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 Jeff | May 15, 2015 | Axon, Events, Featured, Game Jams, Games, Our Games |
TOJam 10, possibly our favourite jam event in the city, just ran last week. James and I (Jeff) were lucky enough to be able to participate this year and we wanted to be able to give some nuggets of wisdom from the professional gamedev world to some students in the Humber Game Programming program that we recently both graduated from, so we formed a group with 3 first-year students from Humber, none of whom we had ever worked with. It was an awesome experience and I think we all worked together wonderfully, our floaters especially, to make possibly the nicest jam game I’ve ever worked on in my short career so far. The Core Team Game Design/Programming – Jeff Rose (Axon Interactive) Programming – James Zinger (Axon Interactive) Programming – Steven Jomha (Humber Student) Programming – Terry Katsoulis (Humber Student) Programming – Tyler Paisley (Humber Student) Floaters Sound Design – Sook Binning Music – Andrew Farnsworth (ACCRETION.of.PLANETESSIMALS) UI Design & Art – Dasha Gordeeva Special Thanks To Tabby Rose for her the game design contributions If you’d like to try out the game, you can play a (buggy) version here http://digitalmachinist.itch.io/the-cube-thing (Note that the menu controls are a little funky as of now, but that will soon be fixed). Some progress shots: Day 1, 10PM: Day 2, 7PM: Day 3, 7PM: Tabby and I worked on the game concept together in the couple of nights before the jam, combining puzzles like simple mazes and the classic Rubik’s cube problem. In our game, you start somewhere and need to get to somewhere else, but if you fall off...
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 | Nov 9, 2013 | Design/Development, Events, Featured |
Recently I’ve been working on an iPad app at my second (third?) job, and I wanted to share some of the stuff I learned about Flash UI design, particularly for those working in Flash Professional CS6. Adobe hasn’t done the most excellent job with creating components or built-in classes for some really important UI standbys (scrollbars, I’m looking at you) so I went looking for some alternatives. What I ended up going with is a quite excellent open-source UI library called Feathers, which runs on the also open-source Starling framework. Unfortunately most of the documentation out there is for folks using Flex or Flash Develop, which are great tools, but I use Flash Professional at work (and before you ask, my work computer is a Mac so I can’t get Flash Develop). It took me a while to figure out even the simplest configuration in CS6 so I thought I’d make a short presentation/tutorial to pass the knowledge on and hopefully help someone out. As an aside, I should point out a few things that may have made this more difficult for me than it would for someone looking into Feathers for a new project. I’m a fairly advanced, but largely self-taught, Flash programmer. I don’t have much outside experience with programming so I do find some of the design patterns that Feathers uses new and confusing. If you are coming from a design background, this is going to be a bit of an uphill battle, but it’s totally doable. If you’re a pro programmer already (like Jeff!) than you’ll probably be just fine. The other problem was that...
by Jeff | May 20, 2012 | Axon, Events, Featured, Game Jams, Games, Our Games |
Our latest outing was TOJam: The Sevening! The 7th iteration of it’s kind, this year’s TOJam (that is “T.O. Jam”, pronounced “Toe Jam”) was a game jam that hosted an awesome 410 people, making a dizzying number of games with only one long-weekend to do it. Since it’s not a competition, there’s just a pervasive atmosphere of productivity and adrenaline and progress that really gets the blood flowing. We were all too happy to be there to ride on that wave. The three of us (Bill, Tabby, and myself, Jeff) entered into the jam with Albert Fung, our distinguished 3D artist collaborator, and a new acquaintance of ours, Marty Bernie. Marty is an incredibly talented musician and we had an great time working with him. Our team of 5 worked together really well, and I think everyone involved is itching to work together again soon. Throughout the weekend, we put together the foundation to what will be a really interesting game, which we call Quench. Since this year’s theme at TOJam was the world is not ending, we wanted to make something that really captures a feeling of life, protection and restoration; a blend of Okami and Minecraft, if you will. Quench is a game in which you play the role of a demigod charged with controlling nature. You must assist herds of animals as they trek back home, through a parched wasteland, to the safety of the Elder Tree. Only by protecting the herds on their pilgrimage will the Elder Tree have the strength to make the world green once again. Wonderful concept aside, we had to cut...
by Jeff | Nov 27, 2011 | Axon, Events, Featured, Games |
Gamercamp just ended and now that I’m home safe (and completely exhausted) I’m happy to report that it was a fantastic experience. Jaime and Mark ran a great show. We met a bunch of really cool fellow indie developers and artists, saw some incredibly insightful presentations, and made ourselves a paper prototype game, in collaboration with Jaime Woo and a couple of other Gamercamp volunteers, called Sandblocks. So, lots to talk about! Cheating as a Game Mechanic Firstly, I’d like to thank Andy Keenan for an enthralling presentation (and everyone in the room for the ensuing discussion) regarding Cheating as a Game Mechanic. His focus on flow maintenance in games had everyone in the room reconsidering how to design game difficulty from a totally different viewpoint. His central idea is hugely important but amazing in its simplicity: Maps, cheat codes, time rewinding, FAQs, YouTube playthroughs and wiki entries all share a common thread of being a form of meta-gaming that could be thought of as cheating, and yet many of these are embraced as viable parts of play while others are shunned as being detriments to play or “impure experiences”. But shouldn’t we, as designers, be most invested in maintaining immersion, enjoyment and flow for our players? Why not embrace these as ways to improve games and maintain flow, rather than rejecting them? Considering this subject from the player’s perspective, it becomes clear why some players cheat. They’re either bored because the game is too easy or the game is too hard and they’re frustrated with it. It’s just more engaging to cheat than that to play the game...
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