Monday, April 28, 2014

Imagine Cup Games National Winners!

We did it! We actually did it!

Team Genesis won 1st place at Imagine Cup Greek National Finals, and we are proud of sharing our latest news with you! Judging was a tough call, taking over 2.5 hours to complete, but in the end, we managed to creep everyone out with the Blackthorn Manor, and the Rat King!

We are already preparing our deliverables for the World Semifinals where we will be faced off with all the games throughout the globe. Our hopes are high and so is our excitement!

This time we won't say much, we'll let the pictures talk for us!

The Team, as we were preparing for our 10-minute presentation

Our Game Designer and Project Manager, Kostas, presenting Dementia

The croud that got to see the first ever public reveal of Dementia



Awards Time! along with mrs. Eleni Rachaniotou, one of the 4 judges 


The Team - Proudly showing off their trophies as National Games Winners



Tuesday, April 15, 2014

The Imagine Cup Team

15 of April..!

The day of submission! That's it! All the rush has come to a temporary end...
The game is now on "Imagine Cup Greek Finals" version, so we can use it for live demo in the finals.

But who is behind this game we've been talking to you about so much?

Introducing... us!


Kostas, Panos, Jordan and Manos are the guys who will represent Genesis Game Studios as "Team Genesis" at Imagine Cup 2014 greek finals at Microsoft Hellas.

But let's introduce ourselves:


Kostas - Game Design & Management
He's responsible for designing most aspects, mechanics and systems for the game, as well as the cards, the Characters and all the text you can read ingame and all the wireframes of the game itself. The one who had to get the message across the rest of the members, so they knew what to code and how the characters would behave.

He was also responsible for overall project management and to guide the team through the most difficult phases of the game, from prototype to the playable version the game has finally reached the last days. He is also the team blogger and that makes him feel awkward talking about himself in 3rd person. Marketing and Business are the other fields of the project he has been working as well, along with the deliverables of the World Semifinals or other Challanges such as project blueprint or UX Challenge. He is the Team Presenter for the project.



Panos - Systems Programming
He's the guy behind the cogweels, wielding the glue that binds every crazy mechanic together. In the team, he is known as "The Terminator" for his amazing coding speed as well as his ability to execute tasks one behind another. He quickly grabs his flamethrower every time he detects a bug and instantly kills it with style.

He is the one responsible for making core structures work in our game, such as the Pathfinding, the Combat, Stealing and Looting Systems, the Artificial Intelligence for our bots as well as their behaviors. The doors, walls and the rooms are in the game because of him. He also gave birth to our User Interface by punching in GUI code and every now and then tinkers with the performance of our game concerning bumpmaps, better texturing, lightmapping and overall quality of the visuals of the game.




Jordan - Gameplay Programming
Endless hours on skype would not be the same without Jordan and his contribution to the coding of Dementia. He would initially have a heart attack and then go and attack some gameplay tasks himself as he is responsible for bringing the initial vision of the game through the game prototype.

He is also responsible for most of the Gameplay that Dementia currently has, including usage of Items, Seals and Events, the maker of the Turn Flow System that rotates the Characters, the one who punched in all the different Damage Distribution cases in the Combat System. Without Jordan, Manos and Kostas would not have any Room Editor to create and Design Rooms inside the house.




Manos - Room Designer & Optimization
Every little detail you can see inside the Rooms is because of Manos. Every furniture, or light, or even the small portraits behind a rusty statue has come from him. He is responsible for designing every single room in the game along with Kostas and making sure that every model used is fully optimized for using in-game.

He is checking every furniture for meshes, verts and polys and has to dessimate them in order to be used in the game properly. He also did quite some Art direction with our artists to create models and furniture, as well as the overall quality (look and feel) or our rooms.


Tuesday, April 8, 2014

New merits for Team Genesis, Leaking Screenshots!

Hello again, people! This time we got EXTREMELY exciting news for you!

First of all, we would like to announce that Team Genesis won its' second reward in Imagine Cup - Honorable Mention in UX Challenge, climbing to the top 10 of the Games Category in the world once again...!



User Experience (UX) Challenge was about creating 2 documents filled with diagrams covering basic gameplay flow of our game, the target screens and their functionalities, 2 LowFi Wireframes about our gameplay and menu screens as well as one HighFi Wireframe concerning the gameplay.

You can see Imagine Cup's Official UX-Winner Announcement here: http://bit.ly/1kHjeTH

Kudos, team!

Secondly, and that's somewhat even more awesome for sharing with you, we will now leak the first ever "ACTUAL" screenshot of the game, which is actualy the high fidelity wireframe that we submitted over to the UX Challenge.

In the following screenshot we are revealing quite a few things:


  1. The characters in 3D !
  2. Some of the Rooms of the House!
  3. The Whole User Interface!

So... without further ado, behold, our UX Challenge Screenshot:

Note: This Screenshot was taken in January. Trust us, there is MUCH more to show you :)


Things are about to get nasty, as one week remains until our game is submitted for the Greek Finals so now, team Genesis is going on full power! Let's do this!


Friday, April 4, 2014

Bugs on the loose!

There are bugs on the loose! Identify them, burn them, don't let them live...!! Oh! Hello!

As anyone can guess we are still on burnout mood. April has arrived and we got sweet news for you..!

The past month, HexCraft got featured in over 38 markets, we gotta admit we did not expect that coming, as it grew smiles on our faces and now we are working with a better mood..!

Right now, the Imagine Cup team is creating the initial and final screens (The Character Selection Screen and the Winning Screen) as part of the game flow, so that players may chose any character from the 6 given and take control of their very own destiny! The rooms have been redesigned a tad bit, some optimization here and there, and still we are quite a few AI tweaks away from going to playtest phase right before the greek finals!

Greek finals... yes, it has been announced, and it's getting more and more official by the day, here are the rewards of the greek Imagine Cup finals :

The Spoils of war!!!

Did you know that we are using Trello as our lead project management platform, for assigning tasks to everybody and killing off all those bugs that keep running away from our intense test cycles? We've been falling in love with it lately as we overcame our fear of trying out something new besides Visual Studio Online and Excel.

Stay tuned for our next post, as I am now promising to all of you that we will leak the first ever screenshot of the game with some rooms open, characters scattered around the house and the whole first draft of the game HUD on screen. :)

Till next time,
have fun all!!!