What if you replace all pixel art with 3D? - Devlog April 2022

So many things have happened since last summer! First, we have an investor, a huge one. The game has changed visually, as you can see below or on the video devlog here:. The visual shift from 3D-with-2D-pixel-art to full 3D art is a bit of work, and consequently the team grew from 4-5 to roughly 30 people. But maybe, before we dive into the visual changes in Nimoyd, let’s talk about last summer, because that’s where all that new jazz and magic has its roots.

Last Summer

Summer 2021 was interesting, firstly because many of you played the pre-alpha demo at the Steam Next Festival back then. We had a decent success with our demo, with a few thousand users wishlisting us on a single day. I believe that Steam wishlists are overrated, but it is a neat indicator of player’s interest, right? In addition, we received over a thousand comments, emails, and questions in just a few days, with not only bug reports (thanks for the patience, by the way) but also ideas and suggestions on how to improve our little game here.

As you can probably imagine, those weeks were exciting. And, at the same time, I was making several calls with dozens of investors and publishers. Yes: on top of bug fixing and talking to you on Discord, Facebook, Reddit, or Twitter, let’s not forget: we kept working on our game. If you recall, beginning in early 2021 roughly 40 investors and publishers—from all sizes, from tiny to huge—had shown an interest in Nimoyd. And their interest culminated in summer 2021, when they finally got their chance to play the game alongside all of you.

By the way, those investor talks were the reason why I couldn’t share much with you for a few months, because I did not know how the game might change: every investor and publisher had their own ideas on how Nimoyd should progress. Quite literally. Western publishers, for instance, do not care about the mobile industry, but have at times very strong opinions and “wishes” on how a game should be. Meanwhile, non-publishing investors, especially non-Western investors, appreciate a bigger mobile focus and do not intervene in the production or game design at all.

In the end, I decided to team up with the biggest investor, who is not a publisher, largely because we instantly “clicked”, so to speak. Especially, I felt that they understood quickly what I am aiming at, what a sandbox game is, what we are trying to achieve here (even when we were just a team of 4-5 back then!). And, well, let’s say that their size and level of professionalism felt good too—even though I have now learnt that a huge investor requires an extensive and time-consuming due diligence and legal process that has spread across multiple months, yep.

Visual Changes

So, how come we changed a 3D-with-2D-pixel-art game (catchy term) into a full 3D game? There is a story to that, and it was not an easy decision, as you can imagine. If I recall correctly, not many games have switched from 2D to 3D before release. If you do it at all, you usually do it after release, right? If you feel that the game’s a success. But before release, where you cannot even tell if the game will be cool to play?

We were discussing the upcoming features of Nimoyd, like multiplayer and mobile support, which we had wanted to support anyway, as you know, and I was asked what else I would like to do. I suppose, thinking back, that they imagined more animation, or maybe more story, but I said: ‘Well, what if we remove all pixel art and replace it with full 3D?’ I still remember the look on their faces (in Zoom, of course) and so I had to explain myself: show how the game engine works, how to do it. Because I felt that, although pixel art is great, it caused us so many issues: especially in animation, combat, and customization.

Nimoyd was previously 3D already, it’s just that we tried to make the game look as if it was 2D. Of course, as soon as you turned the camera, you understood that it is a 3D game, just with 2D billboards and 2D player characters in a 3D voxel terrain game. What that meant was that all 2D characters, trees, rocks…everything were actually a 3D object with a 3D collider (yes, no 2D colliders) in 3D space. What started as an interesting workaround when I stumbled into it for the first time across this mix of 2D-with-3D, edned up proving to be an issue regarding combat feel (rotating items), collision detection, weird looking character moments and growing animation expenses—because if you have 16 heroes with 1000+ items, you can only generalize and abstract those items so much, right?

It still took us multiple months of testing, prototyping, and concepting before I was absolutely sure that we could switch to full 3D. After all, ditching all 2D anims, assets, and pixel art UI is not only time-consuming but expensive. You are not only throwing away old assets, though admittedly we were back then a small team, you need to recreate all assets and more in full 3D, with an entirely new team of 3D designers and animators. However, by now, after we’ve tackled all kinds of asset types, I am very happy about the change. The game feels so much better, and certain parts are so much easier to code—literally. 2D item rotation or animation in a 3D voxel engine game is not cool, nor cool looking, when you have 16 hero characters.

Challenges

So, what else was a challenge? Now that it’s done, it is easy to talk about a new art style, but working under time pressure on a completely new art style for UI, 3D creatures, NPCs, etc., gave some team members extra chills and added to the stress of that important time period.

Interestingly, the UI proved to be less of an issue because, in the meantime, we had established a new style guide, so when we started to remove the pixel art UI parts the rest made sense quickly—though it is an ongoing process, and not all screens are done yet because we took the opportunity to improve certain UI screens at the same time. The NPC concepts worked out pretty nicely too. I was aiming specifically for a painted, kind-of-Blizzard-like texturing, without adding as many details to the characters as Diablo 3 does it, in comparison. The buildings and many obstacles like trees and stones also were fairly easy.

The most difficult redesign was the creatures, though. Not only did we have an interesting mix of creature designs before, but keeping the creatures friendly and cute-yet-not-too-cute was an interesting challenge—and those did undergo a few iterations before they finally made sense to us. And, we hope, to you as well.

Another concept that worked beautifully in pixel art was the buildings. Buildings are still in progress, for a few reasons—including how building, farming, etc., have become more interesting now—, but the challenging part here is to make those buildings fit our creatures, trees, and player characters too.

Gameplay

I will talk more in detail about the gameplay improvements in the following months. However, I could share a few insights already. First off, yes, the game will be multiplayer (it is multiplayer already; not perfect yet, sure, but it is fine). Secondly, we plan a mobile release. I will talk about this in a few months but I plan to release the game both on PC and mobile at the same time, think Genshin Impact or, uh, Minecraft? Basically, I imagine us building some stuff on PC—only then to pick up Nimoyd on your phone in your bed, or on your sofa, to play it with your friends on mobile. Or something like that, but you are getting the idea.

A few bigger changes orbit around the survival and sandbox genre. Yes, the game is still a sandbox, an obviously pretty big one, but I grew a little tired of survival games recently. I mean, so many survival games came out in recent years, right? Therefore, I’ve rearranged some parts of the game design to the better, and to make the game more unique in the long term, since we plan to work on this game for multiple years after the release—yes, it is that type of game.

In this regard, there are a few exciting gameplay and game design changes which make Nimoyd more unique and special but I’d say: let’s talk about those in a few months—with actual gameplay footage.

Release

With such big visual changes in the making, what about the release then? I believe that the release will be either late 2022 or early 2023, depending a little on our investor. Even though we have total creative freedom here, you never know how the next 12 months may develop. And, as mentioned, PC and mobile; or PC first, depending on how it goes.

I also want to say that the past months were not only exciting, but that I am very proud of our team. It is to me astonishing what we have achieved so far: self-funded, from a tiny team (it started with just the two of us), which then grew to 4-5 team members in 2021, to now a team of 30 in 2022? That’s something for sure. Growing to such a team size is not without a risk, but I have to say that, so far, we’re doing great, and the game feels better and better every day.

Talk to you soon! I plan to do devlogs either every 4 or 8 weeks, we’ll see!

Cheers, Rafael :)

---

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