Fri, 11 May 2012 12:15:34 -0800WeeblyThu, 29 Mar 2012 11:52:45 -0800http://www.joquanpro.tk/1/post/2012/03/caution-low-gravity.htmlWell, in response to having to push Ilxder back even further, I've decided to develop a minigame to help make the wait a little bit more bearable. This game is called Sci-Fi Mar-Bles (Pronounced "Sy-Fy Mar-Blayce").

It is going to be a crazy minigame, where the player can control their marble through a low-gravity environment. It's harder than it seems, as the player can only give side-to-side boosts, there's places where you have to rely on the bounce of the marble, there's going to be enemy marbles that force you to restart the mission, and for an added challenge - there's bonus points available by collecting the Energy Nexuses, but the player isn't forced to collect them.

I've had two goals with this game - create something different than most games, and to fix the mistakes that were made in Ancient Palace, such as the frustrating hand-eye coordination requirement, lack of sound, and unoriginal graphics. This game will include its own original graphics, music, and hopefully players will find that it's a tad less frustrating than Ancient Palace was with its hand-eye coordination requirement.

No, this game is not a futuristic copy of Ancient Palace - I assure you, it's a relatively different game. Though it's still kind of a puzzle game, it's not entirely a maze game, and your hand-eye coordination isn't extremely relative to winning this game. Timing still is key, however. It may be a low-gravity environment, but it still has gravity nonetheless, so you will need to rely on the marble's natural bounce qualities in some areas.

I've set up a new section on the community forum for early discussion of the game.

Note: any screenshots you see on our site of this game are just early phase photos, so anything could change.
]]>Mon, 26 Mar 2012 19:10:55 -0800http://www.joquanpro.tk/1/post/2012/03/an-unfortunate-but-necessary-push-back.htmlHello everyone,

I've decided that in order to provide a better, non-rushed game, that we're going to have to work longer on Ilxder 1. I've been having a bit of trouble with some of the technical aspects of the game, plus, I've decided that I want to add WAY more detail to the game world than ever before. Here's a list of things I want to add to the game:

• A relatively basic AI system so people will walk around a bit at random times
• A better menu system so the player will have options to choose from several different options when commencing in dialogue, and the response they receive will differ depending on what the player chooses
• More quests, ranging from random "acquire and gather"-styled quests to larger quests where people will ask you to complete a larger set of objectives, with a similar gameplay style to the main questline.
• Better lighting that will vary depending on the environment
• Fog in certain environments, and possibly even a simple static snowing animation for snowy environments
• More detailed dialogue with non-quest NPCs

All of this being said, I may end up releasing another demo, but I haven't decided this for sure yet.

In other news...

Spherical user Rhuan has offered to act as a "consulting" developer. He said he would be willing to help in certain programming aspects of Ilxder - hopefully this means I can speed up Ilxder's battle system's progress.

Also, I may be getting the brilliant composers, Brett Smith and Jacob Schmeltzer to write music for Ilxder. :) As much as I like some of the tracks by Deceased Superior Technician (the music group who wrote the public domain tracks I was using in the game as placeholder tracks), I think that having a soundtrack written by them would be awesome. :)
]]>Tue, 06 Mar 2012 15:53:24 -0800http://www.joquanpro.tk/1/post/2012/03/social-media-and-an-update.htmlHi everyone! It has been a while since I've updated the progress of Ilxder. First off, I'm happy to say that the updates I've been working on are turning out pretty well. The recent updates I've been working on are as follows:

• Static shadows on buildings, architecture, objects, and mountains, allowing us to make the game feel more 3D.
  
• Character graphic updates - gradient colours on characters to make them feel more rounded and 3D. I've also added some shadows to them as well.
  
