The Nuts and Bolts of our new project & Horror Unity Event at 30 of March

Hello Everyone!

At first, I'd like to let you know that Genesis Game Studios along with Student Guru Unipi will be hosting a 3-Hour Event at University of Piraeus, on 30th of March, with me talking about Unity3D Game Development and more specific a quick development of a 3D Horror Survival Game. This is the poster for the event:

And thus, the time has come to reveal more details about our new project. It is Friday the 13th after all, which fits perfectly into the mood of our game.

So, last week, we said that we are preparing a somewhat big project, at least moving away from mobile titles a bit. So, it's a great pleasure for us, assembling a new team once again, and going through the path of PC Indie Game Development.

At this very moment, we will not reveal the true name of our game, and will merely call it with a codename, more precise, Project AH.

Okay, straight to the main course then! What is the game all about?

Project AH is going to be a First Person Adventure / Horror Hybrid game that is going to be featured in full 3D, and released in the PC Platforms, aiming for as many digital stores as possible, including the Windows 8 Store.

What can someone expect from the game? Of course, everything that you can expect from Adventure Games and Horror Games. In a nutshell: Puzzles, Riddles, logical thinking and Spatial Reasoning Puzzles, that each affect the progression of the story. And on the other hand we have the creepy presence of a terrifying Monster that lurks around, that has made the goal of its' life not to let you rest. Not to let you think straight before you solve the puzzle.

As a result, the player will be in constant vigilance and in parallel will try to solve the puzzles thrown at his path in order to proceed through the game. Everything will be story driven, and it's the player's goal to go and find out the rest of the story. The whole theme and setting of the game will be revealed in later posts though, so you know exactly what we have in mind..!

The thing that got us into the project in the first place was our urge to beautifully and creatively manipulate the strongest and most ancient emotion the world has ever known : Fear. Which can be easily elevated in First Person Horror Games when done right.

So, that's about it on our genre and platform reveal, next time we'll talk about the inspiration part and story and setting.

As a side gift, here is a screenshot from our prototype build:

"Open the door, or Stay right where you are?"
Dummy Prototype Screen with Dummy Textures on the walls. Don't mind the Sanity Meter. It's built for testing purposes.

Have fun!

The Road to Seattle

It's been some time since our last post, but to tell you the truth we have been resting like there's no tomorrow, for the most difficult, yet the greatest responsibility we had up to this time: We will represent Greece at Imagine Cup's world wide finals in Seattle, in late July, Games Competition!

Seattle, here we come!

So, what have we been up to?

We have been working hard to deliver the best possible experience for those who will try out our game at the world finals. As of today, we are revealing 2 apps that will be your handheld companion in your Dementia: Tales of Blackthorn Manor experience.

Announcing Dementia: The Companion App for Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1 !

You can get the Windows Phone 8.1 version HERE
You can get the Windows 8.1 version HERE

You can also search for the app with its' name: "Dementia: The Companion App - Imagine Cup 2014"

We have also been tweaking with the gameplay a bit, so you can now play faster, by adding in a "Turbo Mode AI" feature, making AI bots playing faster, giving you much faster gameplay for those who are more "Action-Oriented" gamers.

Every day here at Genesis Game Studios is a day of creativity, inspiration and awesomeness, the week following we will be making our appearance on TV for a live interview at Star Channel and this weekend, we will be presenting our game live to the audience of a 3-day Game Development with Unity on Windows Platforms event with Jaime Rodriguez (Microsoft Principal Program Manager) and Cark Callewaert (Unity Lead Technical Evangelist).

Finally, we are proud to present our video presentation for Dementia for the World Semifinals:

That's it for now! See you later for more content! Thank you for all your support!

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!

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!!!

The Edge of Insanity

The night draws near. The days are passing by like the sharpnel of Sanders' Handgun pierces through the Dire Rats' feeble bodies.

It's getting closer. I can feel it. Everyone here can. Imagine the whole Blackthorn Manor, and now imagine us inside it. It's a complete and utter chaos. Everyone runs around the house, having 10 goals that have to be done yesterday and simultaneously.

It feels as if we are puppets on a string, played by a force unknown. Half of us are wielding code guns and they shoot limitless lines and lines and lines of code to glue everything together. Our project is as unstable as a newly brewed potion. It does have improvements day by day though. Noticable improvements.

The others strive with writting, designing every missing aspect of the game, puting target dummies around the house, so the code gunners can bring it down. Once the target is being set, we unleash the code beasts and they nuke it until it's down.

Talk to other people. Make the game. Build a presentation. Run around aimlessly at times. Scream with agony. Feel the pressure swirling you inside a dark void, ready to consume you. But you will succeed won't you? You will beat the darkness.

Everyone is on the edge of insanity. Developers rejoice, for the time is getting closer..!

That would sum up the environment and feelings of Genesis at the moment, while we are preparing for Imagine Cup. We got less than a month to submit our game (!!!) and we are exhausted and excited at the same time. We hope we can make it! Ohhhh we sure can!

To the updates it is, then! The bots are much more clever now. It's insane! They run around, open doors, steal from other characters, attack them, and even hunt them down to destroy them, they have specific goals in their minds and they just can't get them off their mind. Our characters also have little light bulbs over them, as the AI *THINKS* the next optimal move, based on the current state, the scenario and the user.

