San Francisco, California. October 31st, 2006 - Unknown Worlds Entertainment, Inc. today announced plans for Natural Selection 2, a sequel to its Natural Selection game for Half-life.
Natural Selection 2 is the next wave in the war for survival between humankind and the Kharaa. Natural Selection 2 is the next evolution in multiplayer action/strategy gameplay and will be targeted for both competitive and public play. New features include dynamically changing environments, a new resource model, flexible game scripting and modes, and new weapons, abilities and upgrades. Natural Selection 2 will be a stand-alone commercial game for release on VALVe software's digital distribution service called Steam (http://www.steampowered.com).
Natural Selection was released on October 31st of 2002 and since then has been played by 300,000 players for over a billion player-minutes. It won Gamespy's Mod of the Year and became the most popular independent "mod" for Half-life. Natural Selection v3.1 is available for download free from the Natural Selection site (http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns). Unknown Worlds Entertainment, Inc. (http://www.unknownworlds.com) is a self-funded independent game company based in San Francisco, CA.
We'll be releasing lots more information on the game, the features and the technology via our site news and frequent updates to our new game development blog.
Also, as you have now noticed, the site is baaack! Not only is it back but it's been completely redone. After well over a year and half a dozen programmers, it's finally operational. It's not perfect, but is completely functional. Please let us know if you find a problem with the site so we can fix it. Don't spread it around to your buddies so they can have their way with us and put us out of commission for another year. It was a huge amount of work, but you'll see every message from the past 4 years is still here. We just couldn't bear to let 1.5 million posts get flushed down the drain. There are new YouTube trailers, mailing lists and much better admin tools to keep the riff-raff out. Let's hope it was worth the wait.
As promised, we are going to start testing NS v3.2 with Constellation members later today. You will receive an e-mail today or tomorrow with full instructions. Remember to try to withhold judgment on changes until you've played a few games! The Constellation system isn't functional yet so if you haven't donated previously I'm afraid you're out of luck and you'll have to wait until the public release.
One of the big problems that we had when the site went down was funding. Primary funding for future NS development came from the Constellation program and when the site went away so did that. I had to put future NS work on hold to pay the bills. I also wrote a small game called Zen of Sudoku to bring in some money more quickly. Zen is feature complete and will go live on some big portals (including Steam) shortly. Between Zen and some other funding we've secured, we can safely announce our next game! It's taken a long time, but it's great to be in a position to self-fund our own games instead of relying on publisher or investor interests. We'll be able to make the game we want to make and won't have to compromise for anyone.
It's also my pleasure to announce the new Technical Director for Unknown Worlds! Max McGuire helped out on NS in v2.0 days, but his day job was writing the engine, tools and technology for Titan Quest. Max has been writing game engines since his early days in high school and was the Lead Engine programmer on Titan Quest. He was also the first employee at Iron Lore. Max will now apply his formidable talents to Natural Selection 2 and our future games. Welcome, Max!
We are also planning on releasing a technology demo (like we did with NS) as soon as possible so level designers can start making maps for official inclusion in the game. We know that you die-hard players will download that and probably figure out some way to play it as well (Skulk racing, anyone)?
At long last, we're excited and optimistic about the future...again!
We're still on track to release the new site to the public and make some NS announcements tomorrow, October 31st, 2006. Let's hope things go smoothly!
If you're anxious in the meantime, check out our new game dev blog.
Next Tuesday, October 31st marks the four-year anniversary of the first public release of Natural Selection. On Halloween of 2002 we released v1.0 of NS and it's been a roller-coaster ride ever since. While the 18 months before release steadily increased with tension, excitement and workload, I unreasonably assumed that the release would be the "end" of NS and the start of something new.
Instead, the first few months after release were non-stop work. We release four urgent patches over the next couple months to fix server performance, network performance and balance. Then came a big reworking for v2.0, then a big reworking for v3.0. We tried to get NS on Steam, I spent almost two years spending far too much time on a business plan, talking to investors and trying to make a sequel with no money in the bank. I moved, hired people with money I didn't have, and to let them go, built a new website, saw said website get hacked, and rebuilt it. We shopped some ideas by publishers, had business guys come and go, and did contract work to bring in cash. All the while I was living off player donations which (barely) paid the bills and not much else.
