Devlog 5: New Mechs, Tutorials, Recipes, Biomes, and Encyclopedia

Good evening,

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Steam post image

First off, thank you everyone for their support and love. Knowing that a few people out there will eventually enjoy what we're trying to do here, it feels great, really.

This is the text devlog of our new video devlog that you can find on YouTube, here: YouTube link

I’ve also figured that I could use the Steam Community posts as our blog, right? So, from now on, I’ll post all the news and new content infos here. So, what happened since the last devlog in December? Aside from that Christmas tree thing… and a Happy New Year.

Discord Friends

Well, before we dive further into the news and game details, I'd like to say Thank you to one of our fans on Discord. He or she (I should have asked before) set out to write a daily prayer for Nimoyd, lol. Which is so surprising and wonderful that I had to add it in this devlog. Thank you so much!

Steam post image

You'll find the Discord, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook links at the bottom of this post.

First Trailer

So, how was December? Launching a game trailer in December may be not the smartest move but I’ve felt that we need to get the first trailer out in 2020, or else it will get too close to the release in 2021. The first feedback and comments were, despite all that Cyberpunk and AAA press focus during Christmas, actually pretty cool. One of the sweetest surprises was a Japanese gaming magazine article.

New Publishers

Interestingly, roughly 10 new publishers contacted me, in addition to the previous publisher contacts that I mention once, in an older devlog. A few new tiny ones but also many Chinese, one Japanese, and one huge Western publisher that we all are familiar with. Ahem. Yeah.

We’ll see how it all turns out in a few months. I’ve still my 2-3 favorite publishers (hey there!). It all depends a bit on what they want, what we want, and whether we’d like to give up being independent and self-funded, which is, as you can imagine, quite a step, being indie and all.

New Biomes

We’ve finished 3 new biomes. Beach, jungle, and fungus. Fungus is special and I will cover Fungus another time, but if you know Ghibli’s film “Nausicaä”, then you’ll probably know what Fungus is about. It is a dynamic biome that slowly consumes all other biomes in the game.

New Tutorial System

If you’re playing many survival games, you probably know what to do next in a new survival game. Crafting, recipes, progression, new assets and new creatures, and all that jazz. However, figuring out all the basic plants, rocks or resources can be still a problem. And, if you never played survival games before, you might feel even lost, right? So, I’ve figured that we need a “simple tutorial system” in Nimoyd. That “simple” turned into a time consuming machine that haunted me even at night. By now though we can configure tutorial tasks for almost everything, so it was hopefully worth it. And the animations look cool too, imho (big thanks to Shanta).

New Encyclopedia

While working on the new tutorial system, I’ve realized how much I’m using game wiki’s playing survival games, which is of course the sign that something is missing in the game to make the game perfect. So now we have an “encyclopedia” in our game which works kind of like a basic game wiki – with all buildings, tools, creatures, plants, and their dependencies. For instance, if you look up “Wood”, you’ll finally what plants and creatures (!) drop Wood. Like a good wiki, imo. But I’m keen to see how you feel about it in the alpha demo.

New Recipe System

A bigger game design and balancing change is the new recipe system. Previously, the Skills were groups of recipes, so that you unlocked multiple recipes per Skill for new items, weapons, resources, buildings, etc. Such a “skill” system was heavily influenced by RPG, but also strategy games like “Civilization”. And it was cool.

However, early testers complained that they felt a bit lost initially, not knowing what “Skill” to unlock first. Think of Skyrim … You do not know what skill tree to climb first, right? Same for all the other skill tree systems. It’s okay for an RPG, or action RPG, I think, because some skills can be easily ignored. However, a crafting and survival game depends sometimes heavily that you unlock certain buildings and recipes in a specific order (think… uh, furnace and iron).

This is how the new tutorial system was born. But soon I’ve realized that no tutorial system in the world can help you with that. What works cool in an RPG, does not work necessarily well in a survival game. So we went back to unlocking single recipes.

Switching from “groups of recipes” (= “Skills”) to single recipes proves to be a big change though. Changing 1,000 recipes by hand is rather time consuming, still unfinished, but the game feels better, so it’s obviously important to do. Your level increases by XP. You earn XP by chopping trees, crafting, even digging voxels, and of course killing enemies, etc.

Market System

A few players asked already what the currency icon is in the game for. Well, markets. You make money by selling goods either to the humans or nations on your planet, or on the galaxy market to the aliens. Both markets have different demands. But more on markets another time. Just a hint.

Mechs

We do not have tanks in the game, so I thought about adding mechs. Because mechs are cool. Mechs are mid to late game content that I will cover another time. It is however a rather simple system where you can upgrade your mechs, so that it fits to everything else in the game, without becoming that one huge mech thing. We use mechs and floating speeder vehicles to move around. In turn, there are no horses or other mounts in the game.

Translations

Aaaand, I’ll update or rather add soon the Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and German translations of the Steam page and our website. The game itself is not translated yet but it is coming too. Thanks to all the translators that made it possible already, even at this early stage.

Cheers, Rafael :)

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Learn more about Nimoyd

http://discord.gg/nimoyd http://nimoyd.com http://twitter.com/nimoydgame http://facebook.com/nimoyd http://youtube.com/c/nimoyd