Dark Matter development progresses at a great pace, as core systems are locked into place, inadequate voice-over artists are disposed of, and game pacing and atmosphere come together in their own mixture that is quite refreshingly pant-soiling.

Nuclear Dawn, for its part, is slated to get a new map in the coming days. “Coast” is the second place entry in last year’s mapping contest, by Lewis “KIPPER” Brooks. Our lead level designer has been working to fine-tune the map so that it generally fits in with our performance and quality guidelines, and he’s almost done.

Loosely inspired by California, except in a more desolate, post-apocalyptic way, Coast features sun, beaches, close interior combat and massive doses of collateral property damage in mega malls. After a brutal regime of occluders and area portals, Coast performs right up there with the best Nuclear Dawn maps, and should provide a healthy dose of Downtown-sized fun.

Also we have refreshed the Community Forums with full Steam Profile Integration and lots more goodies so if you have questions or just wanna have a chat with our staff or community go over to the brand new forums over here.

With that ancient piece of wisdom in mind, we set off to design the three warrior-class members of the Scavenger species. After much tweaking and emissive decorating, and just in time to haunt the upcoming holiday season, we are proud to introduce two of their number: the Seeker and Samurai Scavengers.

Read the full article on the Dark Matter website.

Sittard, The Netherlands, 19 December 2012 – InterWave Studios announces the release of Nuclear Dawn Patch 6.9.

This long-awaited patch for the award-winning FPS-RTS hybrid Nuclear Dawn features a major update to gameplay, with the implementation of the Player Levelling Systems.

As of Patch 6.9, players will be able to gain levels, and unlock an upgrade of their choosing with each level reached.  Not only will they be able to increase their health and weapon damage, but also to unlock features such as access to Siege Classes, which were previously only unlockable by the Commander.

Further enhancements brought by 6.9 include game controller support for both game and in-game menus, positional audio for Mumble clients, and a reworked, extended server browser that implements much of the community’s feedback.

Read the full story on the Nuclear Dawn website.

Set in a derelict spaceship, infested by nightmarish aliens, haunted by something far worse, Dark Matter captures the classical platforming exploration-driven gameplay of old, with a powerful, new high tech twist in its dynamic light and darkness systems.

Explore the bowels of the Endeavour as the Ensign; pick up new customizable weapons, equip deadly ammo types with varied elemental effects, and try to maintain a hold on your sanity as you discover the truth about the spacewreck that killed your shipmates.

Fresh out of Alpha, and headed fast for Beta in early 2013, Dark Matter has been in production throughout 2012 at InterWave, and we’re finally able to share the first glimpse into the game’s basic mechanics.

Dark Matter is currently undergoing Greenlight admission, so heading over to vote for the game if you like what you see would be much appreciated!

For more information, development blogs, up-to-the minute feature updates, visit our website www.darkmatterthegame.com, or follow us on Facebook, where the devs personally respond to most messages.

But we did.

Tonight, we received a phone call from the great guys at Iceberg Interactive. They were our publisher in the Netherlands, and wanted to know what it is we’d like them to say in our acceptance speech. Because we’d won. That Dutch Game Awards 2012 thing that we’d mostly left buried under a pile of Dark Matter development and Nuclear Dawn marketing work.

When news come in the middle of the night, they’re not always bad. When news come in the middle of the night, they’re always momentous, however, and this was no exception.

We’re exhilarated, of course, texting and calling each other, giggling like schoolgirls on the eve of their first unsupervised school trip. But there’s more.

Tonight, the wonderful people at the Dutch Game Awards have given us the kind of recognition that doesn’t belong to the cheering crowd, or the howling teenager, or the sharp roar of the tinkling piles of cash. This is a quiet not of approval from professional, people who watch and judge this industry, people who move within it and shape it daily.

