Here is a sneak peek!