Dev Blog - E1M1 announcement, studio name reveal! (Patreon)

A year ago during Realms Deep 2020, a certain gaming magazine called E1M1 revealed themselves to the world. A retro shooter magazine which, surprise surprise, covers the type of shooter we all hold near and dear to our hearts; retro shooters (or as I prefer to call it: Throwback Shooters). They are gearing up with a new Kickstarter campaign and the line-up that I have seen is looking incredible.

2 months ago I heard the amazing news that Selaco would be covered on E1M1 among many other awesome titles. I didn't know any details yet outside of ''we're being covered''. A week or so later I woke up with a Discord message from Zach (founder of E1M1), containing nothing but a picture. I opened up and saw a sketch of Dawn kicking all kinds of ass. It was a rough concept and I had no idea what he was getting at. ''Why did you commission something Selaco related?''. It was here that everything started to snap into place for me. ''Are we being featured on the cover!?''

artist: https://twitter.com/atomikranger

How damn amazing is this piece!? Zach was kind enough to allow me to share this with you guys. Remember to keep this a secret for the time being! This issue, among other details, will be unveiled at Realms Deep on August 13-15.

I am so happy with how all of this turned out! Being featured on a gaming magazine is all sorts of awesome and having such an amazing piece of art to go along with it is just the cherry on top. I cannot go into details about this issue yet, and I unfortunately cannot share a text-less version with you guys. I'm share Zach will share more details on it when the event begins!

Studio Name

Back in April when I put the project on Steam, it still felt appropriate to put the game on there with me being credited as Sole Developer of the title. This was my baby, this was 4 years of my life and I did not feel comfortable sharing the credits with other people because (roughly) 95% of the work was all me, with other stuff being commissions from talented artists here and there.

A few months have passed since then and a whole lot has changed. The team grew bigger, everybody's motivation to  work on this project went through the roof and it no longer felt like I was the only one keeping the project afloat. Nowadays it's a full team effort. Between the amazing art assets our artists are creating, the amazing UI elements Cockatrice is implementing, the glorious audio effects and music from Lawrence Steel, the writing of Kenneth Knot... It is all here! Everybody is giving it their A-game these days to a point that I refuse to credit the game as a solo-developed game. It is no longer the game it was before we announced it.

Ken and I started talking about the future of Selaco and the team and decided to turn it into a game development studio where we all remotely work on this project and hopefully more in the future.

I'm happy to introduce to you... Altered Orbit Studio's!

And our new Selaco logo

(Alternative versions can be found here https://imgur.com/a/qZzBl4D)

Ken and I have been working on this game for a very long time. Nothing of what existed 4 years ago still exists today. Switching from a generic male Space Marine who did nothing but grunt in pain, to a well developed female lead who is fully voice by a professional voice actress (Melissa Medina). The switch from a horror focused experience to an action packed experience. From a generic grey techbase setting to a beautiful underground city full of bright lights and colors. From fighting red blooded humans to fighting neon purple blooded Aliens. The list goes on forever.

Not only that, even after we locked down certain decisions, things kept changing. We have re-casted the actress for Dawn multiple times, the UC-36 (assault rifle weapon) went through multiple complete overhauls because it was a weapon crucial to ACE Security, the story we once loved so much eventually turned out to not be engaging enough so we kept tweaking until everything was satisfactory. I can go on for hours! I can fill an entire year worth of blog posts about all the ideas that didn't make the cut or has been significantly altered. Change is a common theme for us in this team. We are not afraid to love something and letting go of it because we feel like we can do better. ''Altered Orbit Studios'' is a fantastic name that reflects us. Not only in how we operate, but also in the story of our flagship title, Selaco, where the character AOS is a crucial centerpiece of our story.

Ken and I quickly grew attached to the name. And the moment we pitched it to the rest of the team, everybody was on board with it. Then the logo designed by the same guy who designed our Selaco logo; Paweł Kozak, knocked both of these logo's out of the park and we are happy to have worked with him. 

The future is looking awesome and we largely have your support to thank for that. We are trying to get that demo in your hands are soon as we can, please bare with us a little longer!

Nailgun Revision completed!

We finally got to revise our Nailgun! There is a clip on YouTube that you can watch here. Here are two high resolution renders of the gun in First Person view:

I am really happy with how this one turned out! Thanks to you for making this possible! 

SMG

Development is progressing smoothly! A rough low-poly has been created and Silvia and John are working together to make sure it matches the concept art. Here is the current version of the SMG:

VERY WIP:

Last week we heard that images were not loading for a lot of people. GIFs weren't loading for anyone on Mobile. Moving forward I will create an Imgur album which consists of all the images and gifs shown in the blog post. Here is the Imgur album for this week: https://imgur.com/a/lxpXQ4n 

That's it for this week! Apologies that it's a little shorter than usual. A lot of time is spend creating textures, map assets and other artwork which we think are best kept under wraps for the time being!

Please let us know your thoughts about the things discussed in this blog post! Looking forward to the next one.

Thank you,

- Wesley de Waart