Articles - Maze Qore

What… A year…

This will be my last article for the remainder of the year, and in Maze Qore’s case, for a long while. I don’t want to risk rambling for too long on this video since I am very prone to getting stuck on tangents or circling conversations, so I will just narrow it down to three major points.

• This Year in Review
• Maze Qore
• New Year’s Resolution

Those of you who have been tracking my work or my activities may be aware that this year did not end well for me. Matter of fact, it was a complete disaster and a nightmare. But I decided I won't go into details about it. It was unnecessary for me to do so. My apologies for that mates.

This probably won’t matter to most of you, since our latest project barely has a following, but to those who have been tracking it or have seen and/or tried our demo at the local conventions this year in Georgia, or even last year at SIEGE, it is likely evident that you still have not seen a release from the game (besides the expo demo we showcased and released on IndieDB during Halloween). Well, there are three main reasons.

1. It involve two traitors (won't give any names), one of which really disrupted our schedule near the release date and cost me funding and more debt to pay off in the thousands. Yay.
   
   
2. Speaking of time, we need more time. Worse, I have decided to postpone the project for the time being and focus on smaller commercial work. I took a closer look on the progress made in the game and I was honestly disappointed with the end result of the story plot and a few gameplay design aspects. For starters, I’ve spent nearly a full week just overhauling the intro story the game is supposed to have, which meant recreating some of the intro art, and scrapping a few of them. Four days of work wasted because of a poor literary design on my part. Such experience also helped me realize that Maze Qore is not truly ready for a release. I want to ensure the game is at 110% when it releases (even for an early access game), and if it means delaying the project to ensure all game-breaking bugs and glitches are all purged, then so be it.
   
   
   
3. Finances! You guess it! I’ve never been a better financial state since I started college and it’s only gotten worse since I graduated. I was supposed to cancel my freelance gig if it did not meet the minimum milestone standards I’ve set for myself. In fact, I was counting on failure and continued searching for a new job or money train instead. Despite the odds, I still managed to narrowly exceed the milestone, particularly thanks to a Discord channel known as the Game Dev Network. It featured a LOT of LFM or “looking for members” jobs, granting me far more results than I had with the Unreal Engine Forums or The Game Dev League. It also changed my opinion that the indie dev freelancers are becoming less relevant with the rise of the marketplace sub-industries (to some extent). However, next year, I want to focus more on making money to support myself instead of juggling between that and my hobbies. In order to maintain passion, I must first make a living and Maze Qore has become an obstruction (albeit a temporary one, but one that needs to be put on secure hold so I don’t have to mercy-kill it like I did Army Men III).

Finally, a resolution for the new year! Knowing me, I never expect any new year to be any better or worse than the last. Usually every year has been rather mediocre for me besides a few glorious and notorious exceptions, (though this year prove me wrong and I almost literally lost my life in the process).

Pessimism aside, I want to ensure the best of it, and to do that, I will put aside all of my hobbies (including taking a break from most of not all game jams) and establish a proper income first and foremost. My mother and I seek to establish a janitorial franchise and she already has a few connections who can help me jump-start it easily and hopefully sooner. If successful, I am very confident I will be able to maintain more than livable income. In addition, I will focus all of my efforts on the game engine marketplaces, especially for newer engines like Xenko (if and when they release a marketplace on their store). Here’s to hoping that goes well.

That is all. For future news, update, and content, please follow our website, or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Feel free to follow our other social media should you prefer those instead.

I hope you’ve all had a wonderful holiday season!

This year has been a total NIGHTMARE for me...

There's been a lot of things that happened in my life, some of which did affect progress of the game and I dare not go into too much details about it, but at long last, I finally have some progress to demonstrate how far Maze Qore is going.

Before I do, let's just get the bad news out the way first.

This one's rather difficult to explain, but long story short, one the nightmares this year is the fact that I now need a new voice actor to fill the role of the Psyker due to a very unforgiving experience. I won't go into too much details but let's just say the female VA we had left due to internal conflicts and she is NOT someone I really want to have working on my project.

Moral lesson of the story: Be careful who you work with, always have them sign an NDA/contract before they start work. Don't underestimate crazy. Work with sociopaths at your own risk.

UPDATE: Some have complained about the original explanation I had here (legal loophole concerns and all), so I decided to remove it. Thanks for the feedback.

Well, until I can get a new female VA (or two), there might be a serious absence in vocal dialog, at least for all female characters. I already covered most of the male characters save for a few roles of which I already have someone else covering that right now. I had promised the audience who tried the demo at the conventions I showcased the game at there would be a voiced singleplayer demo and early access beta by Christmas. I am sad to say, this may not come to pass.

