Linux | Night Node Software

Orbital Trials are finally here!

Posted on 22 September, 2014 by Nightadmin

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. 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.

Ice cream Tuesday!

Posted on 22 July, 2014 by Nightadmin

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: