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The road to EGX

I thought it would be a grand time for an update- we at the Forge have been working hard on Ascend for over 13 weeks now, and Tranzfuser has come and gone. Developing a game isn’t easy- while we’ve all made smaller student games before creating a game intended for a wider audience and to be appealing for a publisher to help fund our continuation is a bit challenge, and I am happy to say that I think we rose to the challenge and we’ve done incredibly well. We’ve had to make some difficult decisions during development- there’s always an idea that could kick up your game to an infinitely higher level, but scope is something we’ve learned to keep well under our grasp, and I believe we’ve done a fine job of balancing a realistic achievable development with some more exciting ideas. It’s not long now until EGX when the public will be welcome to play Ascend at the Tranzfuser hub on the floor, and to celebrate this moment I’d like to share some progress shots comparing the origin
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Week 3- Tranzfuser and Manchester

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So we can officially publicly announce that we are one of the 23 selected teams participating in Tranzfuser this year. We are very excited to continue to work with the Tranzfuser team, other teams and we are looking forward to showcasing our game Ascend at EGX in September- make sure you come and see us there! TALK Tranzfuser This week we took a team trip to Media City in Manchester. Everyone piled into my tiny three door Peugeot 207, much to the joy of Andrew, Dec and Adam who had to cram into the backseats in 28 °C  heat and off we went. 5 developers, 1 cramped car The reason for the visit was to attend the TALK Tanzfuser event; to meet the other teams and pitch our game idea and team to the official competition judges and get inspired by some guest speakers. The day was kicked off by an introductory speech by Deborah Farley, Tranzfuser's head of Talent and Outreach who warmly welcomed all of the teams to the event and gave some insight into the day's activities.
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Week Two- Cracking on

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Time for another weekly update! Something I didn't realise fully until I embarked upon this project that time goes by really quickly when you're developing, it's so enjoyable and I speak for everyone when I say that this is so rewarding and fun! Feedback and play testing Getting feedback from other people has been really important to us so far, as I mentioned in my last post, we managed to get a pre-alpha version of Ascend at our graduate show and we managed to get a lot of player feedback. I gathered information in two ways, firstly by strictly only observing someone play the game and take note of what they seem to be most interested in, for example some players just wandered around slowly looking around the environment whereas others seem to go much quicker and tried to go into out of bound areas. After the players were finished playing, I asked them for opinions and critiques and it was interesting to hear feedback from players of a variety of ages, but everyone see
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First week of production

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This week marks our first official week of development on Ascend! It's been a great productive week and I think we've made a good start. Everyone has come onto this project ready to work and with a dedicated attitude which is all I could ever ask for from my team. Pre-production Last Wednesday we started to tie up all of our pre-production work by creating a basic level blockout to start playtesting how the level feels in terms of scale and pacing and allowing us to have another chance to run through our ideas for mechanics. We also took a nice team trip to the Peak District to walk through wooded areas and gather reference - lots of weird and wonderful trees and rocks make for perfect reference! Our own little Yggdrasil!  Thanks to our two exploration greyboxed levels which we finished before the end of last week, we had a very strong starting point for the official development start date. Adam, being our animator, currently doesn't have animation work
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