Friday, September 19, 2014

Genesis are back to action! And opening a Tester Group!

Hello everybody! How's it been this Summer? We sure had a blast that one, for sure, and on August we just recovered our energies and prepared for yet another great year!

This time, knowing our target, we will primarily focus on mobile games mainly on Windows Phone and Windows 8 platforms, while also focusing on what the user really wants and how he feels.

Having all those great people testing Dementia has really given us the insight we wanted and helped us make a better game for them, as long as we had this constructive feedback, and we are really glad supporting them in creating the best experience for them. After all, our main focus is just that. Creating games that are addicting and fun for any gamer!



We are happy to announce our "Genesis Beta Tester Group"! This will be a closed group of Facebook where we will be inviting literally ANYONE willing to be a beta tester for our future games!

What you will be gaining?

  • Be among the first to play our games. 
  • Help us mold the game towards the direction you want.
  • Mention inside the game credits as a "Beta Tester".
  • In-Game Exclusives based on the game you are beta testing (This will be announced on every game)!!!
How do you apply ?

Pretty simple actually! Just send us an email at genesisgamestudios@outlook.com or just send us a PM through our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/GenesisGameStudio asking us to become a beta tester! :D

That's all for now! Happy September people!

Saturday, June 28, 2014

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 :)

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

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!

Sunday, May 11, 2014

New secret project on the horizon!

Hello everyone!

It's been a while since our last post since we have been very active the last few days concerning the deliverables of the Imagine Cup World Semifinals (WSFs).

What's happening over here is a period of re-creation. We are trying to cool off, rest a bit, after the huge coding burnout that occured to us, and then out of all the sudden, a new idea came to mind, a new inspiration... Our next project.

We won't reveal much for now, except the fact that at this moment, the Game Design Document for this game is being written, and that we value each and every second of our productivity, so no days go to waste!

It won't be as big as Dementia. We want to go simplistic this time. But the end result will be fun, and we guarrantee this!

Until next time, where we will "hopefully" have some content to share with you :)



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!