by Tabby | Apr 15, 2016 | Axon, Featured, Games, Our Games, Quench |
Huge news from the Axon team: We will be launching a Kickstarter campaign and a Steam Greenlight campaign for Quench on April 20th! As many of you know, we’ve been working on our first independent game, Quench, for more than a year. Thanks to the support of a grant from the OMDC and the hard work of our team, Quench is well into development: the core gameplay is functionally close to completion, and we’re in the process of integrating new levels and story into the game now. We’ve been lucky enough to show off our demo at several events including Level Up Showcase, Con Bravo, Bit Bazaar, and most recently at GDC, with more events on the way. In the past year, we’ve received incredibly encouraging feedback from our fans about the unique aesthetic of the world and its creatures, the focus on non-violence as a game mechanic, and the central themes of compassion and community, where you can change the world through nurturing the earth and helping others. We’re on our way to completing and releasing Quench on PC and Mac near the end of 2016. But with the majority of our funding received and paid out (and the final amount allocated to post-production costs), we need a boost to help us get to the finish line. So we’ve decided to turn to our friends, family, and fans. Please support Quench on Kickstarter! In addition to getting the game as soon as it comes out, we’re offering great rewards to backers, including the original Quench soundtrack by composer Adam Sakiyama, an artbook and guide to the world of...
by Tabby | Aug 14, 2015 | Axon, Events, Featured, Games, Our Games, Quench |
Tabby here! The Axon team has been a little slow on blog updates recently, but we have good reason in the last month or so. We’ve been working really hard on Quench to get to the coveted alpha milestone, both to hit our own deadlines and because we were accepted into a couple of fantastic events in the past month. Now that they are wrapped up (mostly – I’ll get to that in a minute), I thought I’d share some photos and screenshots to get you all caught up. If you weren’t at either show, first order of business is: We have a brand new, shiny-as-heck demo! We’re not quite calling it an alpha milestone yet, but check out these screenshots (taken while people were playing the demo)! So, first up for events was Bit Bazaar 6, which took place on July 12 as part of the Pan Am Games at Ontario’s Celebration Zone. We had the great privilege of showing off our newest public demo alongside game-maker friends Golden Gear (Fate Tectonics), Damian Sommer (The Yawhg, Chesh and more), Numizmatic (Arcade Skidaddle), comic artist friends Love Love Hill (and Like Like Hump ;D) and Maiji, and a bunch of other really cool people. To prepare for this special event, we created 20 hand-crafted elephant sculptures (shout out to Chantal Parent’s awesome mould-making/casting skills!) based on the models in the game and showcased the little herd at the table. (We have lots of progress photos for the elephants, but we’ll save that for another post!) We also made a bunch of other swag, which was pretty neat too. Next...
by Tabby | Apr 24, 2015 | Events, Featured |
This week I thought I’d tell everyone a little bit about the background of the Axon artists/designers, including myself (Tabby), and talk about a recent event we participated in. Kristina, Albert and I all graduated from the Biomedical Communications Master’s program at the University of Toronto, back in 2010. Cool, you’re thinking, but what the heck is “biomedical communications”? We like to tell people we’re medical illustrators – meaning we are proficient in textbook, particularly anatomical, illustration – but that really only scratches the surface of what we do (and has very little to do with our roles at Axon). Literally the first assignment is a medical illustration. The BMC program is divided into 2 streams. Kristina and I were in the first stream, interactive media, while Albert studied the second, 3D animation. Everything we studied focused on visual communication for medicine and science, but we go about it differently. For our Master’s Research Projects, Kristina and I designed and programmed Flash games (hers was about arthropods, meant for a museum kiosk, while mine focused on food-borne illness and was directed at teens). Albert made an animation describing axillary lymph node dissection, a surgical procedure. In the interactive stream we studied web design, information design, UI/UX, and educational design. Meanwhile, the animation students learned about cinematography, compositing, scriptwriting, storyboarding and 3D modelling and animation. Screenshots of our MRPs (L to R: Kristina’s, Tabby’s, Albert’s). With our technical art backgrounds, you can see why our focus at Axon is on designing visual solutions, mostly for medical education – it’s our specialty! …But we also have a whimsical side. After all,...
by Tabby | Mar 20, 2015 | Axon, Featured, Games, Our Games, Quench |
The team at Axon is excited to announce that we have finally, officially, for realsies started to develop Quench (that game we’ve probably talked your ear off about at the bar/ at that conference / on Twitter). What’s the Game About? Quench is a story-driven puzzle game set in a lo-fi, geometric landscape. You play as Shepherd, an avatar of nature, and you have the power to control the weather to guide herds of animals on a perilous journey. You must provide for your flock, open blocked paths, thwart enemies, and otherwise tend the land to make it lush and green again. Quench is inspired by uplifting and joyful classics such as The Lion King and Avatar: The Last Airbender and games like Journey and Okami. You will experience unique and wonderful environments, memorable characters, be awed by your own power, and be presented with a lesson: in order to make a better world, we must all do our part. Quench was first born at TOJam: The Sevening, inspired by the theme “The World Is Not Ending”. From a Flash prototype, we refined the concept several times as various student projects. In early 2014, we made a playable Unity demo that we showed at the Level Up Showcase and Gamercamp (via Humber College). People who played the game at those events enjoyed the concept and aesthetic, and frequently commented on how refreshing it was to play a game with a non-violent core gameplay mechanic. We are really grateful for the encouragement we’ve received to continue development over the last year. Who’s Working on Quench? In addition to Jeff, Tabby,...
by Tabby | May 9, 2014 | Axon, Featured |
As you may have noticed, a lot has happened around here lately! Today we’re re-launching our website and company with a brand-new name: Axon Interactive Inc. (yes, we’re incorporated now!) But the website and our name aren’t the only thing that’s changed. We also moved into our first office, which has been a long process that we’re eager to share. The Search Last April our friend Ryan Creighton generously offered us space to work, so we spent an amazing summer working in a gorgeous downtown space. Jeff and I were joined by three interns: James, Odin and Deanna (all game programming students at Humber College) and we had a good time making websites and watching The Legend of Korra. Unfortunately the end of the summer brought the end of steady contracts for us and the end of the lease for Ryan (boo) so we all moved out and resumed working at home (double boo). But by then Jeff and I had learned a lesson about working with other people: a lot more gets done when everyone is in the same place at the same time. We knew we’d need an office for the next summer, and earlier if possible. We started our search online – I really wanted a “brick-and-beam” space because I felt like cubicles and white walls might stifle creativity. I wanted big windows too. And cheap rent. So… I had a lot of requirements. Eventually we came across the Planet Storage building, which happens to be in our neighbourhood, the Junction. In December we came to look at spaces on a whim, knowing that was way...
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