the-ship posts

On Monday we posted up an exclusive interview with Chris Peck, the co-founder of UK-based game developer Outerlight. Peck told Big Download that the developer is "all but dissolved" following the completion of Bloody Good Time which will be released from publisher Ubisoft sometime later this fall.

We had some follow up questions to ask of Peck but the answers he provided arrived too late for inclusion in our interview on Monday. Rather than edit and place them in the original interview we have included the questions and answer here as a separate post. You can read them after the jump.

Earlier this summer Ubisoft officially announced plans to release Bloody Good Time, a first person action game where B-movie characters try to kill each other off on movie sets. The game was developed by UK-based Outerlight who gained fame as the makers of The Ship, an unusual mix of first person action, people sim and murder mystery that first started as a Half-Life mod. Both The Ship and Bloody Good Time use the Source Engine from Valve.

What is not generally known is that Outerlight as a development team has been shut down since finishing Bloody Good Time for Ubisoft some time ago. Both the company's official web site and the web site for The Ship are no longer online. Before Bloody Good Time was officially announced Big Download reached out to Outerlight team members for comment about the team's future. The company's co-founder Chris Peck finally agreed to answer our questions about the game and Outerlight in general.

Big Download sent Ubisoft our interview with Peck before posting it today and asked for their side of the development of Bloody Good Time and their reaction to Outerlight's current shut down. So far we have yet to receive an official comment from the publisher on the interview's content.

We've been wondering what the developers at UK based Outerlight have been working on lately. The team first came on our radars as the creators of The Ship, a unique multiplayer action game that started life as a Half-Life 1 mod and later became a full-fledged Source Engine game in 2006. In 2007 Outerlight announced it was working on a sequel to The Ship with a "major international publisher" but since then no news on the project has been announced.

Now a post on the game's official message boards has revealed that Outerlight team members have been spotted playing an previously unknown game called "Hollywood Murder Party" on Steam. It's unknown what this project might be; a true sequel to The Ship or a all-new project. We will try to find out more in the coming weeks.

[Via Shacknews]

Valve's Steam service has announced its regular weekend sales reductions and this week we have a couple of deals to let you know about. The first is for Multiwinia which just had a new demo released. The Introversion Software multiplayer strategy game is now available on Steam permanently for just $9.99. This weekend only, you can also get the first game in the series, Darwinia, for free with any Mutiwinia purchase.

The other weekend sale is for The Ship, the innovative first person action game from developer Outerlight. The game just got a major content update via Steam that adds a new map, new gameplay modes, new player characters and more. For this weekend only you can download and purchase The Ship for just $4.99, a 75 percent savings.

And just as an aside, Steam has added quite a few small and indie based games to their service this week including Spectraball, Galactic Bowling, Space Trader: Merchant Marine and Baseball Mogul 2009.