Aztez – A Game of Conquest and Brutality
15Aug/136

Big News Time; August 2013 Edition!

First of all, the big bad news of the moment is that they have just announced the lineup for the PAX Prime 2013 Indie Megabooth. For those of you not familiar with the Indie Megabooth, it's a MASSIVE collaborative booth space used by indies to get together, share costs, and show off their collective games to the PAX event crowd, i.e. the single biggest gamer convention in the world. It takes place in Seattle at the Washington Convention Center, and anyone that has anything to do with games will be there, along with 70,000 fans.

If you take a look at the INCREDIBLE roster of games playable at the Megabooth this year, you'll see Aztez! We have wormed our way into the hearts and minds of the Megabooth organizers and secured our place in front of 70,000 gamers. 4 days of players, journalists, other devs, musical acts, board games, and anything else we nerds love to be around. The Megabooth runs the duration of the conference, which is Friday, August 30th to Monday, September 2nd. Come see us and play Aztez!

Now OBVIOUSLY, it looks a little different around here! I did a little redesign on the blog; it's all the same old content, and will be continued to be used as the same old vehicle for my design ramblings. Haha! But the change was inspired by the brand spanking new Aztez.com, which now serves as a much more effective landing page for new people interested in the game.  It was designed by the unbelievably talented Michael Heald, who (among many many other things) designed the old Blurst website from back in mine and Matthew's old war days. But go ahead and take a peep at the new Aztez.com if you haven't!

Truthfully, we've know about the Indie Megabooth for about three months now, and we've been working even harder than we usually do to make Aztez the best game it can possibly be. We've got a big feature/content push happening right now for PAX itself, but we made a big one last month for EVO too. I've talked about it a bit, but we haven't really showed it off a whole lot, so went and made a new devplay video. I talk about recent changes, show off new mechanics, and kindly invite you to come play Aztez if you'll be at PAX.

Time to clean this explosion up! Just know that if you're a journalist and you'd like to check out a build before coming to PAX, just email us and we'll hook you up. If not, just come see us at the Megabooth (booth #666) since you'll most likely be there and we'll face to face with you. PLAYERS! We've got a beta access happening in the near future, so keep your looking spheres peeled for a call to join in and we'll take it from there! That's it for now, we'll talk to you soon, and don't forget to check us out on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

Filed under: Development News Leave a comment
  • Millan Singh

    September 30th to August 2nd? Small type there, it confused me for a sec. You are doing a wonderful job Ben, we should get together some time just to catch up since Camp Game.

    • Matthew__W

      Oops! Ben is fixing now.

  • Hamish Peter Todd

    Great fucking going with the camera, adds so much character, and that is a cool idea for a telegraphing.

    Love the way slamming the ground gets them all in the air. What are some ways you can respond to that?

    OH SWEET JIMINY SWITCHING WEAPONS STUNS. That is a fucking great idea. Is the player ever likely to be like “Oh I want to use that immediate stun attack but actually I DON’T want to switch weapons?” Coz that’s a cool conflict. Mind if I ask if you came up with that yourself?

    Uhhh I will say with the bodies I feel like that could get confusing, like at a moment’s glance do I know that they’re dead?

    • Thanks for the kind words! The camera is obviously adding a lot.

      You either mean A. the slam that bounces their limp bodies off the ground or B. the slam that comes down from the air and explodes nearby enemies diagonally into the ground. If it’s A. then you can respond by continuing your aggression by either dash canceling into their bounced bodies and if it’s B. you can either dash cancel once recovered or you can fly back into the air with a fierce uppercut. A fascinating thing you can do with an enemy coming back down to the earth is to grab them (which you can only do on the ground) and even though they’re still falling, a successful connect will cancel them out of their fall and into a grabbed state.

      It’s hard to say! The intention is to have the players develop a good rolodex of mechanics so they never NOT want to switch into something else they know they want to do. I’m prepared to ease up the execution on the switch if it ends up being too much of a barrier though. And I THINK I came up with this specific implementation. I know I was thinking about how in DMC4, as Dante, you have constant access to all of his melee weapons, ranged weapons, and styles, which is amazing! But their isn’t a formal way (that I know of) to dynamically move between them mid combo. So I just did a thing I want to see.

      Noted on the bodies! If more people bring it up I will happily address it but as it stands I think this one is just you.

  • roundcrisis

    Really liking the camera work. Way to go. Any plans for coming over to europe before release? Eurogamer perhaps?

    • Matthew__W

      Thanks!

      We’d like to to get out there. September is a bit full for both of us personally, but we still have a ways to go on dev (so hopefully we’ll find an excuse to get out to an event in the next year)…

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Aztez is being made by Ben Ruiz (Designer/Artist) and Matthew Wegner (Programmer/Business), formerly of Flashbang Studios. It's set for a PC/Mac/Linux release in summer 2017 (consoles to follow).

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