[WIP] Nimbatus

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Here a new video showing the current progress:

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This is great! Art is pretty beautiful, especially those particle effects.

How did you achieve that 'digging' in Unity?

 

This looks great! Definitely will be following this.

 

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.

For the digging effect I generate meshes at runtime using a 2D version of the Marching Cubes algorithm. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_squares)

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 really like the look of the terrain, but I feel the drones don't fit your wonderful enviroment.

Also from a coding point of view I love the way you change the meshes!

 

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!

 

Thanks for the feedback!
I will try to think of a better matching style for the drone parts. I created them in Adobe Illustrator.

 

This looks fantastic! Love it!

 

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.

Going to have to keep checking back on this one

 

This looks absolutely amazing! I love the art and the whole concept behind it Good luck on it!

 

Thats a great idea! I will change the colour palette of the drone parts to achieve a more metallic look today and see how it feels.

 

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..

 

This looks absolutely fantastic. Keep up the great work!

 

I think that's a lot sexier looking that the old green/white/drone - and that hinged tail looks like a lot of fun!

 

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!

 

Thank you !

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.

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Visit my blog to see this drone in action

 

It looks like a game that will go to the top of the chart in Apple App Store and Google Play.

Looks fun and make me feel like I want to play it to, now.

 

VEEEERY cool! loved Pixeljunk shooter to bits and I will love this too. If I wasn't so busy id beg u for an artposition to do the textures for the drones!

 

Thank you! The drones will hopefully look a bit better as soon as I add the more fancy drone parts like wings or shields to the workshop.


Last week was very busy, so I've only had time to make a small technical blog post about the generation of the infinite sized planets in Nimbatus. Please visit my blog if you are interested. (See http://www.nimbatus.ch/technical-information/infinite-world/)

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Aside from keeping my blog updated, I'm currently working on alot of different customizable weapon types.
There will be different types of weapons available to be modified in the weapon workshop. Already implemented are at the moment just laser weapons and projectile weapons like gun turrets. However there is alot more planned in this regard... (grenade launchers, mines, chemical weapons like flamethrowers and of course melee weapons to smash the aliens. ) Expect a progress update next week.

 

Following ur blog, love this game already, hope this works out!

 

This looks amazing! Good job, looks like it will turn out to be a pretty fun game to play

 

After playing Nimbatus for hours, I’ve realized that the workflow of having two separate workshops, one to create the weapons and one to assemble the drone itself, is not very smooth as you’ll switch very often between these two while building a drone.

For that reason I’ve combined the two workshops into one. The drone workshop now has an expandable tab where you can create the weapons and attach them via drag and drop to the drone.

I've added multiple weapon and ammunition types to the game, please have a look at this video showcasing the workflow of building a drone and showing the new weapons in action: (I apologize for the missing audio :|)

If you want more details about the newest features, please make sure to visit my developement blog at www.Nimbatus.ch

 

Nice, this game reminds me Liero

 

Yes I loved to play liero 20 years ago. It was surely an inspiration for creating the destructible terrain.

 

I've changed the way particle effects work when colliding with the terrain.
Now every projectile, explosion or laser beam that hits the terrain will spawn particles with the same color as the terrain that was hit in addition to their own impact effect.

 

I've finally implemented the research facility. It allows the player to research new technologies which grant access to more advanced drone parts or provide passive abilities for your drone.

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The technology tree is made by calculating the positions of each node using a force directed graph in a coroutine. So the tree gets updated automatically as soon as you unlock new technologies.
Please have a look at this small video demonstrating the behaviour of the tech-tree:

 

Wow! This looks really impressive!
The art style is also great!

 

That is one very sexy research screen

 

This week I made an improvement of the movement for the flying enemies by adding swarming / flocking behaviour.

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I also worked on the drone workshop. It's now possible to interconnect all drone parts. (The datastructure I use is now a graph instead a tree )

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I recently replaced my old wacom intuos tablet by a new cintiq companion tablet, so expect updates on the art side over the next few weeks

 

That mesh destruction looks amazing! I'd love some more insight on how it was achieved. Also a piece of that terrain system would probably do really well on the asset store.

Anyway everything about the game is looking really good! I'm sure it will be a huge success.

 

The last two weeks I worked heavily on the enemy AI and used some of my free time to design and paint new background objects and enemies.

Here you can see a new screenshot of two flying enemies attacking the player with weapons.

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As for the AI improvements, there are now the following features implemented:

• Enemies can use ranged or melee attacks to destroy the players drone.
• Enemies can be either aggressive or passive. Aggressive enemies pursue the player, passive enmies however will try to avoid the player.
• Enemies can equip the same weapons as the player to make the combat more exciting. With enough dropluck, each weapon used by enemies can be obtained by the player and attached to a drone.
• Enemies can either fly in a swarm or walk on the terrain.

All enemies are implemented using rigidbodies so they will physically react on explosions and projectiles hitting them.
Here is an enemy I'm currently working on:

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Thanks for the compliment ! Well it's my first game so I doubt there will be huge success. I would already be happy If I finally finish the game this year
I also thought about releasing the code for the endless destructible terrain on the asset store. But at the moment I just don't have enough time to wrap it up and document it.

