NIMRODS News

Hello again, NIMRODS!

We've got something really exciting to show you guys today! We're going to talk about the new options we want to provide to all of the NIMRODS when we hit our Early Access release! That's right; today's post is going to be on our newest project: The Options Screen!

Work in Progress

Okay, okay, I kid. We know that the options screen isn't what you guys are looking for in a Devlog, and that's not the main subject of today's post. But it is something we've been working on.

And sometimes that's the way game development works. A lot of oft-requested features make their home in the options menu, such as keybindings, and they've got to be coded out, even if it's not glamorous. After all, a good options screen goes a long way towards making a game feel professional and polished. But it doesn’t make for the most exciting devlog.

So as we finish polishing up the options screen, let's talk about the actual subject of today's post: Augments!

Out of all the feedback we've gotten, the augment system is the thing we've gotten the most positive feedback on. Players love the way that augments can mix and match, and we feel like our gun building system is second to none. So, obviously we're going to lean into it!

For Early Access, we're not adding new lines of augments, but we are adding a fourth tier to every branch of every augment line. Those with calculators handy can derive that that means 58 new augments will be in the game, eight per slot! (Except the underbarrel slot gets 10... we could probably write an entire Devlog on how that came to be.)

We've done a lot of these augments earlier, some as early as last October, and we were just waiting for the right time to tease them. Given that we've been hard at work on an unglamorous options screen, this seems to be the time!

[h2]Bullet Hell Barrel[/h2]
The first Tier 4 augment to show off is an upgrade to the Hellsplitter Barrel called the Bullet Hell Barrel.
Why bother aiming when you can just spray bullets indiscriminately everywhere instead?

Work in Progress

The bullets all do significantly less damage than they would before you took the Bullet Hell Barrel, but if all of them were to land, you'd end up dealing way more damage per second than any other barrel of this tier. This means for the Bullet Hell Barrel to make the most sense, you'd want to be surrounded by monsters as much as possible... or guarantee your hits by using some other augment...

[h2]Tech Module: Sightsword[/h2]
Another augment we're excited about is the Tech Module: Sightsword.

This augment came about when Zerk was playing around with the Containment Field and asked the team "What if this were a rectangle instead of a circle, and the long end of the rectangle faced towards your cursor?"



I felt like there was still room for "aura" based builds where you were encased in a sphere of bullets, but the idea of directing your Containment Field with your vision was too cool to pass up. This made it feel natural for one branch of the Tech Module; you could either take a route that makes your Containment Field more defensively oriented, or a branch that makes it more aggressive.

But why have a boring rectangle when you could have a freakin' fifteen-foot long sword blade!

Work in Progress

Fire your gun a lot, fill your sword-shaped containment field up with bullets, then swing your cursor around to slam all your bullets into enemies. It's super fun! Just be careful not to swing your sightsword into a rock. You know how they love to eat bullets.

[h2]Neodymium Magnigrap[/h2]
I mentioned on the forums that we were planning to "weaponize" XP. Here's how! Named after the real-life dangerously powerful rare earth magnets. The Neodymium Magnigrip causes any XP that you pick up to rip through enemies and damage them.



This is an interesting augment in my opinion because it converts Collection Range, a utility stat, into damage; the longer your collection range, the more likely there is to be one—or multiple!—Enemies between you and the XP you're picking up. It makes positioning more interesting and combos well with several other augments that give you increased pickup range when a certain trigger occurs.

[h2]Ring of Flames[/h2]
I love the idea of orbital bullets. Right now, that mechanic is only included on the Orbital Dissuasion Barrel, which is only used in some niche high-armor builds because of how much power is dedicated to that barrel's triggered ability.

I was trying to figure out where else we could use that tech, and the Immolative Emitter seemed like a perfect fit; its purpose was to spray fire everywhere, right? Well what if you were in the center of a fire tornado?

