Vote for SHODAN Needing a Hug!
over 7 years ago – Fri, Nov 25, 2016 at 10:50:22 PM

Hi backers!  We're hoping all of you are having a great Thanksgiving week (those of you that celebrate it).  Some of you may have noticed the Steam sales going on, and a new awards event happening for the Autumn Sale.  There are several categories for awards, including one called the "Villain Most in Need of a Hug" award.  I'm sure we all can agree that SHODAN most certainly could use a hug.  Please show your support by voting for her if you can!

To vote, visit the System Shock 2 store page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/238210/ , click on the Nominate button, and select the Villain Most in Need of a Hug option.  If SHODAN wins, we'll have a special treat for everyone...

Thanks for your support!

November Update
over 7 years ago – Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 11:12:58 PM

Hi everybody! Before getting into updates, as I mentioned before, we sent out System Shock 1 and 2 keys to folks that backed the qualifying tiers. If you didn’t get your keys, please send us a message. 

Project Update 

The biggest news is that we’ve officially started Vertical Slice and will have some awesome stuff to show in the coming months. The purpose of VS (vertical slice) is mainly to answer questions. Often times on a game project, devs don’t actually know how long something will take to create. VS is a phase where a slice of the game is created with a few goals in mind: 

• How long will it take to create content? 
• What should the final visuals look like? 
• How should final gameplay feel? 

Basically, VS lets us prove out our pipelines and narrow down how the game should and shouldn’t play. By the end of VS, we’ll have a better understanding of what we can achieve with the time/budget we have, and have a more accurate plan moving forward to create a quality game. 

Q&A

Every month, we’ll compile some questions we’ve been seeing in the community and answer them as best as we can here. 

Q: Can I upgrade my backer level? 

A: Yup, once we have backerkit wired up and deployed. 

Q: Will you be adding paypal funding? 

A: This should be supported through backerkit. 

Q: What will you be releasing System Shock on? 

A: Our goal is to launch on PC/Mac/Linux/XboxOne/PS4 by Q2 of 2018. Not sure if it will be a simultaneous launch, but we’ll do our best. 

Concept Art

This month we’re showing off an amazing concept piece by our art director, Robb Waters, depicting a section of the medical deck. 

  

Open Positions 

As we prepare for entering production, we have a few openings on the team that we’re looking to fill soon. If you, or someone you know, is qualified for any of the positions below, please apply! 

• Lead Animator 
• Environment Concept Artist 

http://www.nightdivestudios.com/careers/ 

Shout Outs 

Nightdive Studios has just released a classic on to GOG: Space Rogue - Release date 11/17/2016 

Notable for being the first game designed for Origin by Paul Neurath, who went on to found Blue Sky Productions (later renamed Looking Glass Studios).

https://www.gog.com/game/space_rogue_classic 

Trek through an astonishingly realistic universe with outposts and mining stations, planets and asteroids, stars and starships - all in spectacular 3D graphics. Watch combat from cockpit, chase plane, or cinematic camera angles. Engage cunning foes in heated dogfights, where you'll have to outgun and outsmart your opponents to taste victory. Outfit your ship with plasma torpedoes, plasteel armor, particle beams, missiles, force shields, ECM units and more. Execute loops, rolls, and spins. Feel the tug of gravity as you whip around a star. Authentic spaceflight dynamics push your piloting skills to the limit. 

Bonus, here is a wonderful image of the 1989 cover:

 

October 2016 Update
over 7 years ago – Wed, Oct 19, 2016 at 12:07:03 AM

Hi everyone! Jason here with this month’s update. In the future, we’re going to have other folks on the team write updates since it shouldn't be just me having all of the “fun” :-p

Project Update

Things are progressing along quite nicely so far. We’re currently about 30% through preproduction with most of our lead team assembled and are working on documentation and proving out our pipelines. This is typically the least fun phase of game development since it’s a lot of meetings and documentation, but it’s also one of the most important phases since it lays the foundation for the rest of the project. 

One of the most interesting aspects of this phase is that we’ve been meeting with some of the original devs from System Shock 1 like Austin Grossman, Dorian Hart, and Paul Neurath. The goal is to sync up as much as possible with the original devs to understand what Shock meant to them, get as many details as possible about pretty much everything, and determine what they would have liked to do back then if they had today’s tech. We’re striving to do this brand justice, and that starts with the amazing folks that created it. 

Q&A 

Every month, we’ll compile some questions we’ve been seeing in the community and answer them as best as we can here. 

Q: When will we be able to donate via Paypal? 

A: We have all of our legal stuff sorted out for it, but still need to wire things up on the website and Backerkit. We’ll probably have a bulk of it finished early next month, but probably won’t bring it live until January since it will be easier for us to start it in a new tax year. 

Q: Where are the forums? 

A: I’ll talk about that below :-) 

Q: When can we expect our SS1 and 2 steam keys for our backer reward? 

A: Daniel should be sending those out within the next few days. Keep an eye on your email address that you used to back our campaign. 

Q: Can backers that missed the Discord invite still get an invite to the developer Discord server? 

A: Yup! We’ll have invite codes in our forums once they’re up. 