• Animated water (still trying to make its animation loop a bit smoother)
• Music tracks being imported to every map, giving the game a bit more of a feel of being alive. Note: most of the current tracks are public domain tracks as of now. Some may remain in the game, while other songs created by myself will be replacing some of them
• I'm about 15% finished with a debugged turn-based battle system
• I've added several more regions with different climates that I'm working on creating quests and characters for

Just for clarification, NO, we are not going to release another demo of Ilxder before the 1.0 release. I'm closer to the finish of the technical aspects of the game than I originally realized. Most of what remains in the game is the addition of the regions and quests, as well as dungeons. I'd like to possibly add an economics system at some point, but that isn't a priority, and I'll only add it if I decide that it's necessary. I suppose it depends on how I program the battle system. If you can use different items in battles, then I might end up making an economy system. Otherwise, I think it might wait until Ilxder 2. ;)

In other news, we're now on Google+, if you haven't seen the news article. Also, we've been working on an Ilxder Facebook page, located here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Ilxder-Series/155019711285064

Well, that's all for now. :)
]]>Wed, 15 Feb 2012 22:08:13 -0800http://www.joquanpro.tk/1/post/2012/02/requiescat-in-pace-adam-adamowicz.htmlThough we've never had official connections to Bethesda (developers of the Elder Scrolls series and Fallout 3), we've always enjoyed their games, so we were sad to hear the news about Adam Adamowicz. Adam was the concept artist who did a LOT of the concept art on Fallout 3 and Skyrim. He passed away from cancer on the 10th.

Without this man, the Skyrim and Fallout 3 would NOT have been the same, and it's always sad to see a fellow designer in the industry go, ESPECIALLY at such a young age.

We wish his family, friends, and his extended family at Bethesda our deepest sympathies.

Yet another unknown warrior has passed on to Sovngarde...

RIP Adam Adamowicz, 1968-2012
]]>Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:06:37 -0800http://www.joquanpro.tk/1/post/2012/01/fight-sopa-sign-the-petition.htmlHello everyone!

This is a different post from my usual posts. Though we really wish to remain neutral politically, this bill (Stop Online Piracy Act/Protect IP Act) would hurt EVERYONE who uses the internet. What it would do is make every website on the internet be censored, so if any content, or bits of content that are copyrighted that are posted on a website, the poster of the content would go to jail, then and there, without warning. In addition to this, it would ruin global freedom throughout the internet. Actually, scratch that, it would ruin the internet in general.

We are officially taking a stance against SOPA/PIPA. We are not going to stand idly while the United States government turns the internet into another one of their pawns. We join with our brothers and sisters across the internet to protest the ludicrous atrocities that the government of the United States is trying to pass. We only wish we had taken part in a protest against the NDAA 2012, which allows the US government to imprison US citizens suspected of "terrorist acts" indefinitely without a trial, regardless of whether or not they were on US soil - that bill has already been passed, and that's why we will be attempting to take our operation outside of the US in the near future.

Unlike many of our brethren across the internet, we are not blacking out our website completely. Instead, we're trying to make it as annoying as possible to use this site, by placing hyperlinked banners across the entire site; we believe this would be more effective, as, instead of people just leaving the site, they might accidentally click on one of the banners instead.

Please, join with us, and our brothers-in-arms to defeat SOPA! Sign the petition at http://americancensorship.org !
]]>Sat, 31 Dec 2011 14:44:06 -0800http://www.joquanpro.tk/1/post/2011/12/2012-most-certainly-not-the-end-of-the-world-for-us.htmlHey everyone! This being New Years Eve, I decided to write the New Years resolution for Joquan Games Studios for the year of 2012.

Well, reflecting back on our 2011 NY resolution, we haven't quite met all of our goals.

First off, we have decided to discontinue the use of Gamini Games and just use this site as our game portal. We're holding onto the rights and the name, but it's not being used for now.

Secondly, this goal we've definitely met with our project. ;)

The third goal was to get Dynamic Dimensions Software growing faster. Well, that really didn't work out well. Since our main focus was with our games, we weren't able to bring on any team members for DDS. But hey, at least we're offering FREE web customization and FREE .tk registration through us, which gains us points so we can improve our services. :)

And as for doubling our team size - that most CERTAINLY did not work out. ;) In fact, we've eliminated over half of our team due to a recently-enacted inactivity policy. It's down to 7 team members now. ;) But the nice thing is - those 7 team members are MUCH more active than ever before, and we're well-connected, allowing for our creativity to flourish. In that closely-knit community, it allows us to devise better plans for our games, and it doesn't leave all of the planning directly up to me, which is a good thing. ;) (With school, my job with SMFNew, and managing this project, it takes a lot of time ;) ) I would still like to bring on some other team members, but it's going to take a few games before people will realize that we're not so bad after all. ;)

