Steaming work

We have finally been able to upload a version of Orbital Gear on Steam that we feel we can actually be kind of proud to show to members of the gaming press. In doing so we also emailed all the people whose email we have found and sent them keys so they can test the game and hopefully write a review of the game. You can find the press release that we sent here (or at least some version of it) if you are interested.

The office has been hot as in Gehennas furnaces of fire and brimstone, but so has the rest of the city. Even when we today had a close call with monsoon season here, the rain was so temporary the streets where covered in steam as soon as the sun came back. Hard to find symbolism there…
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Joxe and Crylar have been the main champions this week with fixing everything in Orbital Gear to a working state, hopefully we’re not too late to have some members of the press catching up on the biggest news in gaming this part of the century (or something like that).

We had a visit here in the office from some friends yesterday and they brought cake. Totally the wrong time to take a break, but well deserved. We sort of felt like deserters (get it) but quickly got over it. The cake is not a lie, and if you ever want someone to stop what they’re doing, bring them cake.
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That’s all for now. Next week we’re going to release Orbital Gear for the world to judge.

Ice cream Tuesday!

We’ll, the same as before, I guess, all work and an overall overheated office. We’re basically working round the clock to meet the set deadline for Orbital Gear. It will be released on the 7th of August (in the US of A) and probably at some time close to midnight here in Sweden. So we might as well start preparing for an all-nighter in about two weeks. Then again we’ll probably be so jacked up on adrenaline around then so that won’t matter.
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It’s hot as hell here in the office and about 25 percent worse outside so we decided to go and get ice cream. It almost melted on the way from the store back to the office, however we did get about 5 ice creams each.
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I’ve been managing and fixing the Steam store page, which feels pretty much like walking around a minefield (I can imagine that walking around a minefield is about an infinite amount worse, but you get my point). Everything says Publish now, making me feel like I might accidently end up publishing the game for sale right away. We seem to manage at the time though. 20140722_143939

Joxe has been the champion this week as sole programmer left in the office. He has been working hard to fix a new beta build, which should be up if not today, then at least tomorrow. Linux user will be especially pleased to know that we will upload a Linux build.
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All work and no play

Well, actually there has been lots of playing since we’re testing Orbital Gear every day. New improvements all the time, and new bugs at the same time. But Morbus and Mowhammer are testing away and Binarin is bug spraying the game constantly!

We have so far been working from left to right on the SCRUM board. As you can see we have made a lot of progress, but it’s still hectic. The release of Orbital Gear has been pushed to the seventh of august, which is later than our original plan. This was however to be expected, since we’re quite new on the whole Steam thing.
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Crylar was working really hard on the graphical assets for the steam page, and now it looks really awesome. Now he can go back to finishing up the rest of Orbital Gear! We also had to push the game cards to sometime further along, but it will be done, hopefully before release. If not we’ll make sure it’s released with the first major patch!
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Joxe used his black magic computer skills to get the bandwidth needed down by almost 90%. This is really good news since the latest builds of Orbital Gear has been really, really lag ridden!

Steelbeak has made some new barriers. Earlier we had to use platforms as barriers, while they did what they were supposed to, with the new ones it’s more in line with the rest of the maps. You can judge for yourself:
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This week we had a meeting with the guy that will make our trailer. We all had the same idea so the expectations for it is really high right now. Since we’re a small studio with a very limited budget on marketing it will hopefully help us getting noticed more, which we really need now that we have a final release date.
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The new build is on its way, this time with a working Linux client. It hasn’t been a total priority with all the stress around the release on Steam, but we’re working on it!

Linux client in testing

We have been working with finishing Orbital Gear for Steam this whole time, and as an unfortunate consequence the Linux version of Orbital Gear has been delayed. However, we have now been testing the Linux client and it seems to be working, so if nothing breaks during the next patch we will definitly have a linux client available for the final run of the beta.
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We also took the time to recycle all the soda cans in the office and bought snacks with the cash we recieved. Now that’s a good system!

20140630_120343For the time being we also have a new member of the team. Meet Texas Chili, our new business developer/marketing director/programmer and lead game designer: IMG_20140701_095453