Concept Art

I don’t know about all of you, but I definitely prefer pictures to words in Kickstarter updates. Here are a few concepts from the mind of Robb Waters of characters you’ll find in the game: 

 

Website and Forums 

We are happy to announce that the Nightdive Studios website is up and running! Head on over to http://www.NightdiveStudios.com to check it out! On top of that, our forums are now live, but still under construction. You can register for an account and start posting/replying, but keep in mind we’re still figuring out the best way to arrange everything. When you sign up on the forums, please use your email address that you used to back our Kickstarter so we can award you the proper forum badges (that will happen in a few weeks). 

Shout Outs 

This month’s shout out goes to Wasteland 3! If you haven’t heard of the Wasteland series, it’s definitely worth checking out. As most of you know, I’ve worked on Fallout, which was originally based on Wasteland. The awesome folks at inXile are back with a Wasteland 3 crowdfunding campaign through Fig and have already been funded. 

Here’s what you can expect in this sequel: 

• Party-based role playing. 
• Focus on complex story reactivity and strategic combat. 
• An evolution of the Wasteland 2 combat system including vehicles, environmental dangers, and a more fluid action system. 
• Story-driven co-op. (my personal favorite feature) 

If you’re interested in learning more, head on over to their campaign here: https://www.fig.co/campaigns/wasteland-3/

 - Jason Fader, Game Director on System Shock

September Update
over 7 years ago – Thu, Sep 08, 2016 at 12:21:19 AM

Project Update 

Phase - PreProduction 

I’m going to start including what phase we’re in from now on in these updates so folks can better gauge our progress. This month is the start of PreProduction for us, which means lots of documentation and fleshing out pipelines. It also means ramping the team up for Vertical Slice. We’ve brought on two new folks onto the team this month to help fill out our leadership ranks. 

Kevin Manning has joined the team as our Lead Artist. I worked with Kevin back on Fallout: New Vegas, and since then he’s been at a few places including Stardock and various contract opportunities. He’s been in the industry for about 12 years and has a passion for all things scifi and cyberpunk! 

James Henley recently joined us as our Lead Level Designer. James has been in the industry for a while with most of his work being done at BioWare on Star Wars: The Old Republic, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Jade Empire. He’ll be leading our team of level designers to deliver on a challenging, yet rewarding, content experience and working alongside Chris Avellone to create the best visual storytelling environments on Citadel Station! 

Other Updates

Nightdive has sorted out the business stuff and paypal is just about in place. The next steps will be BackerKit and setting up some funding tiers on the site. There’s still a lot to do, so no ETA yet on all of that. 

Nightdive’s higher priority has been on bringing back the Nightdive website after a major overhaul, as well as bringing the forums online so we can better communicate with our supporters. The forums should be up later this month, and we’ll issue another Kickstarter update with instructions on how Backers will be able to access the private sections. 

 - Jason

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Shout Outs 

Every few updates, we’re going to point out some other projects that backers might be interested in. This month, we’re supporting “Cthulhu & Shanghai Tunnels 21st H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival” and our very own Stephen Kick has done some awesome art for them in the past. They only have a few days left in their Kickstarter here: http://kickcthulhu.com/ 

Here are some of their amazing rewards: 

Questions, Communication, and Streams
over 7 years ago – Sat, Aug 13, 2016 at 12:13:10 AM

Project Update

The first 2 weeks after the Kickstarter has been pretty busy for the team. We took a break the day after the Kickstarter and that weekend, but the following week we spent a lot of time planning out the rest of the project since we had a better sense of our budget. After that, the focus has been identifying roles we need filled and recruiting for them. That process will take a while…

Twitch Problems

We ran into a huge problem with Twitch and lost all of our past streams. If you recorded any of the VOD’s, please let us know (leave a comment below) so we can push them up to our Youtube channel. Streaming is kind of a new thing to us and there was a bit we didn’t know about Twitch’s retention policy :-(

PayPal and Crowdfunding

We’re still working on getting PayPal and our ongoing crowdfunding stuff set up. Our business folks that run Nightdive had to go through some legal stuff to make everything was friendly for taxes and such, which has taken time. They’re almost done on their side with things, and we’re hoping to have PayPal and ongoing crowdfunding fully set up around September at the latest. We should also see BackerKit coming online around then too.

Communication

As most of you have noticed, our communication on Kickstarter could be better. We started this as a small team and have been overwhelmed by the volume of messages we need to respond to. We’re working on getting better with it, starting by assigning specific folks to manage certain aspects of social media. Jonathan Peros will be our main person in charge of responding to Kickstarter comments and messages, and he should be catching up on stuff soon.

Also, we're working on bringing the NDS site up with forums so we can have a central place for making announcements. Hoping to have that ready by the end of the month.

Streaming

We have a lot of fun streaming stuff for you folks and chatting, so we’re going to work on a regular schedule with planned events. Since Twitch has caused us some problems, we’re going to experiment with Youtube Gaming streams to see what our fans think. We did some tests last night and it looks like the video quality is better and there is less of a delay compared to Twitch.

We’ll be doing a stream tonight, Friday Night Dives, where I will be diving into No Man’s Sky with some other folks on the team heckling me. Feel free to tune in and ask us questions too. We’ll answer what we can depending on who’s around.

Friday Night Dives - Friday @6pm PDT - https://gaming.youtube.com/c/Nightdivestudios/live

- Jason