24/7 Rehearsing!

It's exactly one month before we fly off to Seattle, for the Imagine Cup Worldwide finals, and we are super excited and anxious about the whole thing. We want to give our best out there, and impress the judges, who will be announced in early July. 

We are working on the presentation, the game itself and our booth setup in parallel, and everyone is yet once more giving his best shot, in order to achieve our maximum potential at Seattle. 

There are too many things yet left to be done and they are all need to be done at once, unfortunately, this Summer won't be yet another Summer, but it will be THE Summer, at least for Team Genesis.

At the moment, we have also been working on Xbox 360 controller support for Dementia, in order to make the hands-on judging even easier for the judges themselves. While doing so we happened to be walking on the street, going to meet up and get some parts of the presentation ready, and we stumbled upon ourselves... at the newspaper of course! Ethnos newspaper has us featured in the back cover (Still good for now) and showing off our achievement to Greece.

Ahhh, the feels in this image are going over 9000. Anyway, back to the point. We feel like we're having our own little publicity here in Greece, and the more people see us and the more people like our page, then the more obligated we feel to those greek people and our followers to do exactly what they all want deep inside their hearts. A really good position for Greece in Imagine Cup, this year.

Did you know that Greece has never ever sent any game to the Imagine Cup competition, in the games category? Well, this is a first, at least, and we feel honored to be the ones to do it. Nevertheless, this doesn't really say anything else to us, rather than a plain and simple Imagine Cup trivia :P

Well, that's all for now,

happy gaming to all of you :)

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!

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

Presentation, Progress and Awesomeness

Today's Thursday and we are around a month and a half until the Greek Imagine Cup finals.

The whole team is giving its' best self to overcome the difficulties we are facing every day with our code. Traversal is finally fully functional, you can see the characters ascending and descending staircases, falling into deathtraps and sliding gracefully into the dark corners of the manor.

All the work is focused around the Scenario at the very moment. Such tasks include:

• Spawning the Rats around the Manor.
• Perfectly Positioning them in their respective nodes.
• Correctly fitting the Rats into the Turn Flow.
• Getting the Rat King into the Ritual Chamber.
• Punching in the Winning Conditions of each side.
• Watching how wicked the Rat Ritual is!

Coming right up after this, we will focus on creating the Single Player aspects of the game, meaning that the User Interface will only draw our selected Character on Screen, and all other characters (Not Controlled by the Player) will be controlled by the CPU. This is our last stand, our final obstacle between us, and a game ready for the judges : The AI.

Meanwhile, we are working hard on the presentation for the Greek Imagine Cup Finals. Here is a quick view of the first slide : 

Team Genesis - Imagine Cup 2014 Greek Finals

The presentation itself will require ultimate overview of who we are, what we are doing, why we are doing it and trying to take a deep dive through all the aspects of our game, such as Concept, Gameplay, Goals etc.

Further into the idea, we must discuss about ourselves, how we met, why did we decide to do this for Imagine Cup, how did we work at this project and what's the whole business idea behind it.

We are relaxed taking on Business again, as we believe we can punch in a couple of slides that perfectly explain our competition, our customers, our financial management as well as how is the game going to be distributed and monetized through various platforms, as we have already received an honourable mention at the project Blueprint Challenge and the feedback from the judges has been far more than just valuable.

So, here we are, trying to glue everything together.
Oh boy, what a month April is gonna be...

Till next time, Rat King says "Hello!"

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!

Site and Social Media Launch!

Hello people!

Today is Genesis launch day for us and we are super excited about this! Everything goes public, there is no turning back now, we must keep on fighting!

"Grab your swords, your shields and your potions of ultra awesomeness +2 and show to the people what you can do!" - That's today's feeling.

You may visit our site, which you can find either here or on this blog, on the tab "Our Website" and you can see what we are currently working on! Should you have any questions or inquiries about us, don't fear, we don't bite! Send us an Email or try out our contact form in our site!

Any likes or follows are very appreciated, and keeps us going :D

Hello World!

And we are now officially launching our website, our blog and our very existence in this big world of Gaming Industry, Genesis Game Studios are now live!

Finally, after all this hard work we will be starting this blog, in order to write our thoughts, to share our experiences and to serve as a mere developer’s journal in the holy quest of game development, as we will be posting about the development workflow, design and prototyping.

Should you want to know about who we are, how we are working on our games, which games we are working on and how do we feel about it, this is the place for you!

This will be a great ride towards game development, so have no fear, hop on our ship, join us in our adventure and share the awesomeness!

Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, to catch up with our latest news! J

Catch you folks later!