As you may have noticed, Gravonaut has slipped past August since it is now September, some major issues occurred in the development cycle that caused me to scrap some major assets and rebuild, this overall has lost me about 2 weeks of work, but in the end the delay made a better game. As the great Shigeru Miyamoto (the creator of Mario) once said “A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever”. The delay has made a better game in the end and is giving us time to add a plethora of new features and performance optimizations, but I do apologize for it being longer than anticipated.

As a celebration of hitting βeta, we have lowered the prices of all our shirts in the online store. Now is a great time to show your support for Nexus and Gravonaut by rocking some of our sexy shirts, plus all profits made help aid future development of our games. If you’re on Facebook, you can also show some support by “liking” Gravonaut.

I am extremely excited to have finally hit this stage since we are in the final stretch now, has been a long time coming with too many sleepless nights and hair pulling moments, but thanks to our amazing team, family, and friends, it has made the process all worth it. I’m not giving any final dates yet, but I’m ball parking a week or two before submission.

White tee’s are $19.99 and coloured tee’s are $26.99 (they charge more to print on coloured shirts). We hope you like the shirts, more will be added in the future. Show your support by purchasing our shirts.

Click here to check out the store!

Over the past two months, we’ve squashed almost all the bugs (the final bugs are just presentation issues that will be fixed during beta) that deal with gameplay, added in new features such as vertical gameplay, and a graphics overhaul, all in addition to level development. During the past month we have also focused on player response from fellow gamers (hardcore to casual) that had the opportunity to play early builds of Gravonaut for us that allowed us to gather as much input and critiques as possible to make a better game, as usual this is still an on going process till this day till we finish.

If you’ve been following us on facebook, you’ll notice that we have a picture of a Gravonaut t-shirt, it was only made for the intention of promotion but there seems to be a very positive response and demand for this shirt, close to release we are looking into having the shirt available to purchase for those interested, it’s a great way to show your support for Nexus and Gravonaut.

On a final note, tomorrow is the Canadian release of iPhone 4, I myself will be going first thing in the morning to get this bad boy, cannot wait to test Gravonaut on such powerful hardware, considering we get solid framerates on the iPhone 3G, much older hardware.

Be sure to follow us on Twitter and to “Like” Gravonaut on facebook to support our development and help spread the word.

On to some game news! Lets start off with Black Sun, first and foremost we have a ModDB and an IndieDB (their newly opened site) pages up and running, so if you are part of those communities then be sure to “watch” Black Sun on there, we could use the support. We have been working very hard on getting the engine up and running and recently running our very first stress test on actual Xbox 360 hardware with excellent results, in a nutshell let me say “lots of ships, smooth framerate”. Keep in mind that we do not have all our engine features implemented as well as it not being optimized for performance. Here’s a little sneak peek of what we had running during the stress test:

1024 ships @ ~4000 tris each, each ship applied with a test texture of 4096×4096 resoltuion running at ~55 FPS.

Off-screen pic taken showing only a fraction of the on-screen ships.

So far great results. We have much more done since that picture was taken about a month ago, more models being bult, ships being textured, etc. Still have quite someways until we can show off some actual in-game screenshots of the near final gameplay.

Next is Gravonaut. I’ve been putting my attention of Black Sun on hold for a bit so that I may finally get my focus back on Gravonaut. We’ve made some major improvements since our previous build, runs much better now, more levels, and our recent newly added feature of vertical gameplay! This adds a whole new level to the game, a feature that took some time to get working correctly but the results are worth it. The core features of the game are mainly complete, its just a matter of constructing levels now.

Vertical Gameplay!

As we are getting closer to releasing Gravonaut, we want to start spreading the word. We have a lovely Facebook page up and running and you can show your support by simply clicking “Like”. On there we have been posting new media before the website, so for the latest news on Gravonaut and to show your indie support, be sure to join the Facebook page.

That’s about it for this update, be sure to stay tuned to this site for some upcoming news in the next few weeks regarding some other projects we are doing on the side. As much as we love to, we really want to keep you guys informed and we do apologize for the lack up updates recently. To stay fully informed, be sure to follow us on Twitter and join us on the Nexus Facebook and Gravonaut Facebook.

On to some game news! First up is Black Sun, hopefully by next week we’ll have some new media on the game to share with you guys, we’ve been working extremely hard to get the game up and running along with modeling, texturing, etc. We are still extremely early in development and we have a long road ahead of us. On to Gravonaut, the game is coming along slowly since all efforts switched back to Black Sun, though we are about to switch back. After discussion we decided to release an iPad version after the iPhone version due to the fact that, well… we do not have iPads yet since they have not been released outside the USA, and no, we’re not importing. We have been developing on an iPad simulator but that has seemed to cause issues with development, so we are holding off until we get the actual device someday. Right now we are focusing on iPhone and iPod Touch release as primary, then iPad possibly later on. We’re shooting for an end of the month release, stay tuned on that.

Lastly we have ModDB pages setup, for those who are users of ModDB, be sure to watch us and Black Sun at the links below.

Nexus Game Studio

Black Sun

Don’t forget to join our community forums, we really want your guys input on what you would like to see and other discussion to help make our games better.

The second piece of news I would like to reveal is our mobile game which is entitled “Gravonaut” (genius, I know). This game is our first iPad game with an iPhone and iPod Touch release very shortly after. This game was meant to be a simple side project for us as it is our first step into Apple development, as well we wanted to focus all our resources on Black Sun, so simplicity was key.

Note: Screen taken from Pre-Alpha build, not final game.

To explain the game a bit more, it is a 2D sidescroller where you have no control over the characters movement, but instead to control him you must control gravity itself. Flipping gravity will cause the character to change orientation allowing him to overcome obstacles. We went with a simple 8 bit style to it but do not let it’s looks fool you for it is an extremely challenging game.

We are hoping to release Gravonaut later this month on iPad and the iPhone / iPod Touch versions in May. Be sure to join our forums for your input and more details and media on our games like Gravonaut.

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***Please Stand By***

Cant talk much right now on the games we are making, but we will announce someday soon along with some media on the games we are making for the iPhone. Stay tuned to the site as well as the forums for more details on our projects.