Work in Progress

[h2]Explosive Shield Grip Barrel[/h2]
We've got the shield grip in the game right now, and it occupies a nice role: A small pool of what basically amounts to extra HP, except that it's got its own unusually-fast regeneration mechanic.

The Tier 4 version adds a new interesting complication: When the shield breaks, it damages all enemies on the screen:

Work in Progress

This takes the shield's recharge mechanics a step further; instead of wanting to stay at your maximum shield as much as possible, this incentivizes you playing on the edge a little. It's obviously super useful on builds where you want to get hit, making the Shield Projector branch competitive with the Spiked Grip for the grip slot in those sorts of builds.

In conclusion, we think augments are great and are always looking to expand the builds players can make. Tier 4 is as high as our Augments will get in the forseeable future; once we finish up our EA release, our plans are to make a fifth Augment for each slot. Something to look forward to well down the road!

Does this give you any build ideas? Want to speculate on what the Tier 4 for your favorite upgrade might be?

Come hang out in our Discord!

Until next time, NIMROD!
~Talonos

[h2]The Evolution of the Drone[/h2]
It's typical in this genre to have six weapons that you wield at once, and originally, NIMRODS was the same way; you'd have six guns that you could switch between by pressing the numbers 1 to 6 or by using the scroll wheel. Every time you bought an augment or tuning, you could choose which of the six guns to put it on. The first "iteration" of the Drone system was the "AI Control" tuning: With it, a gun would shoot itself while it wasn't equipped, with the fire speed much slower but increasing for every copy of the AI Control tuning you took. With enough copies, you'd be able to fire one gun while having the other five all be AI controlled, firing at full speed, leading to a massive barrage of death.

There was just one problem.

Six guns? In NIMRODS? No, seriously, think about it. There would be way too much going on on the screen at once. If you think picking augments is tough now, try also having to also determine which gun to put an augment on while keeping track of six simultaneous builds! Imagine how many times you'd have to level up to complete all your guns! (Or, conversely, imagine leveling up the same number of times as you do now, but only having each gun have one-sixth as many upgrades.) And finally, imagine how insanely tanky the enemies would have to be to not melt instantly under the combined assaults of six auto-firing weapons. There's a time to follow genre conventions and a time to forge your own path, and we knew that for NIMRODS, only having one gun at a time made sense.

[h2]Just One Gun To Build[/h2]
What if you had multiple guns, but only built one gun at a time? The other guns would come from prior missions that you'd done earlier. That would make it so that you could focus on building only one gun, so you handle only one set of augments and level-ups. This decision would lead to the deep gun crafting system we have today, which would have been impossible if you tried to do it with six guns at once! After a few funny prototype builds where we had a halo of five drones orbiting the player simultaneously, we realized that to make the players feel like their decisions mattered and that they weren't outclassed by their armies of drones, we could only give a player one drone per run. This led to the buddy system we've got now..

An obvious problem that cropped up was how to keep things balanced when you have a drone partner using your old gun. If your gun was at the same strength it was when you originally used it, then it would annihilate the enemies early game and make the game unfun by completely outclassing you, only to fall off late game as your new weapon grew to a higher level than your drone and left it in the dust.

We tried a few different ways of fixing these ideas. For a while, we had your drone be an activated ability you could use. It would cause a full-powered drone to come out of nowhere to wipe the screen for you before flying off again, content to chill until its cooldown elapsed and it could swoop in for another heroic rescue. Problem was that people would keep forgetting they even had it! For a while, we tried not having a drone at all. (It was a dark time.) Finally, we decided that leaving such a unique feature on the table instead of solving its problems was a bit of a waste.

