Welcome to the latest Null Newsletter! It’s heating up outside, but you know what’s really getting hot? The Null games catalogue! Let’s look back at a very busy June for Null.
Announcing ChainStaff
ChainStaff was revealed as the latest Null title at IGN Live this month! This brutal action-platformer sees you control a soldier that’s been paired with an alien growth on his head. In order to save the Earth from the invading Star Spores, you’ll need to master the ChainStaff, a fearsome alien weapon that can act as a shield, spear, platform, and grappling hook. Take a look at the Reveal Trailer, and find more information on the official ChainStaff website!
We’ve been working with Nathan Fouts from Mommy’s Best Games to get ready for this reveal for months now and were happy to leverage our attendance at IGN Live in Southern California earlier this month to ensure that tens of thousands of viewers of the IGN Live streams and VODs would get a chance to view the reveal trailer, and thousands more players managed to get their hands on ChainStaff for the first time on the IGN Live show floor. It was fantastic seeing thousands of attendees sitting down with ChainStaff and Demon Spore over the course of the weekend. We also managed to show off Demon Spore on the IGN Live stage and livestream!
If you’d like to learn more about our southern California adventures, please read our full recap of the event right here. The month’s not over yet, either! Null is at this very moment attending both the X Games in Ventura, California (showing off Streetdog BMX for all the extreme sports fans) and gamescom latam in Brazil. Stay tuned to null.com for recaps of these events sometime soon, or check the Streetdog BMX and Null socials for more pictures and videos from the X Games.
Introducing Rachael Berkman-Sinclair
The newest addition to the Null team is Rachael Berkman-Sinclair, our new Head of Production! Rachael comes to us via Private Division and BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment, where she helped shephard any number of game projects from pitch through their postlaunch phases. Production is one of the most vital aspects of game development, as producers will help all members of a game team and the publishing team to stay up to date on significant dates in development as well as keeping the developers on track for a successful launch. There’s few aspects of the game development process that a producer does not touch, so we’re very happy to have Rachael on board!
Athena Crisis: Meet The Alien
Athena Crisis is barreling towards its full release this fall, and we keep rolling out monthly updates to keep the community appraised of what’s going on during the late stages of its development. While Christoph has been heads down on improving the game’s balance and implementing the full campaign, we are trying to highlight some of the game’s special features on Discord and the Steam Community Hub for the game. This month’s update was all about our favorite secret enemy unit, the Alien.
The Alien won’t be available on every map in Athena Crisis, but if you happen to wander across this interdimensional interloper in the fog of war, you’ll want to be very, very careful: one swipe of his Munch attack can gravely wound or defeat even armored units.
You can read the full monthly update here. If you missed it, Athena Crisis also shipped a Local Mode update this month, allowing you to play the campaign or PVP maps against bots offline! We know many of you were requesting this feature and are happy to announce that you can play Athena Crisis offline today if you’re playing it in Early Access. We also announced the winners of the Athena Crisis speedrun.com challenge this month as well.
If you’re not playing Athena Crisis yet, now’s the perfect time to jump in: it’s 20% off on Steam right now!
Etcetera
It’s been a busy month for everyone here at Null, with most of the company logging multiple plane flights to travel to a variety of gaming events. We’re luckily going to have a bit of a pause before the next big event that we attend, but personally I have to say that attending IGN Live during the week of Summer Games Fest was a real treat. I’ve been to around 15 E3s in my career and while this year was not quite a replacement for that event, it was still really nice to catch up with people I haven’t seen since the last E3 in 2019. It was a busy few days, with most days going from 10 AM to 10 PM or so with official and unofficial events, but there’s not much that can replicate the hustle and bustle of the busiest week in gaming.
With the whirlwind dying down a bit, Null will be closing for the week of July 4th here in America to rest and recharge before getting back to business on July 8th. Here in Oakland, that basically means that I’ll have a bit more time to listen to professional-grade firework shows being set off directly outside my windows at all hours of the day and night, but I’ll hopefully have time to clear off a bit of my reading backlog during the downtime. Typically for July 4th we just take off out of town somewhere and try to come back around three or four in the morning - poor little Patas up there is not a huge fan of fireworks, and Oakland…well, Oakland loves us some fireworks.
Enjoy the holiday, should you celebrate it, and we’ll see you back here next month. -rorie
