The Null Newsletter - October 2023

By Matthew Rorie

#Newsletter

Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of the Null Newsletter! If you’re reading this on October 31st, then we certainly hope you have a very spooooky Halloween ahead of you. Unfortunately I live in a neighborhood without many trick or treaters (they mostly take a trip over to the wealthier island community near us), so I’ll just have to treat you with this fine, relatively unspooky newsletter.

A lot of this month has consisted of creating assets for a variety of trailers that we’ll be debuting in the future; a lot of this work has been focused on taking static logos and applying animation and sound design treatments to them. I, personally, have also been diving headfirst into the hiring pool as we look for someone to help assist us with social media and short social videos for all of our games, as well as talking to a variety of agencies to assist us with public and press relationships, influencer marketing, and social media. It is interesting but time-intensive work!

Anyway, here are some other exciting items from Null in October!

Image of Jeanna LeClair

Welcome Jeanna Leclair!

We’d like to welcome Jeanna LeClair to the Null team as our new Creative Lead! She’ll be responsible for all aspects of design for the company, including working on new art for our games and working on treatments and overlays for our video products going forward. We’ll have a Q&A with her on the site in November, but for now, check out a quick bio:

Jeanna heads Art Direction at Null. As a creative at heart, she continually strives to develop visual solutions that express art, design, and marketing into a cohesive effort. Coming from Ubisoft, she brings the insight needed to maintain brand awareness and make graphics shine, catching the attention of targeted audiences.

Jeanna is the friendly Canadian on the team, living up in Toronto. When she isn’t creating yet another farm on Stardew Valley, she dabbles in abstract painting and illustration.

As mentioned, we’ll have a full interview with Jeanna at some point soon, so please stay tuned to the website, our YouTube channel, or this very newsletter for more info.

Null Visited Tokyo Game Show

Tokyo Game Show

Dave Newman and Karim Chaoui jetted off to the bright lights and big city of Tokyo in September to attend Tokyo Game Show! They were looking for games that might need publishers in the future, of course, as well as scouting for any partners who might help our games have successful launches in Asia. Don’t take my word for it, though: you can hear a full recap of their trip (as well as accounts of their site-seeing adventures), in the video below. Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel to stay up to date with any future travelogues!

October Gaming In Review

With Spider-Man 2, Alan Wake 2, and Diablo IV: Season 2 launching in October, it was a big month for 2’s. I have been dabbling a bit in Spider-Man 2, but I’ve always been relatively awful in combat in those games; although I was always proficient at the combat in the Arkham Knight games that the Spider-Man games generally remind me of; there’s something about the verticality and speed of the combat that just tends to get me flustered. I’ve set the difficulty down here to Friendly, though, and have been having a good time swinging around and doing the often meaty sidequests.

I’ve been spending a lot more time in Diablo IV this month, though. A lot of quality-of-life changes have made the game a much smoother experience to play through, and at least one build seems to be entirely broken with the devs stating they have no intention of toning it down until next season, so I’ve been Ball Lightning it up and having fun just melting enemies with little interference. I’m nowhere near the ferocity of this endgame build yet, but I am at World Tier 4 and am about to get a lot of upgrades, so hopefully the sky’s the limit.

Etcetera

As always, the Paradark Studios Discord server is a must-subscribe for news on ExeKiller (and weekly intriguing questions from their community manager). The Tape To Tape Discord is also celebrating the future appearance of the game at Awesome Games Done Quick in January. (We’ll definitely be tuning in!)

Don’t forget to subscribe to Null on Twitter and YouTube, and as always you can find plenty more news about Null Games on our website and maybe pick up some gear in our merch store.

See you next month! -Rorie