Hello again, and welcome to the November edition of the Null newsletter. It’s a short month (especially for Americans with the Thanksgiving holiday), but that doesn’t mean we didn’t pack it full of fun.
Christoph Nakazawa Q&A
We sat down in November with Christoph Nakazawa, developer of Athena Crisis, to discuss his career in programming, management, and, of course, all things Athena Crisis. Check out our Q&A on our YouTube channel.
Athena Crisis is going to be hitting Early Access soon, so don’t forget to sign up on the Athena Crisis website.
Demon Spore Goes To Lisbon
Demon Spore is under feverish development as it prepares for a launch in early 2024, but that doesn’t mean that its developer Ed Kay doesn’t have time to show it off. He took a recent build to both DevGamm (where it won Best Portuguese Game at the Indie X awards!) and the Lisboa Games Week, where interested gamers could check out a demo and grab a sticker or two.
I’ve personally been spending a lot of time with Demon Spore this month and I’m super excited to be able to show more of it off when the time is right!
The Month In Media
Tape To Tape continues to release new features in Early Access, but don’t take my word for it: check out this archive of their recent stream that shows off the brand-new customization options in the game. That’s right: you can now customize your player with a variety of appearance options, abilities, and talents. If you already have the game on Steam, you can download the update and play around with the new features yourself! Don’t forget to join the TTT Discord for more behind the scenes information about the game’s development.
Paradark Studio, developer of ExeKiller, continues to create compelling social media content on their Twitter and Instagram channels. Have you met Winston yet or checked out the latest Dev Diary on Steam? If not, take a look at some of the unique takedown animations that are being built to help you rid the wasteland of your robotic adversaries:
Want a hot tip? Null is also preparing for our very first company stream in early December, where we’ll be showing off our announced games, get into some gameplay, do some giveaways, and possibly have a big announcement. In preparation for that, I dusted off my streaming gear and took to Twitch to play some games with a friend (feel free to check out the archive here), but beyond that, we’ve been spending a lot of time internally preparing for this first stream. We hope you’ll be able to join us on our Twitch channel early next week for our inaugural stream!
Etcetera
It truly has been a busy month behind the scenes here at Null, so I didn’t have as much free time to play games as I would have normally liked, beyond the aforementioned hours spent escaping tentacles in Demon Spore. After finishing up the wonderful Phantom Liberty expansion for Cyberpunk 2077, I dabbled a bit in RoboCop: Rogue City and Trepang2, both of which are very fun throwback shooters in styles that have gone somewhat out of fashion.
RoboCop, especially, is an interesting study in game design, as RoboCop obviously cannot run very fast or take cover. In that sense, it’s kind of a run and gun shooter, except without the running part of it; it’s been a hot minute since I’ve played a single-player FPS with actual medpacks you use to heal yourself. It’s enjoyably retro so far and seems to have some interesting ideas about its storyline, so I look forward to spending more time with it.
Trepang2, on the other hand, is a very obvious throwback to the fondly remembered F.E.A.R. series, especially in terms of its gameplay, which features copious amounts of bullet time action and shooting security guards who are constantly yelling at each other over their walkie-talkies about how badly you’re murdering them all. It’s super fun and fairly straightforward, even if there are some keybinding decisions that I disagree with (I’ll never understand why game developers bind stuff to Left Alt in shooters!). Still, worth checking out if you’re interested in blowing up some bad guys in poorly-lit environments.
And that’s it for another wonderful Null newsletter! We’ll have plenty more news for you in December, so stay tuned to our social channels, the links to which you can find below.
-rorie
