Category Archives: NEWS

Better late than never.

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Hey!

MowHammer here with a blog post!

It’s been a very long time since we’ve updated our blog, so thought it would be a great idea to do that now.

A lot has happened at Night Node that made everything super stressful and we have not had enough time to update the site as regularly as we wanted. But things are now changing for the better! We are down to the original team plus one intern. So we have way more work to do and unfortunately the blog and our social media presence has suffered.

The next game from Night Node is Bell Ringer, a hack n slash RPG with random generated worlds. Crylar has had this idea for a while I believe he told me about it almost 6 years ago. It has changed dramatically from that initial idea but the core of it all is the same. As you can tell it’s very important to save your game ideas and design documents.

It’s so much fun that we have a new project to work on, like a breath of fresh air. It’s been awesome working on Orbital Gear but it feels great to finally move forward and to work on something different. There is still work to be done on Orbital Gear but our main focus right now is complete and release Bell Ringer.

Development is going quite smooth and our spirits are high despite that we have almost no money. What Orbital Gear has shown us is that when you make a game you really want to play it’s all worth it when we see the user reviews and smile makes it all worth it. The plan is of course to get enough money to live decent but without making games that we don’t want to play ourselves.

Well that’s all from me this time. I will try to update the blog on a regular basis from now on.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Update time!

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Hi there y’all!

MowHammer here with some updates!

 

We try to post a blog post once a week but sometimes you just have too much to do and don’t have enough time. With a couple of minutes to spare I would like to share the ongoing events at the office with you!

We’ve been having creative sessions for our upcoming project. It has been a gruesome and tough experience – but at the same time super fun and exciting! Soon we will be unveiling the next project and it will be really cool!

Besides trying to figure out our next project we are constantly working on improving Orbital Gear. Right now we are reworking the menus so they can work with controller support. Aside from controller stuff we’re also adding a local 4-player split screen mode which is turning out great!

Aside from these cool updates, I also sadly have to announce that Simon “Morbus” Borgström has left NN. But the good news about his departure is that the reason he left was to concentrate on his programming studies – and when he’s done he’ll probably return to us as a programmer! ^^

The news of Morbus’ departure left me in the spot to try to fit in his job into my schedule. It has been hard, but I think I am getting the hang of it. I wish that I had 48 hours a day instead of the lousy 24 hours.

Speaking of schedule, we will be at the Intel Buzz Workshop on the 23rd in Stockholm to showcase Orbital Gear and learn a bunch of things from some very experienced and interesting people in the industry. You can get tickets to the event here!

I hope everyone had a great start to their week! Until next time, take care.

Night Node is going to Comic Con Gamex!

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Hi there.

Good news everyone! Night Node Software will be attending Comic Con Gamex. We are going to have a small booth together with other indie devs. This is the first Comic Con Gamex convention ever. It’s going to be interesting to see how the convention is going to play out.

For you that doesn’t know Comic Con and Gamex used to be seperate conventions but now worlds will collide and the two has joined forces. That will result in it being Sweden’s biggest games, comics and movie convention.

So come on down to Kista mässan and hang out with the Night Node Team and other fun developers. The convention is open from the 30th of October to the 2nd of November.

You can get your tickets for Comic Con Gamex here

 

Dreamhack baby!

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This weekend the whole Night Node team were at Dreamhack Stockholm! We showcased Orbital Gear at the Expo there, and got a lot of positive feedback from the visitors! We also met a lot of other indie developers who were showing their creations and there was a lot of fun creative games that we’ll hopefully see available soon.
There was also a bunch of cool e-sport tournaments and we’d really like Orbital Gear to take a place on that scene in the future!  IMG_20140927_105512

Crylar was also interviewed by SVT (Swedish public service) about game development, you can (hopefully) watch it here. The interview with Crylar starts at 01:21:44!Rasmus SVT

There are not many news about Orbital Gear at the moment, we’re working with local PvP and controller support, which will be made available as soon as possible.

We’re also discussing which game we’re going to start developing next. This means that crylar is on development prohibition at the moment, since he needs to be creative and work on the upcoming title.

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We’re considering moving to Unreal engine for the next game, however that’s up for the developers to decide. We met a guy on Dreamhack who works with Unreal and hopefully he’ll show us most of the engine.

Orbital Trials are finally here!

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We have after a month of hard work finally released the single player mode for Orbital Gear!
Orbital Trials (earlier known as “Target Practice”) is a series of timed challenges, where the player needs to destroy a series of though robots that will reign down hurt on you. It truly is a challenge to get to the top score.screenshot_130554151462069213

Truth be told we should have had the single-player mode from the start, perhaps generating more interest from the public, but you live and learn. Orbital Gear already has some great supporters out there promoting us, and with further expansions and platforms hopefully we’ll make Orbital Gear the classic that we feel it should be.

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The enemies in Orbital Trials are pretty awesome, and unforgiving. They have a range of weapons that they use against the players, including the Phase Orb which can totally destroy your winning streak. IMG_19092014_130429 IMG_19092014_130424  A lot of other fixes has been set in place as well, but those can be found in the forum or the Steam page.

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That’s pretty much what we have been up to. It will soon be time for our next project, it’s a secret for now, but it will be awesome. But Orbital Gear fans do not have to worry, we’ll continue to patch and update Orbital Gear with maps and other stuff.

Still in the gravity field!

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We’re still working with fixing some of the details of Orbital Gear. Dedicated servers are soon up and running, and we’ll probably fix everything with host migration soon after that. At the same time we’re working with adding the Target Practice mode. Hopefully with it being added to the mix of multiplayer mayhem, Orbital Gear will feel like the whole package. One of the major features that will come with Target Practice are leaderboards, something that will hopefully add much to the community, and make people feel that competitive side even if playing by them self.

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The Target Practice will have different enemies that fires at you while you’re trying to take down your objectives, making this a deadly obstacle course, as you’re trying to beat your friends best time as you swirl through it!

We’re also doing a bundle with Bundle Stars. This might be a bit early actually, but we feel we need to get more players in Orbital Gear and this might be the best way to do it.
Hopefully it will make more people look up Orbital Gear and at the same time make sure that the servers are crowded.

Steam Release and Release party!

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So we have finally released Orbital Gear on Steam! Everything happened in the middle of the night here in Sweden, and we were home at about 4AM or so when everything was finally set and we saw a lot of people playing Orbital Gear.

Most people seem to enjoy it, there are however some major bugs that we’ve noticed that needs to be fixed. These are of course currently being worked on!steampå

We have also gotten some really good reviews of Orbital Gear. You can (and should) read them here:

strategyinformer.com
Twinfinite.com
outofeight
elder-geek.com
everydaygamers.com
FZ (Swedish)
IGN (Swedish)

We had our release party here in the office this friday, with a lot of friends and family! Everything went really well and everyone was wither playing Orbital Gear or super mario world!

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Steaming work

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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!

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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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