Sometimes I feel frustrated that we put in so much work and progress feels so slow - but this year is different. All the while my plan has been to establish ourselves with NS by building and giving NS away for free then selling the sequel. It seems so simple. But this anniversary is different. Pieces have fallen into place.
Strangely, things seem to have worked out perfectly. For even if I had money to fully fund a game before making NS, I wouldn't have known how to do it right - I didn't know how to design and execute a vision. The ups and downs with NS taught me a great deal there. Then if the website hadn't been hacked and some money was still coming in, I would've continued on our current course, which I can now see wasn't as good as it should have been. I also had some urgent personal development that I needed to do during our investor-downtime that I wouldn't have happened if things had gone "better".
My "last attempt" to move the company forward was to make a casual game, which has been a complete blast to work on and looks very financially promising. We've got pending deals with four of the biggest portals out there and it will at least partially finance Unknown Worlds' next game (below).
There's an old Chinese proverb that explores the idea of seemingly-bad things actually being good and vice-versa. In the end it can be more useful (and much less stressful) to simply not evaluate a situation and just believe that everything is working out perfectly. Life is perfect, no matter what happens. Given enough time and hindsight, you will see this as true. This may or may not be true, but it's a great model.
This Tuesday we're planning on re-opening the Unknown Worlds site to the public and announcing the next Natural Selection game. We'll also be announcing Unknown Worlds new lead programmer (and partner!), who has already made stunning progress on a sticky feature in the next game. He's an amazing person, we get along great and he's the perfect person for the job. I've never been this optimistic about our future and I have our serpentine history to thank.
The American Natural Selection League was created to replace CAL as the premier competitive league for NS. Its admins are exclusively experienced competitive players who not only run the league, but are players in it as well. The league aims to improve the relations between public server communities and competitive players with an open league for non-veteran teams.
This means that newer teams will not be playing experienced teams in the league, they will be playing each other. Right now we have four registered teams in each division, and would really like to see at least four more in each. Matches will be starting this week. Interested parties should visit the in-production website at http://ansl.us, stop by and visit us on IRC at #ansl (irc.gamesurge.net is the server), or send an email to ansladmin@gmail.com.
Also, we are planning on releasing the next Unknown Worlds site and announcing the next NS game Tuesday, October 31st (the fourth anniversary of NS)! Stay tuned!
Jon "Merkaba" Chapman has been our resident team mapper on NS since way before v1.0. Not only does Jon have a fantastic visual and layout sense for mapping, but he understands the technical intricacies of VIS, BSP, clip nodes, etc. and is also growing quickly as a 2D and 3D artist. Jon created and maintained ns_hera and between all the major revisions of it, it probably counts as three maps by now!
His new map is called ns_machina and has been in development in various forms for about a year. We've been testing it with the Constellation members Playtesters in NS v3.2 and we're hoping it's going to make the release (which is quickly approaching). I'm not sure how much it has been shown so I thought I'd do a quick level preview here.
One of his interesting design goals for the map has been to make the level feel "alive". You can see some of this reflected in his organic architecture - many curves, arches and liquid elements make you feel almost as if you're roaming among the internal organs of an ancient hulking space beast.
I've created a game development blog that will be updated with development news frequently as it happens. Check it out from the link above or here.
People have been telling me for a long time that we don't update the site enough. I agree. The problem is that until recently, the site was not built for easy updating. The other problem is that a lot of content that is appropriate for IRC, in-game chat or the message boards isn't appropriate for the front page - it's for "hard-core" players who are eager for any news. I've also been constantly amazed at the desire for behind-the-scenes information on game development. So we'll be using this blog to give information about upcoming (unfinished!) features in progress and to give you an idea about our general development process as well.
Stay tuned and...welcome!