[h2]The Modern Drone[/h2]
It took a while, but eventually, we settled on our current drone. For those of you unaware of the specifics, in NIMRODS, you take guns home with you when you finish a mission. Giving that gun to your drone to take with it on the next mission turns that drone into a "ghost" of your former run, similar to how the ghosts in racing games work. Your drone will start off wielding a base chassis, but it would take all the augments and tunings that you did when building it, in the order that you took them. This was better than our previous solution, which was to have your drones' level up in lockstep with you; it made it so that leveling up fast made for better drones than leveling up slowly. We were a little concerned that it would be confusing to players to place their super amazing level 30 gun on a drone only to have that drone use a pistol at the start of the game, but from what we can tell from feedback, you guys all catch on to the idea pretty fast, and tend to like your drone companions, so it all worked out!

[h2]Drones of the Future[/h2]
So, what's next for drones? What's this new Drone Bay System we’re teasing today?

We want players to be able to customize their drones even further and expand their usefulness. For instance, there are some augments that don't work well on drones. For instance, you know the Terra Cannon Mount, which stuns enemies when you use a character ability? That would be useless on drones because they have no character abilities, right?

Well what if we give them one?

Drone can teleport to its destination. Triggers the "On using a Character Ability" effects from its augments.

Or how abilities that trigger when you get hit, like the Energetically Dissuasive Barrel? Those are useless because your drone can't get hit, right?

Well what if they could?

Press LSHIFT to lower your Drone near the ground. It agains an HP bar, and enemies will target and damage the Drone. It will fly back up, becoming invulnerable again, before dying.

Or what about the Enchanted Bayonet? It hits nearby enemies, but the drone almost never floats over a group of enemies, right?

Well what if it did?

Drone leaps towards your Crosshair with a certain Max Speed

The goal for the Drone Bay is to make it so that as many augments as possible are viable on the drone if you set your drone up correctly. There are three main features of the drone bay: The Targeting selector, where you can customize what you want your drone to shoot and what targets it should pick, the movement selector, where you can customize how you want your drone to move, and the list of special features, which you can toggle on and off to give your drone abilities to make use of certain augments that currently don't have a place on the drone right now. Each of these three options can be unlocked by talking to a special NPC near the drone bay who will sell you drone upgrades.



Our hope is that this will bring even more energy and customization into the drone mechanic. We've already seen in our Discord that people are already going out of their way to build drones with cool setups to help support them in their runs, such AoE drones to assist single target builds that struggle with crowds, credit and research drones that stack augments that give drop chance to make farming easier, and bubble drones players can hide beside as they spray death all over the screen with their primary weapon. We hope to see these sorts of "custom built" drones explode in abundance and variety as people start to take advantage of all the new options drones can gain!

Do you have a favorite augment that is "useless" on a drone? Want to see it finally shine while equipped to your mechanical companion? Leave us a comment here or come to our Discord and let us know, and we'll see what we can do to make sure the drone bay system will support its use! As always, we're open to comments and feedback!

Best of luck, NIMRODS!

(Art is not final and is subject to change)

[h2]Drop Pods[/h2]
It's the little things sometimes that make the biggest differences. Our Drop Pods have become a defining feature of NIMRODS, unique and found nowhere else in the genre. It's very simple: Every time you level up, instead of your new power coming from the mysterious ether, it comes in the form of a five-ton chunk of metal that flattens almost anything it lands on for massive damage. It's simple, arguably elegant, and is a fantastic "holy crap, that was *awesome*!" moment that players see right in the early game. Not bad for in idea we came up with drinking soda late at night saying "dude, wouldn't it be awesome if...!"

So, of course, seeing how iconic the Drop Pods have become, it's only natural that we would lean into them.

This comes in the form of the Drop Pod Bay, another new area of the Home Ship in which you can take your basic pods and upgrade them to be something much cooler.

[h2]Pod Assembly Hub[/h2]

(Art is not final and is subject to change)

The entire system is a little much to onboard new players to, so we're breaking it into three parts, so we can introduce it to players one step at a time. The first of these steps is the Pod Assembly Hub. It lets you build pods that are better than the ones you're currently getting. You pay some resources and/or credits, and you get an upgraded pod of some kind. Here are some examples:

• Rocket Pods hit the ground sideways instead of coming straight down, cutting a swath through enemies instead of only affecting a small circle.
  
