July/August Newsletter

11/09/201911/09/2019
by Joshua Heng

July and August saw our anniversary and our first Annual General Meeting, in which we made lots of changes to the company. Due to many people being on holiday around the world, not much progress was made on games, but hopefully we’ll be able to continue to develop them in the coming months.

Our First Birthday

Gift, Birthday, Loop, Heart, Mother'S Day, Greeting — Our First Birthday

The 14th August 2019 marked the end of the first year since our company was incorporated out of the three planned years of producing games. We made a blog post about it here, summarising all our significant events that have taken place so far.

Our First Birthday Blog Post

Annual General Meeting

Following our birthday, we had our first Annual General Meeting on the 3rd September. Most of the changes that we made regarded company structure, but one of the key points was that although we spent over 250 hours on game development last year, we decided to allocate more time on this this year to really accelerate our game production.

Role Changes

Owen decided to leave Vanadium Games so he could focus more on his school work, with GCSEs looming up at the end of this year for all members of our team. Max and Harry also wanted to dedicate more time outside of creating games, so this year they will have less of a role to play in our projects.

We also invited a new member, Timmy, who will be one of our Creative Officers. He joined with the main role of writing storylines and coming up with ideas, so everyone else can spend a bigger focus on art, music and programming.

Josh and Morgan are continuing with developing the majority of our games in their spare time, along with Timmy.

Company Titles

We also decided to change the company titles to better reflect what we do, and they are as follows:

Chief Executive Officer – Michael
Chief Technological Officer – Joshua
Chief Marketing & Human Resources Officer – Morgan
Hardware Systems Officer – Max
Creative Officer – Harry
Creative Officer – Timmy

This won’t make a huge difference on the game development side, however it has allowed us to review the roles of each member of our team and make it clearer about who does what.

Games

Illumination & Kedian Interspace have been slowly improving over the last two months. Most of the programming has been completed, and now it’s mainly the art and music that needs the most work. We have also begun work on Trolley Dash again and will be now using this as a training project so that Morgan can learn how to use our game engine, Unity, more effectively.

We hope to release Illumination on iOS and Android on 1 December 2019, before the start of the Christmas summer holidays. The 2-3 months until then will allow us to redesign our UI and artwork with plenty of time to have everything beta-tested.

In regards to Kedian Interspace, this is going to be a project which is likely to take a long time to produce. The artwork, music and storyline required to produce is a significant amount, and with everyone developing these in their free time, this may take a while to do. We haven’t got any release date or deadline yet until the majority of these are done, but it isn’t likely to be released anytime soon.

The development of Trolley Dash has been started again by Morgan, but this time, Joshua will be helping him monthly with the programming. We hope that this will mean that Morgan will be able to develop more ambitious projects in the future, both by himself and with the whole team. Again, we haven’t got a release date for this, but we won’t think it will be completed within the near future.

Social Media

Due to everyone being quite busy, our social media accounts haven’t been posting recently. This year, though, Morgan is going to take a lead in keeping these active and keeping everyone updated with our activities.

If you aren’t already following us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, follow us to get our latest updates. You can also join our mailing list to receive these bimonthly newsletters and other blog posts in your inbox, as well joining our Discord server.

That’s it for this newsletter! See you in two months…

Bimonthly Newsletter

May/June Newsletter

03/07/201903/07/2019
by Joshua Heng

Hi everyone,

The past two months have gone by quick! With exams for everyone in our team, we have been very busy. Despite this, lots of work has been made on our game Kedian Interspace…

Kedian Interspace

We have been focusing on the game mechanics and programming, with these nearly being completed. Now the aim is to develop our artwork, sound effects and music to a high standard, after which the game will be released in a public beta.

We are hoping to release this beta in the next month or so. Our original release date was the 14th August, our company’s first birthday, but this may need to be delayed due to other commitments of all the developers.

Find out more about Kedian Interspace

Illumination

Our other game Illumination has also been coming along well. This is a simpler game than Kedian Interspace, which some of us are working on at the same time. The public beta and release dates are looking the same though, with us hoping to release the beta within a month.

Public Betas

As part of our vigorous testing scheme, once we have ironed out all the bugs we can, we release the games as public betas. This means that anyone, including you, can download the game early and help us in the game development process by bringing any broken features to our attention.

Once these betas are released, we’ll post another blog post, but if you would like to get involved, you can join the Vanadium Games Testing Programme by clicking here. This is the same testing program as we used for The Stacks, so if you already enrolled then, you won’t need to again.

Join the Vanadium Games Testing Programme

More about the Team

Another two blogs have been released in our Getting to Know the Team series – Owen’s and Morgan’s. They provide a summary of what their role is within Vanadium Games and their interests and hobbies.

Check out Morgan’s introduction

Check out Owen’s introduction

All in all, the two months of May and June haven’t seen much progress. However, many things have been being developed in the background between our other commitments. Once we start finalising our art and music, we will be able to post these on our various social media accounts: Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, so follow these to keep updated.

See you next time!

Josh

Bimonthly Newsletter

March/April Newsletter

02/05/201902/05/2019
by Joshua Heng

Hi everyone,

In our second bimonthly newsletter, we cover the events of March and April. We underwent changes for our team and logo whilst also making significant progress on our games. We additionally attended an event at the beginning of March where we showcased The Stacks…

Team Changes

In April, another person joined the team – Owen. He’s been doing lots of work for the art of Kedian Interspace and has fitted into the group well.

Harry has temporarily left us as he has been very busy with other projects, but he will join again soon once he has a bit more free time.

We have also started a blog series where each member of the team introduces themselves. There is currently only one out for Josh, but other people will be releasing theirs soon.

Click here to visit Josh’s introduction

New Logo

The logo of Vanadium Games

We decided to create a new logo as we felt that our old one didn’t resemble us well. Morgan took the lead on the task, and we went through several versions before we finished on one that we all agreed on.

We eventually decided on one with a cog – representing game development – and two electrons, representing the element Vanadium.

Morgan wrote about the various stages of design here

Coolest Projects UK

The Vanadium Games team at Coolest Projects UK

The start of March saw us travelling to Manchester for an event called Coolest Projects UK. This was a convention of young people showcasing what they had made with technology, and we had many visitors to our stand.

This was a brilliant opportunity to gain new players of The Stacks. We printed leaflets and produced a slide-show narrating the story of its development.

We also met new people and were inspired by other projects. Whilst we didn’t read the prize for the ‘Coolest Project’, it was still a great and unforgettable experience.

We wrote a blog post about this event here

Kedian Interspace

Concept art for an alien from Kedian Interspace

Our game Kedian Interspace has had significant progress – we have been creating many sprites and developing game mechanics. On the 15th April, Josh and Morgan met up for the whole day to decide some key parts of Kedian Interspace such as the style of all the art and turret design.

Find out more about Vanadium Games Day

Illumination

We have also begun work on a new game called Illumination. It aims to be a minimalistic and simple game where the player has to create circuits to light up certain light bulbs. Some members of our team are working on this in addition as working on Kedian Interspace, which will take a while longer to finish and release.

Social Media

An image of our Instagram account

We have continued posting to our various social media accounts to market our games. We focus on Instagram, as we feel that that is where most of our target audience are active, where we now have over 400 followers

March and April have been eventful months with lots of changes being made. The next two months might see less work being done, with exams looming for many members of the team, however, we hope to still make progress on Kedian Interspace and Illumination.

See you next time!

Josh – Lead Game Developer