Hello! My name is Micha Stettler, I’m a software engineer from Solothurn, Switzerland.
I’m a long time stalker at the unity forums and worked on countless smaller projects but never managed to fully stick to an idea until now.
Finally I managed to focus on a single project for about 5 months now. In order to keep my motivation up and get valuable early feedback it’s time to present you Nimbatus, a game I am working on in my spare time.
Nimbatus is a game where you can build your own drones and deploy them to explore remote planets. On your journey you will encounter alien wildlife and find pieces of technology you can use to upgrade your drones. The planets are procedurally generated, fully destructible and virtually endless in size. The alien creatures you encounter get stronger the deeper you delve into the world.
The drone customization is one of the main parts of the game. You are able to build a drone from scratch and integrate newly discovered parts or completely rebuild your drone before you deploy it to a new planet.
As you can see my skills are more on the engineering side than on the art side, thats why I chose this simplistic artstyle with basic shapes and strong colours instead of realism and high detail. However my terrain module generates multiple-material meshes with uv coordinates, normals and tangents, therefore it’s ready for high quality textures if I change my mind later on.
It is still an early Work In Progress project. Some features are nearly finished but others only exist in my head or are under heavy construction. I spent most of the time designing and implementing extensible frameworks for each part of the game. Therefore It’s still missing alot of content (enemies, items, objects), but because of the nature of these frameworks It’s pretty easy to add new content without the need to change alot of code.
So there won’t be any playable alpha release for the next weeks, but stay tuned.
If you are interested in this project and want more information please visit my blog at www.nimbatus.ch.
I’ll try to allocate some time between my full-time job and the work on this project to post weekly updates on new features and technical details of the game.
Please feel free to give me feedback or criticise my work to help me improve Nimbatus.
Thanks! Credits for the particle effects go mainly to Unluck Software and their great FX Mega Pack, which is available from the unity asset store. ( Asset Store Link ) I just manipulate the effects to suit my needs.
The terrain in Nimbatus is in its basic form just an array of floating point numbers between 0 and 1, where 0 stands for air and 1 for solid terrain. The marching squares algorithm divides the terrain into small squares and calculates the triangles needed to create a mesh. There is more information about it in my blog.
I love how you can shape the environment! It looks really complex, and that to me means more then art. As said by TheRaider, your terrain looks great but I also agree that the drones don’t match it. Anyway good job man, and good luck!
looks interesting, will the game type/design be similar to terraria or starbound? where you explore a planet and build housing, craft weapons and items etc.?
I’ve never player Terraria or Starbound, but you won’t be able to build houses, grow plants or feed animals
But you can explore endless planets and find items you can use to craft weapons and upgrade your drone. Currently I’ve implemented a Weapon Workshop where you can build weapons out of different modules and a drone workshop where you can assemble your drone out of all items you collected.
However the gameplay will be fast and repeatable you just fight through different dangerous environments and try to get as deep into the world as you can in order to find the best items.
But if you crash your drone into a cliff, get destroyed by aliens or hit by a meteor you can’t connect to this drone anymore.
Therefore I try to make the planet generation as interesting as possible, every planet you explore will look different and consists out of different climate zones with different enemies and items. The farer you travel from the entry point of a planet, the higher is the chance to find more advanced or rare items.
Every time your drone gets destroyed you can use the newly found items and experience to unlock new technology and build a stronger and more advanced drone and deploy it to another planet to see if you survive longer this time.
Both the visual style and the mining gameplay look great so far - I really do love that first screenshot! I think the drone could suit being more metallic looking, perhaps you could link the artwork/color scheme of your drone parts to the types of metals they are made from.
As for the overall game description you posted, it sounds like a good start, I just hope it doesn’t become too repetitive too quickly, or people run out of things to do. Your core gameplay does sound a little bit like Starscape (great little game) - perhaps you can find some more gameplay ideas / inspirations from there.
Here you go, I made a first try on more metallic looking drones.
Additionally you can see that there are hinge drone parts (motorized and free swinging) which are alot of fun to play with.
On the downside, I sometimes spend too much time playing with my game than actually working on it…
Hell, this looks so great. Loving the “minimalistic” approach, the warm colors. The look of cutting through the terrain is just great, I want to do it right now!
It’s also possible “add” all kinds of different materials to the terrain by using another weapon module. It allows you to build some walls to protect yourself or trap enemies.
However some enemies have weapons too, so the walls you build won’t last long
In addition to the new hinge drone parts, there are now also fuel tanks available which are used by the thrusters to move the drone. If all fuel tanks are empty you can not use your thrusters anymore and will fall down from the sky.
I’m currently thinking of a way to regenerate the fuel by collecting special materials from the terrain.
The fuel levels are visualized directly on the fuel tanks to remove the need of a on screen display.