The words they gave us: “Who dares to experiment? Who dares to innovate? It is these type of games that are known to cause a headache, that we want to reward with this prize. Sometimes you should not listen to that little voice that says it is not possible, that it won’t work, that it isnt funny. Sometimes you have to take a risk and just go with it, when your heart tells you it is the right thing to do. The winner knew with their game to go further where others were stranded. Congratulations to InterWave Studios and their chief, Michiel Beenen.”

It’s the pat on the back from people whose lives hinge on understanding your work, and it feels so like all those vision we had, but distilled into a single, professional gesture.

The piles of cash may be a while in the piling up, and the hordes of screaming fangirls (and boys, I suppose) will eventually fix their GPS and find our offices. But tonight, we can sit back and smile to ourselves contentedly, celebratory glass in hand, and cheer to a job well done.

Initial reception was positive, but so were the performance issues on various iDevices and several bugs. Many were fixed, many were left for future updates.

As of today, rComplex is not the game we were hoping it could be. It’s buggy, and does not perform well. It lacks basic features such as Game Center integration. After frustrating months chasing windmills, we have been unable to get the game patched by the developer, and contractual obligations keep us from doing it ourselves.

InterWave is therefore abandoning the rComplex project. All rights and dues revert to the original developers. One of them can be found on http://www.rekcahdam.com/ – they can be contacted for bugs and future development.

The game can no longer be purchased on the App Store, and will not be until the developers re-publish it under their names. Everyone who purchased the game from InterWaves App Store account should contact the developers for further support.

Being selected is a great honour of course, and we would like to thank all the fans who played and are still playing Nuclear Dawn for this spot in the limelight.

To keep supporting Nuclear Dawn, and to see it crowned in this prestigious Dutch Award, click on the cool picture below, and vote for us. We’ll post pictures, promise!

Dark Matter is our next full-fledged game, and while it’s set in the same continuum as Nuclear Dawn, it also is completely different from anything we’ve done before. Gone are the large FPS arena battles, to make room for focused, scary 2.5D combat and adventure.

Explore the dark hallways of a derelict spaceship, investigate the lights in the sky, and do try to stay ahead of the insidious infestation that’s taken over the Endeavour after your ship mates were butchered by an unidentified force.

Dark Matter’s pacing and action is a blend of Metroidvania and survival horror genres, with a whole lot of InterWave-branded tactical combat thrown in for good measure. There’s inventories and customizable weapons, crafting and resource collecting, along with a good deal of taxing your grey matter.

Click here to read more about Dark Matter.

Players will be cast in the role of a recently re-awakened Ensign, and tasked with exploring and unravelling the twisted world of Dark Matter.

Dark Matter combines a detailed, hand-painted art style with the latest rendering techniques, making its gameplay about that perfect moment of spine-tingling terror, as much as it is about unloading your firearms into intelligent enemies that react to changing environmental conditions.
Dark Matter is emergent gameplay in a world of darkness, where light is not always the safest place to hide.

There is no set release date for Dark Matter, but we are aiming to complete work on the main adventure before the end of 2012. More details will be released as the game progresses out of prototyping and alpha gets into full swing. We’re very excited about this one, and we’ll be unveiling more sights from the Dark Matter universe regularly over the coming months.

More info will be available soon on the website: www.darkmatterthegame.com

Nuclear Dawn 2 is a little bit like that. In a recent Reddit AMA, we stated that we’re considering working on a sequel to Nuclear Dawn. This was enough to flood the internet with reports on the ‘announcement’ for an ND sequel.

The rumours of Nuclear Dawn’s sequel are currently terminally premature. We are not working on a Nuclear Dawn sequel, yet.

To set the record straight, there could be no InterWave without Nuclear Dawn. ND was our first major project, an idealistic salvo at modern shooters that boldly showed it could, just like that little engine. Such a labour of love cannot be abandoned, and we are at some point in the future going to revisit Nuclear Dawn, and shape a sequel to shame all sequels for our baby, but only when we’re ready.

