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 Jeff | Jun 12, 2015 | Axon, Design/Development, Featured, Games, Our Games, Quench |
Since entering into production for Quench, we’ve been building out all of the gameplay by making the world much more dynamic and complex than our prototype ever was. Not only can you use your rain power to create water and bring the map to life, but wind is able to shift sands to uncover hidden objects, and lightning is able to start fires that can quickly become uncontrollable under the wrong circumstances. Many of these features are brand new and still very programmer-art-iffic. We have a Grand Plan™ to soon move all of these systems rendering into 3D with awesome particle effects, but as of this moment everything is a black-and-white demonstration of data flowing through the map that we use to help us debug. Don’t let that scare you though. We just want to give an insider’s look at how we get our work done before we have assets ready to see the final product in all of its shimmering polygonal glory. Until then, we’d love for you to take a look at a couple of short videos about fire and how it behaves, and a short discussion of some of the tools we’re using to help us design the behaviour of our environment even with so few assets to render what’s going on. Only YOU Can Prevent Forest Fires In this video, Jeff shows off the environment simulation with regards to fire and spread of heat in a level, including how fire reacts with water (rain, surface and groundwater), movement of fire with wind, and production of ash. Currently the simulation is not associated with 3D assets...
by Kristina Neuman | May 29, 2015 | Axon, Design/Development, Featured, Games, Our Games, Quench |
Kristina here! I’m responsible for a lot of the 2D art and 2D animation for Quench. In particular, I’m working on the animated cinematics that will play at the beginning and end of the game, as well as between some of the levels. In this blog post I’ll describe my process for making these cinematics, focusing mainly on storyboarding. Overall Process There are many steps involved in creating the cinematics for Quench. Before I delve into more detail about storyboarding, here’s a quick overview of the whole process: Figure 1: Flow chart of how we’re making the cinematics for Quench. While I’ll likely go into more detail about the final few steps of this process in a future blog post, for now let’s focus on steps 1-3. What’s Storyboarding? Storyboards are graphic organizers that visually tell the story of an animation (or film), panel by panel (kind of like a comic book). Before jumping directly into making the animation, starting with storyboards help us pre-plan the major actions that will happen, help to time everything out, and (at least in our case) give us an idea of the assets that will have to be made to make the animation. Storyboarding saves money in the long run because it is much easier to make changes and fix mistakes during this stage than once the animation has been put together. A storyboard will likely convey some of the following information: What characters and objects are in the frame, and how are they moving? What are the characters saying to each other, if anything? Is there any narration? How much time has...
by Albert Fung | Apr 10, 2015 | Design/Development, Featured, Quench |
This is Albert Fung, and I’m responsible for generating the 3D models in the upcoming Quench game. I’d like to start with an overview of our 3D workflow. Generally speaking, I would receive concept sketches and pre-production specifications from our team members, and start building rough 3D models in Cinema4D, our choice of 3D production software. I would then add in lights and colors on the model (as seen in Fig.1) to enhance its appearance, and then import this model into our gaming engine, Unity3D. Fig 1. Test renders made in Cinema4D – these will be hard to replicate in Unity3D The problem is that the lights and colors do not necessarily translate across platforms. Cinema4D can produce fascinating renders on linear animations, which are based on complex calculations that simulate physical light in a virtual environment. These calculations, however, are too resource-intensive for real-time rendering – imagine having to simulate the light interaction between a herd of animated elephants and a vast terrain object, all at a rate of 60 frames per second. If we tried to do that, the game simulation would grind to a halt, gamers will experience lags, or in worst case scenarios a complete crash. Fig 2. Flat 2D files that document the rendering/lighting data seen in Fig 1. For that reason, I’m experimenting with baking textures, and importing them as flat 2D files into Unity3D. The intense calculations will be done in Cinema4D, and the finalized data will be taken into Unity3D. The game engine wouldn’t need to do the heavy-duty calculations, but our models will retain the high...
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,...
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