• Smart Pods fall down where your cursor is when you level up instead of coming down at a random part of the screen. When you notice you're about to level, keep your cursor near you to drop the pod nearby for an easy level-up, or keep your cursor over the enemies and smash them with a targeted strike.
  
• Gambler pods contain some free re-rolls. Don't like your selection? Re-roll once or several times... but if you run out of re-rolls, you're stuck with the options, even if they're worse than they were before!
  
• Blackout Pods are useful because before selecting an upgrade from them, you can select any number of other upgrades to permanently banish for the duration of the run. Have a thing against Containment Field? If it shows up on a Blackout Pod, that's the last you'll see of it that run!
  

We've got a lot more planned, but this should be enough to give you an idea of how we plan to use the system.

In case you were wondering, all Drop Pods are completely re-usable, so you don't need to worry about losing your investment on an Airdrop that completely whiffs; whenever you level up to a level that grants you an augment (not a tuning) your orbital Drop Pod Bay will pick a random Pod from a pool comprised of all the Drop Pods you've ever built. Once you run out of those Pods, it'll send the rest of your augments in normal Pods.

[h2]Pod Refinement Bay[/h2]

(Art is not final and is subject to change)

Are these drop pods not enough for you? Once you unlock this machine, you can upgrade your Drop Pods! Each pod's special power can be increased to be more powerful than it was before. Rocket Pods cut a wider swatch of destruction, Gambler Pods grant more re rolls, Blackout Pods have more capacity in them so you can banish more augments, and so forth. Upgraded Pods will drop before un-upgraded Pods.

[h2]Drop Pod Scheduler[/h2]

(Art is not final and is subject to change)

The final piece of the Drop Pod Bay puzzle, the Drop Pod Scheduler is the last thing that you unlock. Here, you can assign certain Drop Pods to certain levels, so you could, for instance, put all your Blackout Pods in your first few levels, then some Gambler Pods to finish off your initial build, then stack up Smart Pods to explode your enemies late game when they start to stack up on you. We're excited about this, because we think that the variety of Drop Pods we plan to give you access to, combined with the ability to choose when they appear, will give you all lots of opportunities to make interesting builds before your run even starts.

We really hope this excites you all. Let us know your thoughts ❤️

[hr][/hr]


In other news,

Fiveamp recently had the exciting opportunity to attend SXSW in Austin for the ATX Game Makers event, where we proudly showcased NIMRODS. Our main goal was to get the word out about our game with fellow gamers and gather valuable feedback.

We're thrilled to report that the response was overwhelmingly positive! Possible publishing partners that hadn't given us a second thought paused at our booth and asked us to resubmit our applications.

Experienced indie vets gave us feedback and advice on everything from game design to performance improvement ideas. We received a lot of valuable feedback from players and took a lot of notes from live play sessions. Going to events like these never fail to excite and energize us. I know we've said it before, but it bears repeating: we can't wait to get the full game ready and out to you all for early access!

Hello, NIMRODS!

In today's hotfix the primary focus is to resolve an error that could occur resulting in no upgrades appearing in the Gun Upgrade screen.

As for the smaller updates, we're currently hard at work on the Early Access version of NIMRODS so update sizes will be minimal as all resources are put into the main version of the game ❤️


[h3]Changes[/h3]

• Containment Field and Bullet Optimization have switched places.
  