I may clean up some of the more interesting parts of my game and release the source code on the asset store after the release. (Drone Building, Destructible Terrain, etc..)

 

As mentioned in the last post, I’ve spent the few free hours I had during the last two weeks designing and painting new objects, enemies and items.

The first thing you might notice is the addition of prototype GUI elements like the compass or the notifier if you unlock a new item. The compass is a key part of the game mechanics, it will always direct you to the nearest dungeon, which is inhabited by a random boss enemy, but I will tell you more about that later

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I also changed the camera movement, so that it will get affected by the players rigidbody velocity. This is especially useful when traveling at higher speed so you can see ahead and avoid collisions.

 

First of all I'd like to apologize for not being active for the last few weeks. I had alot to do at work and could not spend as much time on Nimbatus as I wanted.
However I'm now back on track and I have some cool progress to share.

I recently changed the lighting method used in Nimbatus from Gamma Space to Linear Space. This change allows me to utilize HDR lighting and use better looking shaders for the particle system. I use the great Natural Bloom Shader from Sonic Ether, available on the Asset Store right here https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/17324






All the particles now have a much smoother glow and light up their sourroundings. In my opinion it looks much better this way. The effect can be disabled in the options menu to increase the framerate on slower machines.

Dungeons
Last week I talked about dungeons, the initial idea was to place portals all over the world which will teleport you into a dungeon which is filled with deadly traps and boss enemies.
After some tests this concept just didn't feel right. Therefore I reworked the terrain generation module and added the possibility to distribute huge Places like dungeons, ruins or crashed starships right into the world without conflicting the procedurally generated terrain. This technique fully eliminates the need of loading screens.




So once you arrived on a planet you can fully explore it without ever seeing a loading screen. All places, enemies, objects and the landscape itself are generated procedurally.

Next time I will show you*some combat. At the moment each enemy is equipped with randomly generated weapons built out of modules of the appropriate level. But this system may be too overpowered, you have basically no chance against a swarm of enemies equipped with tripple poison grenade launchers

 

The new particle effects definately look cooler, and its great to hear more about the gameplay side of things too. So... when do we get to playtest it?

 

Well I was thinking about releasing a demo-version where you can use the drone workshop to assemble a drone and fly it around in a small test environment, but I haven't planned it yet. You will hear from me as soon as I decide to release a playable demo version

The drone building is the core part of the game and it would not hurt to get some more feedback to improve it or find bugs. At the moment only family and friends have access to the newest builds and provide me with feedback.

 

I am testing JellySprites from the asset store , it can be used to make soft body sprites.
I may use it in the future for some enemies and "airbag" like drone parts. For testing purposes I made a huge jellyfish



Its really fun bouncing into this big jellyfish until it explodes :mrgreen: I can recommend it to anyone working on a 2d game! Visit the JellySprites Thread for more info (http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/215305-Jelly-Sprites-Soft-body-sprite-physics-system)

 

I've streamlined the user-interface based on feedback, to provide a better and more clear user guidance as you can see in the following screenshots. The game will now guide you step by step instead of just having everything accessible from the main menu.

In the same process I got rid of the research facility and the technology tree, it was just too complicated and felt a bit misplaced. There is now a GameOver screen where you can choose the technology you like to research as soon as you unlock a new level. Internally it still uses the same tree as before, so researching a specific technology will unlock new ones at the next level.











One thing you might notice is the new Drone selection screen. Its now possible to create and save up to 3 different drones, each drone is saved to a file and could be shared with someone else. if three is not enough I might add more slots.

 

Really liking the UI - cleaning and simple, and matches the game style perfectly!

Curious how the tech tree now linked to Game Over will work out, kind of encourages you to fail to make yourself stronger, but without seeing the tempo of how the game modes play out it's hard to say. If dying and going again is a common thing, it'll probably work out fine. Does it always just offer 1 upgrade regardless of score / game duration?

 

You will fail alot and need to build better drones from the items you find or the technology you research in order to survive longer.

And the longer you survive the more experience you get which allows you to unlock more advanced technology.
At the moment it offers you a choice between two technologies each time you level up. Its possible to level up multiple times in one playtrough so you'll get mulitple rewards at the end.

But you are right, you only unlock new technologies by getting yourself killed. Maybe I need to add a meteorite storm or something to make sure you die after some time

 

Sounds pretty good Micha

 

This looks fantastic, its a really interesting concept. Looking forwards to seeing how this progresses.

 

your game reminds me of http://www.captainforever.com/

 

Yes seems like this game has some similar concepts as mine.

 

This is just a very short update. As promised last week I recorded some gameplay footage including an overview of the graphical options, drone building and combat against different enemies.

Please enjoy these videos on Youtube and feel free to comment or give me feedback!

As you might notice there are still no sound effects or music in the game, therefore I just added some songs youtube provided for me.

About ten different musicians or composers have contacted me over the last weeks and wish to work with me on Nimbatus, so I will keep you up to date on this matter.

 

The screenshots don't do it justice - it looks even better in motion! The bloomed particle effects look especially nice.

 

Thanks alot!

I noticed something. When I run the game in Fullscreen I get 60fps without having VSync active and with the same settings in windowed mode I get about 700fps.

I'll have to figure out where this comes from. Especially when capturing a video at the same time its much smoother with 700 fps.