---

Those aside, here's a few of our other goals for the New Year:

1. I'd like to have Ilxder 1 out this year, but I don't want to rush it. Zach is the new co-writer of the story, and he's possibly going to join on the development team, which will definitely speed things up.
2. We are working on a new project - possibly our largest project ever, and possibly the largest game of its type ever to be designed. As you know, we love to have the largest amount of player choice as possible within our games, and this game certainly would revolutionize that. And when I say "revolutionize", I mean it in the truest sense - it really would take things to a whole new level. The design document for this game is still being developed. (It's primarily going to be single-player, but for you multiplayer fans out there, we plan on putting a multiplayer duel mode into it that ties in with the game. ;) )
   
3. We'd like to put a few smaller games out there, specifically scrolling shooters or maybe even a FPS. We'd like to maybe even design a small first-person adventure game similar to the Myst games. However, because of the small size of our team, and the massive size of our one massive project, we might not be able to do this.
4. We'd like to change our support up, so we'll have a support ticket-type system that allows specialized support for our games. Although the support boards would remain for player-based support and aid, the ticket system would be used for major issues fixable only by us, or if you decide you'd prefer our support over other players' support.
   
5. The Voluntary QA team might be getting some special tools to help test our games. :)

Well, those are the primary ones, but we have other ones as well.

Have a good New Years, and thank you for another great year! :)
]]>Wed, 26 Oct 2011 18:12:19 -0800http://www.joquanpro.tk/1/post/2011/10/updates.htmlHey all, been a while since I've written one of these! :P Anyways, I've decided to update you guys on a few things behind-the-scenes. First off, although I haven't been updating anyone on newer game productions, I will state that we are working on some pretty cool stuff, including what may be our largest game yet. We contacted Wigshop Records a while back about maybe using ES Posthumus songs in Ilxder: the Adventure Begins. (Still waiting for a response there :P )

On the job/team aspect - we're no longer taking on ANYONE who wants to join. We now are only taking on ones who seem passionate, determined, dedicated, and hard-working. We still DO NOT take into account their experience (unless they have no experience in ANY of the openings ;) ), but rather those four factors. We have a position open for an internal architect/mentor whom would help train the people with lesser experience how to work with some of the stuff, so if you enjoy acting like a mentor/teacher and you have EXTENSIVE knowledge in game programming and design, check it out! :) See, we don't believe in the saying "Beggars can't be choosers" for two reasons. 1) We're not begging for team members, and 2) We believe that only the most passionate, determined, dedicated, and hard-working individuals are the ones that a team should have. Numbers don't make much of a difference if you've a team that's so dedicated and passionate. ;)

And here's a very minor website upgrade - we fixed an odd bug in the logo. We fixed it so it's much more smooth-looking.

Anyways, that's it for now! Stay tuned, oh wait, this isn't a radio station... watch this space for more blogs and updates!
]]>Fri, 23 Sep 2011 18:59:46 -0800http://www.joquanpro.tk/1/post/2011/09/site-updates-game-updates.html    Well, I'm sure you've seen the new site design. ;) We've been working on this for a bit, and it's the first time we've done a major upgrade to the site since it was first launched. I'll explain the way we've upgraded it in the following paragraphs.

    1. We upgraded the theme. The old site theme was beginning to look a bit jumbled, non-professional, and quite frankly, hard on the eyes. The new theme is much more smooth and streamlined. We also updated the logo to the site.

    2. We updated many layouts on the site. Beforehand, our site was very boring. No images, barely any color, etc. This was due to our attempts to make a professional-looking site. Unfortunately, we were so concerned about making our site look more and more professional that it ended up being so boring. We re-worked the games and projects section of the site, giving it a nicer-looking and better layout. With the games, we've included a preview screenshot, as well as basic info about the games, the status of their development, links to any related sites, as well as a link to download it if a download is available.