  As Containment Field is a big change in play-style, we put it at Tier 1 instead of 2 so that you know what you are getting yourself into

[h3]Fixes[/h3]

• Improved German Localization. Special Thanks to Nyatsu
  
• Fixed an issue where certain translations wouldn't display correctly in the Settings Menu
  
• Fixed an issue where the XP would leave the screen after picking up a magnet
  
• Fixed an issue where an error could occur in the Upgrade Screen resulting in no upgrades appearing
  

Without you, the game wouldn't be as it is today. The feedback and bug reports have been overwhelmingly amazing and it's so much appreciated ❤️

If you want to help us, make sure to wishlist our game if you haven't already and share it with your friends! 🤗

If you would like to share your videos, suggestions, or feedback with us and the community,
come join us at: https://discord.gg/mdbCsgnsS7


We hope to see you there! ❤️

[h2]Metagame: Balancing Base Power[/h2]
Most games in the Survivor-Like/Horde Shooter genre have metagame systems not just to unlock more content, but also to improve your base power that you enter a run with: Some games have shops where you can trade gold for stats, others have their skill trees, and so forth. Initially, we shied away from this idea for one simple question: should you balance the game for people who have none of these power boosts, or for somebody that has all of them? If you balance the game for brand new players, then power boosts make the game too easy and more boring, but if you balance it for people with all the power boosts, then new players have little hope of beating the game; winning is more about “buying” your victory with playtime and less about your game mastery and knowledge.

[h2]Dynamic Difficulty[/h2]
This outlook changed when we pivoted from being a small arena shooter to having a huge, open map. The reason was simple: We wanted areas to have differing difficulty levels. If all areas were equally difficult, there would be no sense of progression, and you could rush through the map and see all there is to see before even having played enough to understand the game's core systems. Having some areas be more difficult than others would lock off certain areas (and thus certain resources, pickups, etc) behind gaining enough strength to be able to survive those areas. While you can do a certain amount of that by counting on the player to gain strength through non-mechanical means (like game knowledge and game mastery) the strength you gain from such experience can only go so far. To have a half-dozen or more different areas, each of which is more difficult than the last, we needed to give players mechanical benefits as well! Thus, the idea of the Genetic System was born!

(Art not final and is subject to change. Especially those icons. Or... non-icons, as the case may be.)

[h2]Cloning and Genetic Enhancement[/h2]
The narrative idea is simple. You’re a clone (how else could you have died so many times and still be alive?) and so in theory if your corporate overlords could take the genetic data you’re based on and improve it, each clone would be better than the previous one was. Taking inspiration from other games with slot-based bonuses, we made a screen where you can insert genes with useful bonuses into sockets in your “genetic profile”, a board that represents a given character’s genetic bonuses. These genes can give you all sorts of small buffs, comparable to the tunings you receive as you play: You could have a genetic proclivity to move faster, reload faster, shoot more accurately, deal more damage with your bullets… shoot faster… have more ammo… Okay, narratively, some of them are a bit of a stretch. But the point is, this lets you customize your stats to a certain extent before you even take your first augment.

[h2]Gene Acquisition[/h2]
Where do you get these genes? At the moment, we’re still discussing this as a team. We’re pretty sure your first copy of a gene will come either as a reward from the quest board or from discovering it on the world map, like you can discover chassis blueprints. After that, additional copies of that gene can be purchased from either the research bench for resources or the arms dealer with credits.

[h2]Enhancing Genetic Potential[/h2]
Beyond just the quantity of genes, you’ll also be able to upgrade the quality of your genes. This will improve the numeric bonus of the genes, letting you fit more power into less slots. Genes will provide a significant power spike early in the metagame to help you with the difficulty spike you notice moving from the Chaos Grove to the Hive Barrens, but perfecting your genes by bringing them to max quality is going to be a long term goal that we don’t expect anybody but the perfectionists to reach. Luckily, that won’t be necessary to reach and beat the most dangerous biomes, but those of you shooting for the highest level possible will appreciate the micro-optimizations.

[h2]Expanding the Genetic System[/h2]
The best thing about this system is still yet to come. The genetic system gives us a solid chassis that we can use to put out even more interesting metagame progression mechanics, like Unique Genes and Gene Linking. But we’ll have to cover those topics when we talk more about our post-Early-Access content.

But don’t worry! There’s a lot more to look forward to, even in our early access release. We’ll see you in the next update with more info on new features for you to look forward to at our Early Access Launch!