NS2 general update
Hey everyone,
We have a lot of irons in the fire right now so this blog entry will be talk a little bit about a lot of things.
At the end of my talk at the GDC this year, I was approached by a very cool investment group. It's funny that my talk basically said "don't get investors, build your company yourself", but I guess he liked my honesty. I've spoken to many investors over the past couple years usually they are of the soul-sucking "don't understand games" variety. These guys feel totally different. Not only do they have a great track record for investing in game companies, they "get" games and seem to want to help where they can, without changing our course. They don't want to "fix" us or have us change course to make a anime-themed casual MMO for U.S. tweens. They like what we're doing and want to help us do it a whole lot better. Not only that, but we have great chemistry and actually look forward to working and spending time with them. So we're in the due diligence phase of that and it's quite exciting.
We're also exploring other ways to speed our art along. Our distributed team is doing great work, but it's clear we need more help to ship in a reasonable time frame. We are aiming to make the best multiplayer game out there but it's difficult without any full-time artists! So besides our funding, we're exploring other partnerships with game companies and art-outsourcing companies to see if we can partner up there.
On the game development side, client-side scripts are working pretty well and it's intoxicating. After the pistol went in, it was 15 minutes to get a basic machine gun working. It's literally 25 lines of code. Then a similar amount of time for the shotgun. Of course we'll want to add more custom behavior to each weapon to make them more unique, but it's exciting to add new weapons while the game is running. Very slick.
We're still looking for a killer concept artist or two; we seem to have a real talent for getting amazing concept artists interested, then suddenly having them become too busy with other projects or real-life. if you're interested, e-mail us your portfolio at jobs@unknownworlds.com
Max is cranking away on a new project that everyone will see pretty soon. He's a machine!
That's about it for now, hope you enjoyed it!