Here‘s the entire announcement:

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Another Axiom’s Development Philosophy

Just over a year ago, Another Axiom was a team of one - Lemming - who had an idea that he wanted to try. Inspired by what he had played as a VR early adopter, that idea turned into Gorilla Tag. Part of what made Gorilla Tag unique was how he openly talked with the VR community from the beginning. He shared early screenshots and builds with people - far earlier than most developers do - so he could rapidly iterate. This has been well documented publicly. On the Gorilla Tag discord, it’s possible to scroll all the way back to the beginning to see those first screenshots. There are a few really good “History of Gorilla Tag” videos out there that show the historical development progression.

gorilla tag early development clip

Another Axiom is now a team of 50+ people making Gorilla Tag and our new project that we’ve codenamed A2. While the team has rapidly grown, we want to keep the same radically open development used for Gorilla Tag. We are excited about the idea of sharing prototypes and concepts that are freshly made, even if that work will ultimately be thrown away and rebuilt with better ideas. We think we can achieve something special by working together from the very beginning.

Early Access Expectations

We recognize that coming to Vegas is a significant personal commitment that you’re making to our team and we want players to know what they can expect to see. To help manage those expectations, we’d like to share some of the early progress we’ve made on the game by dropping dev blogs.

Understand this is a work-in-progress. We’ve built a talented team, but this game won’t ship until late next year at the earliest.

Early access will give you a behind-the-scenes peek on how game development is made, gray block-out environments, programmer assets, all while the final look of the game hasn’t been established. You’ll see level layouts that will never ship, mechanics that are too OP, design explorations, lots of bugs and fun things in between.

This is not a beta … this is early access.

However, this is the fun part of game development and we are excited to bring you in.

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What to expect from Vegas?

We’ll start the event with a welcome that explains how the day is going to go. There will be a space sectioned off for running groups through the game. Outside of the game, we’ll have scheduled sessions with developers to discuss feedback that will help us refine our goals.

This will not be a non-stop free-for-all playtest session. We’re going to need your cooperation and help to manage these scheduled sessions to give everyone that comes out equal access to playing time.

Our goal is to give everyone at least a single session of 30 continuous minutes in the build. We’re hoping that we can push that number higher, but this is a realistic target for the number of tickets that we are going to issue.

Our plan is to show some of the tools that we want to eventually release and get your feedback on what is important and would like to see. Over the next weeks, we’ll be collecting ideas and topics from you directly for the event.

In all honesty, if you’re coming out to just play the build for 30 mins - This is not the event for you. We’ll be adding players to our builds over time throughout development and you’ll be able to play from the comfort of your own home when it’s time.

This IS the event for you if you want to try some of our crazy ideas and get into spirited conversations for hours about the vision for our game.

Here are some of the features that we’re planning on talking about at the event:

Early gameplay clip

As a robot champion, build a community of galactic olympians, beyond the limits of gravity.

Stations: Travel through a fleet of stations to find your community. Once arrived, float or take one of the many high speed systems to different casual game modes. However, if larger arena sport games are more your style, then find your way to one of the many stadiums. Hang out in the bleachers with your friends to cheer on your favorite players, commentate from the casters’ booth, or float through the locker rooms to join in on the action.

Game Mechanics: Learn more about our new approach to zero-g movement. We’re targeting human scale speeds with more physicality, hand based collision, sliding, and paddle based momentum mechanics, all while using very few controller inputs. We have removed the ability to grab flat walls, only allowing grabbing on bars and handles that your fingers could wrap around. We hope this model will follow people’s expectations of how hands work in real life, while adding depth and a high skill ceiling by layering multiple physical mechanics together.

__Level Editor: __ The tools we use to build the game will be the tools we ship to the community. Grab your friends and build the game mode live while they are playing.

Community Stations: We’ll share our plans on how players can run their own servers, control their own stations, host their own rule sets, moderate and customize the look and feel of, activities, posters, game modes and more.

See you in game and in Vegas!