Fez is finally ready.

I’ve been working (my ass off and compromising my job and social life) on this game called Fez for a couple of months, and 5 hours from the Independent Games Festival entry submission deadline, it’s finally OVER!

Well, the demo. But it’s a full level, with dialogues, collectibles, sound, music and a pretty full demonstration of the game’s concept… which I can’t show too much of right now, especially the concept and what’s original about it, but here’s some in-game material that I can release. It’s a screenshot, taken directly from the game, no mocking-up here.

I’m really proud of the end result, especially how much it evolved in like, two weeks. The game was basically created in a one-month sprint, the 4-5 months before that were slow engine structure development, XNA exploration, error & trial and rewriting… But in the last month, it really took shape as a game. And it’s something I’ve never done before, an actual game. It feels… so much more constructive than anything I’ve done before.
Once the secrecy of it all disappears (so when the IGF entries have been announced), I’ll post a series of dated shots that demonstrate how much the game has grown in such little time. It’s amazing, and it’s been exhausting…

Because of err… technical limitations, it won’t be available right away for everyone. I didn’t have the time to make a codepath for older hardware so it runs only on SM3.0-compatible video cards, and was only tested on nVidia hardware. But I expect this other codepath will come in the next months.

Foolish reader!

8 thoughts on “Fez is finally ready.”

  1. Looks Great Zak! I’ve been wondering what you were working on (because you haven’t been posting much in the usual places lately). Good luck at the IGF, can’t wait to see more of the game.

  2. Platformers are the best, I’m also making one in 3d with my friends.
    Looks excellent and simple!
    Don’t know what’s IGF but I wish you good luck!

  3. Since this is your latest post I am going to ask this question here and hope you will see it. I cant compile a single sample demo. I have both tv3dsk 6.3 and 6.5 installed. I also have visual studio C# 2005 express and XNA installed as well. Whenever I try to compile any of your samples in vs2005 it stops and and error message pops up that says vs cannot start debugging becasue the debug target binDebugwhateversample.exe is missing. Please build the project and retry, or set the output path and assembly name properties appropriately to point at the correct location for the target assembly. By the way I put whateversample.exe because it says the same thing for whatever the project is called. I have tried different ways to change the path of the file and still nothing . Can you please tell me what Is wrong and how I can fix this?

  4. @JayJay : I have not heard this one before… so I can’t really tell what’s wrong here. Make sure you remove the C++ project from the solution if there is one, and the the MTV3D65 reference is OK, you have to reset it to your DLL path. Otherwise… try to delete all the output files and do a full rebuild… I don’t really know, sorry!

  5. I figured it out after all. I just forgot to add the tv3d media and engine references to VB! It works know but thanks for trying to help!

  6. Wow!! This looks brilliant! :D

    What a fantastic idea to render from orthographic views and to flatten out the depth in your collision, and be able to switch between different axis-aligned views! Excellent! :D

  7. Thats a really clever Idea , why didn’t I think of it .Its actually a higher dimension universe. I’ll have think about how many.

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