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!
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!
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Now that GDC is over, our eyes are set on our next big deadline: submission to the IEEE competition. The competitions is going to be hosted at our school, at Dodge College's Folino Theater. The event is on April 28, from 2-4pm. We'll be able to see the work of lots of other students, and if we are a finalist, we'll see our tiny-screened mobile game up on the HUGE theater screen. And we thought porting to the tablet was intense! What does this competition mean to you? It means within the next few weeks we will be posting AN AMAZING TRAILER of Axle. Yes! You will be able to see the game in action! In-game artwork! Dazzling effects! Never-Before Seen Gameplay! Since we're making an announcement that there will be a trailer, check out this high-budget professional version of making an announcement that there will be a trailer! We all had a great time up at GDC! It was a very long drive, but plenty of good times were had. We took Bart into the city and stayed a hotel a few blocks away. We got there a bit late on Wednesday because we were busy getting everything polished to show around, but it was worth it! We went out to Indian food with a group of other game designers from Chapman then out to the LucasArts party, which was awesome! Thursday a few of us saw a panel, we toured around the Expo floor. An indie game that stood out was WAY. It was a very charming puzzle/platformer where you play with a partner that you can only communicate with non-verbally. After the conference, we went out to an excellent dinner in Chinatown! Thursday was spent mostly on the career floor, where we got some great feedback on the game, and some of our team members got very interesting job offers!
The experience was great! We can't wait to go again next year! With GDC just around the corner, we've been replacing our temporary assets with something more presentable. We did a whole new set of textures for the gears and a new splash screen! The style of the game is really coming together, and we can't wait to show it off! We are also getting our trip itinerary together, so we know where to go when the Expo floor isn't open, as well as arranging transportation in and around the city. We also want to be able to check out San Francisco while we are there, and go get some awesome food! We want to go to there.
We're getting ready to go to GDC with a demonstration level of Axle! There are business cards on the way, hotel reservations made, and passes procured! It is sure to be a grand adventure!
If you would like to find us and try out the game, feel free to contact us! We've got two talented programmers, a designer, an artist and a producer, but that still leaves some gaps in our project as we're applying more polish. We have found a Sound Designer, Billy Peake, and a VFX Artist, Sam, who will be collaborating with us to help give a professional touch to areas outside our expertise. We have prepped up some test implementation, but their awesome work won't be get into the game for a while, until they wrap up some of their other projects. We are working on a musical, sound and effect style in the vein of Electro-Swing (aka Swing House), which if you haven't heard it, is pretty sweet! In other news, we have moved all of our task tracking to a site our friend Will is making for project tracking. It has been very promising, and he has been really accommodating to our needs.
One of the biggest challenges we faced in making the prototype level is placing each gear individually, and rotating it to match the other gears it was connected to.
Now we have a solution! A handy level editor that saves levels as XML files! You can import gears from a list, drag them around game space and even snap them to other gears! This ensures that the gears are interlocking correctly from the level start, as well as gives us the ability to set one gear's rotation and have the rest of the chain match accordingly. The level editor can also specify backgrounds, trigger zones, and path nodes for gears that translate. This is super exciting and will speed up our level creation when we start to work on multiple levels in March. We are wrapping up the prototype this week and it looks great! The game is fun to play and gives a good idea of what we want to accomplish in our next stages. We also completed a design document that will help steer our next efforts as we start to polish the game. Jessica did some rad concept art, which you can see above.
The next step is to sit down and polish one of the levels, get our awesome gameplay to look like the awesome concept art! We have a name for our game, of course, but we needed to come up with a name for our company! We had a massive brainstorming session and came up with a huge list of words to incorporate. These are some of the highlights...
Dapper Inferno Flying Fox Worthy Sophisticate (From a random word generator) Calico Prehistoric Studios Bio-digital Jazz Jerry Rigged Digital FireFall Flulminology (The Study of Lightening) Pony Storm (Lauren's Boyfriend's contribution) Inverted Spider 22 Calliope (Name of an asteroid) Dendritic (Derived from 'Dendrite') Iron Pine Studios (Good, until we realized Iron Pine Peak was a location in Skyrim) Brick Oven So... what did we decide on? We shall reveal that another day! |
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