NEWS | Night Node Software

All work and no play

Posted on 15 July, 2014 by Nightadmin

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.

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!

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:

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.

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

Posted on 1 July, 2014 by Nightadmin

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.

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!

For 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:

Progress this week

Posted on 27 June, 2014 by Nightadmin

So another week has passed us by. We’re still working on Orbital Gear, which will be released on steam within a month (according to our recent estimates). Everyone is working hard for the final product, and we’ve added a few more mechs that players will be able to chose from. You can check them out here:

Joxe is working on the network code, and everything seems to be working at the moment, apart from heavy lag. This has been expected though, since it has yet to be optimized.
Crylar is working on a new map for Orbital Warfare, as well as implementing some new buildings, so that the teams get different looks.

We’re loosely planning our next project as well, drafting up some ideas, and even though it’s not yet decided exactly what game we’ll be doing next we can tell you that the ideas are amazing.

New Computers and SCRUM

Posted on 18 June, 2014 by Nightadmin

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!

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.

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.

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

Birdie and the Orbital Gear tournament

Posted on 5 June, 2014 by Nightadmin

We had our first expo at Birdie, a local LAN-party here in Uppsala with about 1400 visitors annually. We set up four computers with Orbital Gear playing and as soon as the expo opened we had a bunch of visitors asking about Orbital Gear and about us. We had a steady rush of visitors the whole time.
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We also sent everyone at Birdie a Beta key for Orbital Gear, and about 10 percent of all who visited activated an account, which at least we see as a success. Walking around the different parts where people had set up their computers we saw some matches of Orbital Gear being played which made us really proud as well.

We also presented Orbital Gear on stage, but as soon as Morbus was about to take the microphone and start talking about it, the power died for the whole stage. Eventually it was fixed, but within 45 minutes three computers had crashed and been exchanged so we decided to stop having people play on stage. Apparently the problems with the computers was something that happened throughout the whole time at Birdie. IMG_20140529_194603

Unfortunately, since there was problems with the computers, we couldn’t have the finals of the tournament on stage, but we met a production company called Unisl who helped us with sending the finals on BirdieTv, the stream that showed the finals of games such as Starcraft, Dota2 and lol. Mowhammer and Crylar where commentators of the match and the whole thing looked really professional. We’ll make sure to upload the stream as soon as possible.

All in all the whole thing was a success and we are really satisfied with the whole thing.

Growing slowly and surely.

Posted on 17 May, 2014 by MowHammer — No Comments ↓

Hi!

It’s been a while now since our last post here, but we have been crazy busy with trying to make the Orbital Gear beta a reality and now finally it’s out! If you haven’t signed up yet do it here!

What else has happend?

We have acquired a new 3D artist! Welcome to Team Night Node!

We also got our 3D artist some brand new gear 😀

Gravity is more attractive than you’d think

Posted on 24 April, 2014 by Nightadmin

So we went and bought the latest edition of the Swedish PC Gamer, wherein Orbital Gear was featured.

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The article, writen by Mats Nylund, was a great read, especially since it was writen in such a positive tone!

Crylar is working on some cool new features such as the ghost planet and some cool explosions/implosions. He’s quite overwhelmed with work at the moment with maps and everything else that needs to be finished, but hopefully we’ll be able to get someone to help him out soon.

Apart from that development is still coming along nicely. No real update on when the beta is ready, but most features are working now, which means that it shouldn’t be many days away now.

Orbital Gear has been Greenlit!

Posted on 17 April, 2014 by Nightadmin

We are happy to announce that Orbital Gear Has been Greenlit for release on Steam!
This has been a huge milestone for us, and we are really excited to see how Orbital Gear will be recieved.

We are still working on the beta, but it shouldn’t be long now. Remember to sign up here!

Upgrade Complete

Posted on 12 February, 2014 by Binarin

Hello again. We’re back!

The new office

Some stuff has happened since our last post. Perhaps the most important thing is that we have moved to a new office. We’re still located in Uppsala, actually just a few blocks from where we were seated before. But this time it’s our very own office.
Mowhammer explained for the Uppsala municipal office that we would have to move Night Node to Stockholm if we couldn’t find an office in Uppsala. After that they set us up with an office pretty quickly. I guess they want us to stay.
The new office is really nice and now we’re going to establish our own workplace culture. Yesterday we moved everything and has almost finished setting up again. Now we just need to establish a Internet connection and remove the logo of the previous company which is painted on the wall. After that our Night Node realm will be complete.
In other news; we’ve been in the news! Mats Nylund wrote an article for FZ.se, one of the biggest gaming website in Sweden. The article was about our alpha version of Orbital Gear, and was quite a good read. It’s partly because the review said a lot of nice things about the game and he saw a great potential in it, and partly because it’s been our childhood dreams to have such a huge site publish an article about a game made by us. You can read all about it here (it’s in Swedish though).

Apart from that we won an award! Yay!
It’s called Bona Postulata, and is awarded to growing companies in Uppsala. We haven’t gotten any explanation for why they picked us yet, but we will probably get one soon. Anyway, the award will be in the form of getting help with company management through education and connections.
All in all we feel we’re on a winning streak right now!

Stay hyped!
//Binarin

The second coming of the stream plus news!

Posted on 30 January, 2014 by MowHammer

Hey y’all!

We had our second stream today and it was as fun as the first. We didn’t feel as nervous as the first one even though we had a camera pointing at us this time. So we are making progress with our stage fright ^^ and this time we managed to save the stream so you can watch it again and again xD During the stream we got two fan art pictures!

Thanks to Thomas Karlsson and Johan Kalén for the pictures we had a good laugh with them.

Here is the link for the stream http://www.twitch.tv/nightnode/b/499370504

We also had a little pre-stream that you can watch here http://www.twitch.tv/nightnode/b/499374778

And now it’s time for the news!

We have secured another small investment that will help a little along the way to get Orbital Gear into the hands of gamers all over the world! One more thing worth mentioning is that we are hopefully moving into a new office this weekend what I mean with hopefully is that we tought we got the office we wanted but they called up us later and said that they had other people that has looked at it before us so now we have our fingers crossed that they decline and we can move in.

That’s it for us! Thank you everyone that joined the stream we will see you next week!