Wow!  On Friday we got featured on the front page of the business section of the OC Register!  The article is fantastic, well rounded, and we really couldn't be more honored and happy!

You can read the article here!  And read Dodge College's response here!

We just want to send our thanks to the team at OC Register, our mentors at the Chapman eVillage for supporting us, and to Digital Arts and the Computer Science Departments for giving us the opportunity to work on Axle while we were still students!

In other news, we are now over $13k on our Kickstarter!  Thank you for your support so far!

EDIT : The OC Register article has also been posted on MSNBCand Businessweek websites!

Thank you for your support so far!  We are 80% in only the first week of our kickstarter!  We can't thank you enough for all of your support and generosity thus far!

We have busy with putting together a new version of Axle to submit to the Student IGF competition. Each big deadline like this is another opportunity to refine the game, build more features, and get feedback on what we have so far. It will be the first year we are participating, so we're excited!

For everyone who pledged $10 or more, we are going to include another bonus level in your games… if we can get 500 likes on our Facebook page! We wanted ways for you to be able to support Axle aside from just donating money. If everyone could convince one friend to like the Facebook page, then we'll easily have enough!

Since the last update we have also been featured on a couple of blogs!  Noble Presshas a fantastic, detailed article about the game, and Liz was featured on the Dodge College Blog for her thoughts on making games with a film school education.

As always, feel free to leave us questions or comments!

-The Axle Team

Bonus:  A couple of pictures of us working away on our IGF build!

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!

To get Axle released on Google Play and the App Store, we need to do some fundraising.  Our Kickstarter Campaign is live, and we are offering some REALLY cool rewards!  Go check it out, and tell your friends!  If we raise enough money we'll even be able to provide a level editor, which is going to be AMAZING!

And don't just take our word for it!  The guys at 8th-Curcuit are on board as well!

You can now like Axle on facebook!  This is the best way to ask questions and communicate with the developers.  Also, if you use twitter, we'll be tweeting.    Keep your eyes out for contests, promotions, and announcements!  Also, we clearly have a new webpage layout.  Everything is still be here and where you expect it to be.  :)

Updates on the project itself: We've finished up re-working our back end code to perform better, faster, and more efficiently!  It took a while, but it is definitely going to be worth it, particularly because we're getting some new programmers on board to help, which is going to make finishing up the rest of our systems and implementing level-specific code much faster.

We live in exciting times!

We are featured in the Chapman Happenings for our success at the IEEE competition!  It talks about the game as well as the our summer plans to release it.

Last night we screened a trailer for Axle at the Digital Arts thesis screenings, where it was nominated for a Cecil Award!  This is another great honor, because there were many really interesting and excellent digital arts projects created, in a variety of mediums.

The team finished up classes this week, which means that we'll be able to focus all our efforts on getting Axle ready for release!

Wow!  We came in first place at the game competition on Saturday!  It was amazing to get such a good response for Axle.  The event was packed and exciting, full of awesome, talented game makers.  The other teams brought games from JRPGs, to puzzle-platformers, to UDK masterpieces, to multi-player frenzies!  Congratulations to everyone who participated!

We want to thank the judges for their compliments and criticisms.  It is such an honor to get feedback from game industry veterans.  Thank you Chapman for hosting the event and supporting this project for almost a year.  And finally, thank you to everyone who stopped by our booth to play the game.  Your feedback is extremely valuable to us, and we're going to use it to make the game better and better.

There were a lot of people who wanted to know when we are releasing Axle on the Android Play market.  Unfortunately, we don't know exactly yet, but we started a mailing list for people to find out.  We promise not to spam you, but we'll send out announcements about the release and perhaps even a few focus testing opportunities this summer.  The link to sign up is at the top of the page.

Although this award is an amazing achievement, we still have a lot we want to improve on, and the game will only get better from here!

We are a finalist in the IEEE GameSig Intercollegiate Game Showcase!  This afternoon is our presentation where we will live demo Axle in front of a crowd of over 400 people!  It is a super exciting prospect, and we are thrilled to be a finalist!  It will be great to get a bunch of feedback from professional developers and meet game teams from all over Orange County.  This week has been a lot of last-minute cramming to fill the game with awesome content for the show, but after this we'll be able to take a bit of a break while we make it through finals and graduation.