Progress.

Hello! MowHammer here and I am back with yet another post!

Slowly but surely we are making progress with our latest game, Bell Ringer.

First and foremost let me show you our teaser!

The problem we are facing right now is that we are making tools to create the game so when the tools are done the game is almost complete and that is really cool! But in-game footage is very scarce and that makes it very hard to promote the game. But now finally we are able to show something. It’s not much but it’s always fun to see the progress.

Here is a video of our first developer diary.

We hope to have a new developer diary by tomorrow and that we can show you how the special moves work more indeept. Until next time, have a great summer!

Bell Ringer!

Howdy!

Like I said in my previous post is that I wanted to update to blog more regularly so that is what I intend to do. It already feels great to write something without it being 10,000 years since the last time.

We are working really hard right now to get everything ready for Future summer 2015. Future summer 2015 is an event hosted by Future Games and Epic Games.

Future Games is a two year long higher vocational game development education located in Stockholm, Sweden. The education opened its doors in September 2008, and the first students graduated in September 2010.

So yeah we are going to show a very early build of Bell Ringer at Future summer 2015! We have a lot of stuff to do before then. With only 3 days left we are getting a bit nervous about showing our game. But we know that it’s very important to share what you are doing and getting feedback. The hardest thing about showing your game when it’s not complete is that you have to keep quiet when you get feedback from players and resist the urge to tell them that you have thought of everything.

Basically it’s just a grind session until Friday and we are very used to grinding.

 

Better late than never.

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!

Post Comic con Gamex.

Things have been a bit quiet from our side but as usual we have been busy. The whole team went to the Comic Con Gamex expo in Kista, Stockholm! It was amazing! We had our little booth alongside other awesome indie developers.

For us this was the best expo we have been to. There were so much people there and our booth was packed!

 

We really want to thank the people at Comic Con Gamex for setting this up for us indie developers so we also can showcase our games next to the big dogs in the industry.

It was an amazing experience and we are looking forward to next year so we can do this again.

Now that we are back at the office we are working on making Orbital Gear better and getting things ready to announce our next game that we are going develop.

 

Here are some pictures that we took at the expo for your viewing pleasure.

 

Update time!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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.

Orbital Gear version 1.01 patch changelog

Fixes:

      • Overhauled the network code
      • Team chat messages are no longer posted twice
      • Fixed the issue that your mech sometimes wouldn’t spawn after joining a server or after dying
      • Fixed an issue with the countdown during mapchange where it sometimes would go below 0 and keep restarting -the map over and over
      • Music should now abide by the music volume at all times and no longer play at default or max volume while loading a new map or scene
      • Chat-messages now have a black outline which will make them visible after Orbital Warfare games
      • Game logic will now continue in the background when the window loses focus
      • Hint visibility should now abide by the Option and no be re-enabled every time you start a new map
      • Fixed an issue with turrets sometimes wouldn’t fire at opponents
      • New icons in the fragscoller for suicide and out of bounds
      • Pulse Rifle ammo indicator redesigned
      • Shredder ammo indicator redesigned
      • Font size has been reduced on the Deathmatch score screen
      • If you are disconnected from the master server for some reason, the game should now try to reconnect
      • Failing to create a room and then joining another room will no longer make your client show multiple instances of the same weapon in the loadout screen.
    • Inactive Energy Cores should no longer be appearing when joining a server which has been running for a while.

Balance:

      Weapons

        Discharger

          Cooldown increased to 1, up from 0.8.
          Damage decreased to 82, down from 88.

Nailgun

          Velocity increased to 61, up from 51.

Shredder

        Damage decreased to 56, down from 84.