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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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.
Screenshot from 2014-07-01 13#3a21#3a57

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!

Upgrade Complete

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