One thing that Nuclear Dawn taught us is that if you’re going to bite off more than you can chew, you better do so with a tried and tested team that won’t break apart at the seams when the going gets heavy, and as anyone who’s ever been involved in game development knows, the going gets pretty damn heavy just when you need your best faculties at their sharpest.

Right now, we’re focusing on building a team worthy of our ambition and reckless dreams, through work on smaller, more focused projects. Dark Matter is one such project. It’s completely unrelated to Nuclear Dawn in both form and game style, though it does pay homage to the universe and IP. We can’t discuss much about it yet as it’s barely in its first two months of prototyping, but it already shows a lot of potential.

We are building a strong, unbreakable core team so that when it comes to battling giants perched on top of windmills, with not enough stones in our slingshot, at least we won’t be eyeing each other for lunch.

Fear not, we’re not going to leave Nuclear Dawn fans without support, as we continue to roll out major updates that keep bringing more and more to the game, based both on player feedback and on our initial designs.

One such update was just released, and the reaction was heart warming – so many of you picked up Nuclear Dawn and kept playing that we’ve been thoroughly invigorated, and expanded our plans for continued Nuclear Dawn support for the foreseeable future.

Coming soon to a post-apocalyptic wasteland near you is a level cap increase, more class options, some core tweaks to player-initiated unlocks, and destructible, faction-build obstacles, just because there’s nothing like watching waves of powerless enemies crash against your defences and succumb to your weapons fire.

Until we’re ready, Nuclear Dawn will be very much like that famous quantum cat that’s both there and not there at the same time, just waiting for a brave observer to open the box and find out what’s what. Of course, we feel that much as the cat will be both alive and angry, Nuclear Dawn 2 will come out swinging.

“Nuclear Dawn could become the most important FPS game to arrive in a long time” –Destructoid

Since its release in October 2011, Nuclear Dawn has received 6 major content patches which added new classes and weapons, new maps, additional Commander research and abilities, and a slew of community-requested small and large features to keep the game competitive and fresh.

“A surprisingly deep and well-designed FPS/RTS hybrid” – PC Gamer

Upgrades since the release version include, but are definitely not limited to:

• Oilfield – a new, sprawling map of intense desert combat
• Saboteur Stealth – a new class armed with deadly remote explosives
• Support Boost Pack – ammo kits, player boosts and deployable radars have been added to the Support’s arsenal
• Advanced Research Options – Commanders can now research several powerful upgrades for infantry, structures, or for their own abilities
• Battle flow improvements – with spawn-to-spawn fast travel, preferred spawn points, a more solid and functional in-game UI with better menus, a compass and more information
• Training and tutorials – in-game step-by-step tutorials and training sessions to guide you on your first steps in the Nuclear Dawn universe!
• Community features – with a configurable auto-balancer, powerful customization options, and full support for server administration and modding tools, this is the game YOU want to play!

And we’re not done! This promo Day marks the beginning of a new phase of development which will bring even more features to this title which gives “..far more bang-per-buck than most AAA games give you” (AVault).

On April 12th, join us on the battlefield of tomorrow, sample highly polished FPS/RTS fusion, and stay for the long, passionate battles that will test even the most hardened FPS gamers and RTS gurus.

For more information on Nuclear Dawn, head over tohttp://www.nucleardawnthegame.com, or visit our Steam page over here.

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About InterWave Studios
InterWave Studios is an indie game development company that specializes in making awesome games. Made up of dedicated gamers who spend far too much time playing and developing video games, InterWave’s goal is to make genre-bending titles that combine the best elements in order to create uniquely fun and entertaining experiences. As part of the TechConnect holding, the gamers at InterWave rely on an extensive background in development, communications, marketing and online publishing. Nuclear Dawn is their first title.

About Steam
Steam, created by Valve Corporation, is the leading platform for PC and Mac games and digital entertainment, serving over 1500 games to over 30 million active users worldwide. For more information, please visit www.steamgames.com.