    3. We updated the Help Us Out page so it's a bit more, what we call, candidate-friendly. It no longer requires you to look through a bunch of lines of text to just find the one position you're looking for. We may add a search box to give you the ability to look for a specific position. We also formatted the appearance of the text as well.

    4. We've reworked the downloads page to be mainly for everything except games. We've also modified the appearance a bit. However, we have kept the original game downloads on this page as well as on the Games page, and we will continue to do so.

    5. We've redone the community page. This gives us the opportunity to save you the trouble of going here and there looking for links to our community sites.

    6. We've also updated some minor things as we saw fit.

    We also have plans to create a better, more helpful Voluntary QA page. These plans include putting more useful tools into your hands.

----

    Game-wise, we have a couple of updates. I feel it has been a long enough wait. THE LONG-AWAITED TITLE OF PROJECT PHEONIX IS.... Ilxder: The Adventure Begins! As I've mentioned before, there are plans for a sequel, so I decided to go with a per-se franchise name of "The Ilxder Series". I also got tired of people telling me that Pheonix was misspelled. ;) (Also, considering that phoenixes don't have a whole lot of place in the plot of The Adventure Begins, it seemed a better idea to NOT keep the name of Project Pheonix) Here's a bit more news about The Adventure Begins - although there's quite a bit to be done before the 1.0 release, we will probably only release one more demo before 1.0! :) Thank you all for your support over the past two years - it's all about to pay off. :)

    We also have our teams working on another pretty large project. I'm not revealing many details, as we want it to be a surprise. :) However, I will say this - if everything works out as planned, it will be the biggest project we've completed yet. ;)

    I've temporarily delayed any further development with Ancient Palace until I sort out the teams a little differently.

    I'm personally working on another project with Zach. All I'll say about it is that it takes place in space. ;)

    Bringing up an old idea: Gamini Games. Although we're holding onto the name and the rights, we've decided to just post any of our games on our own game section here on our current main site. We may even redo the games and projects section completely to look more like a games portal.

    We hope to create some browser-based games at some point. Although we currently have no plans to make them extremely big, we might have them created so there could be 8-16 player tournament modes! :)

    Well, that's all for now! I hope you enjoy the new site, and watch this space for any more behind-the-scenes updates! :)
]]>Sun, 03 Jul 2011 15:17:51 -0800http://www.joquanpro.tk/1/post/2011/07/more-plans.htmlWell, it's been a few weeks since Ancient Palace 1.0 Beta and Pheonix demo 3 were released. In addition to the plans we have for Ancient Palace and Pheonix, we are planning to work on something massive. We're hoping that it will be successful enough so that players won't just play a few minutes and leave. We hope to have it so players are playing it a lot, at the same time. We also want to add more player choice to this game than the previous ones we've worked on. As our statement goes, "The next gaming revolution!", we want to break the Shattered barriers of the gaming World, and being revolutionary in what we do. We want to do something that no other studio nor team has done. It may even be 3D! :D Keep an eye out for any news! :)
]]>Fri, 24 Jun 2011 17:57:26 -0800http://www.joquanpro.tk/1/post/2011/06/dont-die.htmlIt's official. Ancient Palace 1.0 Beta has been released. We really hope you enjoy it, there was immense time and devotion put into it. :)

So far, the story is far from completed, and you can expect more to come in the next year or two. The only traps in the game are the bombs, which just send your character back to the beginning of the level. (Don't worry, it's more of an annoyance than a true trap, because you don't lose any point if you're hit.) In a near release, you will be able to use the Tome of Time Control to aid you in your journey. More traps such as spikes, flames, etc will eventually be included, as well as some enemies which will send you back to the beginning of the level if you are hit by them.

The reason it's open beta is because we realize that sometimes we won't be able to pick up every single error there is in our games.

Also, something else I forgot to mention in the last log: in demo 4, I hope to introduce a new graphic improvement called "Layers". It will allow the graphics to generally look better. It will also allow us to use transparent/partially transparent 2D tiles instead of creating new sprites for something that we need transparency on. :)

Now how about that? What game developer team releases two big releases only 5 days apart? ;)
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