Elijah Dixson

Game Producer / Designer

Sprint 12: Studio Wide Pitches

November 21, 2017 by Elijah Dixson in Lucha Megadrive

Pitch night has come and gone at Champlain College. 12 weeks of development has gone by here at The Game Studio and 18 teams presented what they’ve accomplished and why their games should move forward into production. Every team did an amazing job, and besides technical difficulties with the auditorium, it was all around an impressive event. When our team was called to the stage the excitement quickly escalated in the audience. Our fan base on campus made sure they were heard. And then, we started our presentation. Fair warning, there were technical difficulties across all the teams, the audio from this recording is far from ideal, and the crowd blocks the footage at times. With that said, here is our pitch:

Sprint 11: Finish Line In Sight

November 13, 2017 by Elijah Dixson in Lucha Megadrive

Were almost there! One week remains before the studio wide pitch next Monday. We’ve made a ton of progress this past week: crowd reactions to hype events, UI updates, more animations, physics changes, advertisements in the background, and on top of all that we added a new mechanic: parrying. Gameplay footage can be seen below:

Sprint 10: Last of the Mechanics

November 06, 2017 by Elijah Dixson in Lucha Megadrive

First week of vertical slice down. We finished up the last of our fighting game mechanics such as: parries, armored moves, and unblockables. We added a second megadrive attack. Updated our font and environment. And added some placeholder music in the background. Check out the footage below:

Sprint 9: Into Vertical Slice

November 03, 2017 by Elijah Dixson in Lucha Megadrive

We made it into the vertical slice! Our team is excited to finally be able to take a break from having to meet class requirements and just make our game. Gameplay footage can be seen below. We've made progress on our how our stage and UI looks. We are still experimenting with the fonts we want to use and currently we are playing around with a font that is for personal use only. Sadly this means the video is unlisted, but don’t worry we are in the process of finding a font that is 100% free to use and fits the style we are going for.

Sprint 8: The New Stage

October 23, 2017 by Elijah Dixson in Lucha Megadrive

This week we made the transition from a 2D fighting stage to a 3D one. It wasn’t quite the smooth drag and drop experience we were hoping for. A big issue involving our camera came up were we needed it to function like Streetfighter when 2 players are close up and when they are far away from each other the camera needed to function like Super Smash Brothers. We consulted with our peers and faculty eventually finding a solution that allows the mechanics to function the way they are supposed to and also properly represents the art. Below is some updated gameplay footage:

Sprint 7: Super Charged

October 17, 2017 by Elijah Dixson in Lucha Megadrive

This week in class we challenged to get out of the deep dive stage of our college capstone. We successfully made it through and now we are in the Proof of Concept Stage! The slides for our presentation are below:

Itch.io - Let's Play - Twitter Publicity

October 14, 2017 by Elijah Dixson in Hyper Neon Fishing

Itch.io release! Someone did a let's play! and Itch.io tweeted about the game! Moments like these remind me why I love making things!

Sprint 6: First Gameplay Footage

October 11, 2017 by Elijah Dixson in Lucha Megadrive

Here is gameplay footage of our latest build! I figured it is probably time to show this prototype in action since our plan for this next week is to start replacing the prototype art with assets more representative of Lucha!

Sprint 5: Deep Dive Week 1

October 05, 2017 by Elijah Dixson in Lucha Megadrive

This past sprint Team Nitro Fist had our first week of deep dive. We plan to be working on this mini vertical slice for the next 2 weeks. During our in class demo we showed off our rig for our first 3D character, the final core fighting game mechanics, basic meter implementation, and made progress on our documentation.

Sprint 4: In To Deep Dive!

September 26, 2017 by Elijah Dixson in Lucha Megadrive

We successfully passed our second challenge attempt and have been approved to enter deep dive. The team is happy, excited, and relieved. We didn’t get here without some challenges— we started to encounter the unfortunate stigma around creating fighting games here at Champlain College. Sadly fighting games have not seen very much success here and have formed a reputation around them. There is a lot a team has to get right in order to have a good fighting game: satisfying input feedback, smooth controls, clear visuals, balanced mechanics, a huge amount of moves to facilitate lots of strategies— overall a ton of work and polished for everyone involved and not the typical level of game seen at Champlain College.

