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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!

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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!

BfO5Gq8CMAMnhqr BfO7QQaCcAAKiqK

 

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!

 

Streaming

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We had our first stream on twitch today! We peaked with 19 viewers watching and five of them where us ^_^

Streaming something looks easier that it seems, especially when you are five people who are in the stream at the same time. It was a little bit of a nerve racking experience for all of us. It was a fun experience and something we definitely do every Thursday from now on.

We only broadcasted for an hour and at the end of the stream we started to relax more and got into explaining the development side of the game and showing how the levels where created. If there is something that you want us to talk more about or explain please don’t hesitate telling us, just hit us up on either twitter, facebook or send an email.

We can’t wait until next Thursday! Hope to see you there!

First testing done. Now for the future!

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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

Alphatest at Dragon’s Lair!

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Back to work again!

We’ve been back to work for a week now. Well, most of us anyway. Anton was stuck at the airport in Australia a little longer than he or we would have wanted him to. We’ve been preparing for the alpha testing that will happen the 15th January at Dragon’s Lair in Stockholm.
So if you are in Stockholm on the 15th make sure to sign up now for the testing here http://www.dragonslair.se/evenemang/?6907 it’s in Swedish, if you want to join the alpha testing without using the form, send an email to testing@nightnode.se).

If you can’t make it to the alpha testing but want to try the game early, you can sign up for the beta at orbitalgear.com.

poster

Moving forward in 2014.

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Thinking back on 2013, it was a great year. We’d been working at another company where we felt that we didn’t really have the opportunity to do what we wanted anymore and decided to start a new. This is how and why Night Node came to be, perhaps the greatest thing that happened to us all through the whole year.

Things are starting to get right on track. We secured necessary investments allowing us to actually complete Orbital Gear, as well as allowing us to avoid starvation. We also got contacted by Google, where we are now a strategic marketing partner and got on the develop’s 100 most exciting video game start-ups. Great things are happening for sure.

There is still a lot of work to be done, but overall 2014 looks like it’s going to be an awesome year. Not to mention that Orbital Gear will be released sometime in spring.

Happy new year from all of us at Night Node!

Orbital Gear Play test!

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On January the 15th we will have our play test for Orbital Gear at Dragon’s Lair which is a game center in Stockholm. If you are interested in participating in the play test just email us at testing@nightnode.se with your first and last name, age and experience in gaming.

As thank you for testing and feedback we will provide you with something to eat either pizza or subway, if you have any allergies please let us now ahead of time.

We just want to add that we have a limited amount of seats for the testing so we can’t guarantee a spot. We urge you to be there and be square!

And on another note. Yesterday was awesome! I attended Uppsala Game Developer Evening and met a lot of people from Machine Games, Gaming Corps, Hansoft, Goo Technologies, Star Breeze and other awesome people. Thank you Hansoft for having such a great Game dev pub!

News and Google!

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Hey There! It’s me MowHammer! And I got some news for you peoples!

Monday

Started out really awkward! I had a meeting with a animation company called Cinematic to see if they wanted to make the Orbital Gear trailer. Bad communication led to them going to our office and me to their’s. Pro-tip for anyone that is setting up a meeting is to pick a location for the meeting, it makes everything so much simpler. But it turned out great. They headed back to Stockholm and we had ourselves a little fika (fika is something swedes do a lot!) they wanted to make the trailer for a nominal fee. Now we just have to get the contribution from Almi so we can pay for the trailer. Almi is a government funded organisation who helps companies with loans and contributions to help their company grow.

After the meeting with Cinematic we went to STHLM TECH MEETUP to find some investors. Unfortunately we had no luck there. It seems hard to find investors that want to invest in non-mobile games that doesn’t have a free-to-play model.  Everyone is looking for the next Candy Crush. Got a lot of free beers though ^_^

Tuesday

We had a meeting to set the feature list for the game 😀

Toca Boca Wednesday!

I came in to the office in time! Wohoo!! A friend of mine really wanted to try out Orbital Gear. Of course you can’t say no to a friend 😀 But he wanted to meet up really early! I was so sure that I would be late. But somehow I made it in time! Awesome!It seems like he really liked the game, which made coming in time to the office totally worth it. That day we found out that there was going to be a Unity3D meetup! There was only 3 spots left for the meetup so we acted fast! Me, Crylar and Binarin went there with a crappy laptop to show the game for everyone there. Toca Boca hosted the event and we gotta say wow. They rule big time! Amazing refreshments, awesome office and cool games! If you have the time you should really check out their games/toys. We saw some really cool things being presented on the meetup one of them was Shader Forge!It was still in alpha, but man it was cool. Get a look at it here —> (Shader Forge) awesome way to make beautiful shaders! Orbital Gear got some good feedback from the audience so we are very happy to have taken this opportunity to show our game.

Google Thursday!

So today was the big day that we have been waiting for! We had gotten an email from someone at Google about a possible a strategic partnership. He had read about us in Develop 100’s article, Most Exciting Start-Ups In Europe. After the meeting we were very pleased that they wanted to invest time and resources in us. When we asked him why he choose us, he said that he went with his gut feeling.

Friday!

Is the future!

 

 

 

Down with the sickness.

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Hi!

So our beloved CTO Joxe is still at home sick with some sort of throat super virus. We all miss the table flipping, the jokes, the frustration and having discussions at lunch. Hope you get better soon! Maybe this video will help!

Being sick really sucks! Crylar and Binarin seem to have a special gene that makes them immune to all kinds of diseases in the known universe. They never get sick! Me I get sick all the time so that is my normal state of health.