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.

Steam Release and Release party!

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

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

New Computers and SCRUM

We have recieved some new computers from Alina Systems in Uppsala! The computers are awesome, and will really help out with the final production of Orbital Gear. Working with double screen is absolutely the way to go! IMG_20140617_160812

We have been able to finish some more things with this newfound productivity, amongst all things are a new mech, so that players will be able to configure how they want their mech to look when playing Orbital Gear. IMG_18062014_172059

In other news we put up a physical SCRUM board in the office. Right now there are more posts in the Task area, but they are moving with a good pace to the Testing and Done area.

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All in all, we are increasing our productivity for the final sprint towards the release of Orbital Gear on Steam!

First testing done. Now for the future!

Hello everyone! Binarin here.

DLTesting

If you have been reading our blog, social media or any of our posters you know that we just had our first playtesting of Orbital Gear. We thought we would be low on testers but in the end we managed to put a tester on every computer at Dragon’s Lair.
In the morning we went to the office, we knew we had some bugs we wanted to fix before the test. We managed to fix most of the bugs we saw, then we printed the surveys for the testers and took the train to Stockholm.
We got to Dragon’s Lair, which is where we had our test. Installing the game on their computers went fine and everything seemed to work. When the testers came in we quickly noticed that the number of players on a single server was for some reason capped to 5. Kind of ironic since 5 was the most players we’ve had on a server before. It was not a big problem tho, our level was probably too small for more players. It seemed like the testers really enjoyed playing because they kept playing even when we brought sandwiches from Subway. All of the testers filled our survey, which we now have collected useful data from.
Regarding the balancing of the weapons, it quickly became obvious that Phase Orb was too strong in the current version. After we banned Phase Orb many started using Chainsaw instead. The Chainsaw might have been a bit too strong, but we think after you’ve played Orbital Gear for a while you learn how to dodge it.
Being too weak was Grenade Launcher and Chaingun, which we will take a look at.
I won’t go through all the things we learnt from the test, but it was a lot.
Once again we want to properly thank Dragon’s Lair for having us and the testers for spending time on our game and helping us out.

Now when we’re finally done with this deadline and has reached Alpha version we have to decide what comes next. For me, except for doing CEO stuff, I’ll probably work a lot on how planets and the gravity works. We will soon put together an application for Steam’s Greenlight system. When we’re on Greenlight you guys can give us thumbs up, when we have enough we will be approved to sell the game on Steam. Also, we’re looking into putting up a Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a crowd funding service where you can donate money on projects you like. If they get the amount they asked for they’ll get the money (otherwise you get your money back) and you’ll get different rewards depending on how much you donated. The reason we’re looking into it is because we want to work on Orbital Gear a bit longer to make it even better. We will have stretch goals, which means if we get up to some milestone donations we will add extra features. So I hope you understand why we’re putting up a Kickstarter.

Stay hyped!
//Binarin