If you are a female VA and wish to fill in the roles or just here for the money, send us an email at neotlempire@gmail.com and we will schedule an audition date.

Right, almost forgot!

To end this progress update, we were hoping to release the singleplayer demo today to celebrate Halloween. Unfortunately as you may have read from what I stated above (presuming you did not do the 'TLDR skip'), that won't be happening either. I also need to polish the inventory system before I can release said demo as that is one of the few obstacles remaining. So instead....

I will just release this pre-alpha tech demo I showcased at the conventions this year!

Happy Halloween! Hopefully Witch Seneca didn't prey on her next victim tonight.
That's all folks! Goodnight!

It's been a while since we had posted any progress folks and we never made our first WIP article so here it is.

We have three videos to demonstrate Maze Qore's core gameplay mechanics. The "essentials" if you may.

More so, we plan to showcase our demo at another convention, so hopefully that goes well too.

For those of you who've tried our game and have followed us thus far: Our demo has been improved ever since to supporter wider spaces and become more AI-friendly with navigation paths so hopefully the gameplay experience will prove superior to the last demo build.

Finally, we're hoping to get this game in EA before the end of 2017, particularly by Christmas.

Meanwhile, stay tuned for more in the future through social media.

That's all for now, Lord Iheanacho signing off.

Where the hell have we been?!?

Last year, I have stated in our last article that we were going to try to reach the April 2017 release window for the game. That was before I realized how limited UDK truly is. Personally, I don’t care about the complaints on graphic inferiority compared to Unreal Engine 4, or Unity, as most computers are still not strong enough for UE4 yet anyway and the graphics of UDK can still suffice to this day and the gamers will still buy and love a UDK game if it shows promising potential. That said, I only cared for the most important aspect in making a great game – the gameplay. Problem is, UDK only supports 7th-gen consoles. What this means is that if we want to ship our game to consoles such as Xbox ONE, PS4, or Switch (which we do), then we’d need the full-license source code to UE3 AND we have to implement 8th-gen console support manually, which neither prerequisites are cheap or worth the hassle (since I have to pay my way through each console provider individually). So we chose our best and only option – move to UE4. They console support and code is already bundled and updated in UE4 saving developers the finance-crushing hard-work. That also meant we had to restart the project nearly from scratch, which leads to our next problem.

I am currently struggling with publicity and marketing for Maze Qore. With our first game, this less an issue since we were using an existing IP and the notoriety from it could still be diverged into a positive one with just a bit of know-how (which I have). However with a new IP, it becomes insanely difficult and an easy make-or-break scenario. No one knows what Maze Qore is yet and we've not proven enough reason for them to care either nor do we have enough resources to do so. I am afraid it may take longer than I hoped and I am unsure if we'd even get the game into early access before the end of the year, especially now that Steam will be replacing their distribution model.

Starting on April 20th, 2017, I will be hosting a live-stream on the game. Hopefully this will help garner some support for this project. We will create a Twitch account for NeotlEmpire in due time and will announce it a few days prior to the stream date, but just in case something goes wrong with Twitch. Feel free to follow us on Beam instead.

Alright, time for screenshots as you've all been waiting for.

A few developer-only editor nodes to guide us with our AI system and our custom-made actor master-class.

We have also redesigned our HUD from the UDK version complete with mini map (WIP).

Finally as an added bonus, I have made one promotional drawing to celebrate the #MakeItSUPERHOT contest from the last two months.

Meanwhile, stay tuned for more in the future through social media.

That's all for now, Lord Iheanacho signing off.

Establish, Explore, Expand.

I mentioned about a new game in the works in news from my last game and here it is.

Maze Qore is half-way towards completion and I want to celebrate it by showcasing the game at the annual, 2016 Southern Interactive Entertainment and Games Expo, or SIEGE for short.

Starting Friday, October 7th 2016, I will be hosting Maze Qore at SIEGE for others to tryout at my designated booth. I will be giving out artwork for others to keep and enjoy as well. First come first serve.

Now that that's out of the way, you are probably wondering...

"How far are we with Maze Qore?"

To answer that I leave you with this:

As seen in the gameplay videos, we already have the core gameplay settled and some characters to fight. All of the characters are also done in the game as well as most (if not all) of the overall gameplay. We however still need to cover cinematic scenes, music, setup the vocals (death sounds and such), and above all else - debugging and polishing. The weapon for instance occasionally jams, meaning I have to drop the weapon or restart the game. The last thing a prisoner (gamer) wants to deal with fighting his/her outta prison.


Meanwhile, stay tuned for more in the future through social media.

That's all for now, Lord Iheanacho signing off.