We love how smart they can be, thanks to our CodeSquad, we feel that if all the holes of the game are filled and de-bugged to the end, our game will finally be playable..! :D

We'll now leave you with a screenshot of what the user will experience when someone is becoming a traitor:

The Curse of the Rat King - "BOW TO ME MY FOLLOWERS! THE VERMIN SHALL INFEST THIS LAND"

Till next time, more updates coming soon!

It's all about A.I. - And showing off rooms!

Finally! The game now properly locks to one character, and we control him only now! The rest of the explorers now have a very very very BASIC form of AI.

They can think for themselves! They can open rooms, steal from others and even attack them at will based on predetermined design guidelines. They know what's good for them, as such when you complete your turn with your character, you can FINALLY see all the others doing stuff at will. Mostly navigating into other rooms.

But what else you'd expect when the curse has not broken and the scenario has yet to be revealed? Their only goal after all IS ACTUALLY to open up all the rooms discover as much of the house as possible!

The AI to handle the post-curse effects is yet to be written, since we focus on polishing the pre-curse thinking patterns of the characters.

The rooms have also been optimized. Some messy models were thrown away, some others just got dessimated, just enough to keep the poly count low. We have also given the players the ability to tinker with the Video Quality Settings : Low (Without any shadows emitting light) , High (Which really takes the game to another level, if you can handle the FPS cost).

Currently we are focusing on making the game playable by one player. We believe we will reach our goal easily by the week, so we can start wrapping up and adding spice to the game itself the time remaining until the Imagine Cup Greek National Finals.

We are very excited and we hope that every sacrifice we've made so far won't be in vain. We will take this to the very end..!

We don't like not showing you what we are preparing, so here is a quick view of the Ritual Chamber, where the Rat King will perform his Wicked Rat Ritual..!

The Ritual Chamber - Perfect for Spellcasting, Rituals and other Demonic Sacrifices...!

HexCraft Release Soon!

It's #HexCraftWednesday, and we will fill you in with the latest.

Our game will feature 12 different leaderboards! Finally, we got this working with Azure Mobile Services and we feel that this game is really coming to an end.

As you saw in our latest photo in Facebook, we leaked how the main menu will look like!

HexCraft - Being Tested on Windows 8 - Desktop and Tablet versions.

HexCraft is currently under playtest mode and we look forward to hooking you up with the Download link soon! Expect the game to be released in February!

Also, we will appear at infocom to showcase our game, we will be expecting you :)

For more information, visit this link : http://www.infocomapps.gr/

That's it for today folks, see you next week!

Hexagon Cells gone crazy!

Guess what? It's HexCraft Wednesday!

Time to fix you up with the latest..!

So, what's been going on at Genesis the latest week? With all those crazy projects on, our minds are literally blown, yet we are so thrilled to just keep going at the same pace as before to deliver..!

HexCraft is coming to a pretty decent shape, since we have finished up the procedures of level design and we have been working on visuals, leaderboards and porting to Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8.1 Platforms.

Each level now ought to be tested thoroughly, as those little cells are taking away chunks of our time, in order to properly create a challenging enough experience for everyone out there. 

Looks Yummy. Next Week!

We have a special treat for you people, next week - We promise to hook you up with a sweet Gameplay Video, so stay tuned, there are puzzles to be solved!

You can see our progress here, when our programmer has failed enough times on this puzzle so he can now solve it perfectly right in front of you, hey dont cheat now, when you get the game, okay? ;)

This HexCraft Puzzle is calling out to you "SOLVE ME, SOLVE ME!"

Welcome HexCraft to the Genesis Family!

Happy new year everyone! 2014 has arrived and we promised for special news! So here they are!

We are announcing our first puzzle game to come on Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 Platforms : HexCraft !

HexCraft is a hexagonical tile puzzle game, featuring over 200 puzzles for you to solve and sharpen your
brains! Can you beat them all ?

The concept is pretty simple. Rotate all the hexagons so that you solve the puzzle! Just tap on the hexagon to rotate itself and all its' neighboors around themselves but be aware, rotating the wrong hexagon may make the puzzles even more challenging than they already are!

But then again, rotating the right hexagon may result in making your lives easier..!

Here is a sneak peek from our Level Design :

We focus on designing pretty, challenging levels to bring you hours of fun!

We will be bringing you news of HexCraft every Wednesday, so stay tuned people, as we have even more spicy news to share!

First week at MIC is over!

What a crazy week it's been! We had a blast over at Microsoft Innovation Center, on our first days of finally working together as a team. Did you know that we were working over skype for at least 7 months? It's a relief finally seeing each other's faces, going crazy on our laptops in this great workspace we are provided with!

Our website is live, our blog is live, our social media started spreading everywhere, we will do our best to keep the fire burning and inform you guys about our latest endeavors. Speaking of which, the Genesis Team says "THANK YOU" for this initial love by liking our posts and our pages, we would like you to know that it really helps build the morale to keep us going.

The Genesis Team

And we have one more announcement to make! This week, on Saturday, Genesis Game Studios along with Microsoft Hellas, are organizing a Unity3D event! Kudos to Found.Ation for providing the space to do such an event. Don't you miss it if you live near Athens!

Stay tuned for more juicy updates in the week!