Sprint 3: Challenge Attempt 1

September 19, 2017 by Elijah Dixson in Lucha Megadrive

This week we attempted our first challenge stage. In order to progress in our Champlain College Capstone we need to present our rationale to our professors on why we should move forward into the next stage of prototyping and development. Our attempt to challenge the first stage of concept generation didn’t completely pass, but it didn’t fail either. We no longer have to prototype 3 games at once. Instead, we are being asked to challenge again next week and present an even deeper case for the one game idea we really want to develop. Below are some of the slides we presented to the faculty. Also, we finally have a team name: Team Nitro Fist.

Sprint 2: Concept Exploration 1

September 10, 2017 by Elijah Dixson in Lucha Megadrive

This week our goal was to develop 3 basic prototypes one for each of our sticky game ideas: Luchador Fighting, Cut Corners Farming, and Dungeon Survival Versus. Since each idea is very different, we took very different approaches for each prototype.

Morale Activities

September 07, 2017 by Elijah Dixson in Lucha Megadrive

Week 2 has begun and our team dynamic seems to be normalizing once again. Last week there were misunderstandings and miscommunications, but this week we seem to all be jiving and we were even complimented on our team dynamic in class by a faculty member. I don’t think last week will be our only interpersonal road bumps this semester, so I am working hard to constantly huddle everyone together and make sure we are on the same page. In our meeting for today I plan to start up weekly morale activities to help make sure everyone is comfortable talking to each other and to checkin on everyones lives.

Sprint 1: Ideation

September 03, 2017 by Elijah Dixson in Lucha Megadrive

Sprint 1 is coming to an end. The goals our team set out for ourselves were to come up with game ideas we are all excited about, figure out some initial meeting and communication logistics, set up our blogs, and put together a general road map from now until December. We accomplished all of those and a little bit more.

Capstone Day One Down

August 28, 2017 by Elijah Dixson in Lucha Megadrive

The team I am working with this semester had our first class this morning and our first meeting this evening. I have worked with all these young developers before, but that doesn’t mean it will make the team dynamic any less new or challenging. It has been a few months since we all worked together and we have all had very different experiences and thoughts during that time. We have already had mild misunderstandings and it seemed like not everyone was comfortable speaking up today. We are going to need to spend sometime to reconnect, open up, and to go over our visions and goals for this semester.

The day has been long, and even with these initial road bumps it has been very fulfilling. I’m excited to be working with these developers and to learn again who we are as a team. I am looking forward to discovering together our college capstone game.

The Hyper Before the Storm

April 27, 2017 by Elijah Dixson in Hyper Neon Fishing

Almost everything is in place for us to be ready to attend GameFest RPi 2017. A link to the compitition details can be found here: http://gamefest.rpi.edu. In preparation for the compitition we prepare a trailer show casing our game!

Week 10: ALPHA

April 14, 2017 by Elijah Dixson in Hyper Neon Fishing

While not all the features we wanted made it into the Alpha Build, our QA testers still greatly enjoyed our game and gave us very valuable feedback on how we could continue to improve it.

Week 8: PRE-ALPHA Gameplay Footage

March 30, 2017 by Elijah Dixson in Hyper Neon Fishing

Alpha was just 2 weeks away at this point. We still had a lot to do, but we managed to find time to put together a gameplay video for Accepted Students Day at Champlain College.

Week Five: Studio Pitch

February 21, 2017 by Elijah Dixson in Hyper Neon Fishing

In Just 5 Weeks we went from having only a title and a vague idea to the presentation below. We survived the infamous cuts that happen at Champlain College, and later that week we convinced 6 new awesome people to join the Hyper Neon Fishing Team.

Initial Game Idea: Hyper Neon Fishing

January 22, 2017 by Elijah Dixson in Hyper Neon Fishing

A game that takes place across various landscapes like ruins or ancient wilderness, where you take the role of a small creature that harnesses the power of shapeshifting into other mythical beasts to overcome enemies and puzzles.