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Huge Suggestion Post


Kadan Joelavich

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I got this game after you guys posted on Reddit, and so far I have really loved the demo. I’m super excited for the final product, and I am already one of your kickstarter backers. I’ve played a lot of games similar to this and I have a lot of feedback and suggestions, so bear with me.

 

Game Fundamentals.

I absolutely love the quest-like nature of exploring the galaxy and finding new parts. Not only is that a great foundation for the game, but already having features like the sumo arena, battle arena, and a shop and scrap system really make it shine even as a demo. There are a few things I think would improve the game even more:

• Quest reward parts beyond just weapons. Play more to unlock more.

• A budget per ship (more on this later).

• A part factory where players could disassemble and customize weapons (and other parts). For example, turning a tower weapon (that tracks your mouse) into a fixed weapon.

• A PVP arena. (Death match, team death match, capture the flag, etc.)

• Friendly fire. (Maybe shooting 50 rockets at a time isn’t a good idea).

• Quest related galaxy map travel restrictions and unlocks such as fuel, wormholes, etc.

• Wider camera zoom in game and/or the capacity to view beyond the immediate area around your ship (maybe part dependent?), to allow for larger ships without compromising visibility.

 

Construction Fundamentals.

I think that the ship construction is mostly intuitive and easy to learn, while still allowing for significant creativity. There are a few things that I would do to improve upon it:

• A budget per ship system. Instead of only using money to buy parts at stores, players could have a shipbuilding budget (dependent on a portion of their total money) to limit the size and complexity of each individual ship. Each part would have a monetary cost, and players couldn’t build a ship larger or more complicated than their individual ship budget. It would encourage players to work on building efficient ships, rather than just massive weapon barges, and also motivate players to keep exploring and mining to improve their ship budget.

• Better part connections. My biggest issue presently with the ship construction system is that each part can only connect to one other part. This means that there’s really only two viable ship frameworks that players can build: long snakelike ships with each part connected to the part in front and behind, or dense brick-like ships where the pressure of surrounding parts keeps pieces from wobbling around are flying off. It would be great if we could connect each part to multiple other parts, or even just have a single part that allows for multiple connections. Additionally, it would be awesome if we could tweak the connections between parts themselves. For example setting a connection between two parts to be more rigid (stays in place better but more susceptible to damage) or more flexible (more ropelike and looser, but takes less damage).

• A mirrored placement setting: the player sets a central point and parts placed our mirrored on either side of that point on an X or Y axis (or both).

• A UI option to change the rotation amount when the mouse wheel is moved (currently set to 9°)

• Some part stacking. Right now stacking pieces on top of each other causes unstable wobbling and ultimately destruction, but with some of the parts that doesn’t make sense. Why couldn’t one put a solar panel on top of the fuel tank, or attach a weapon turret to a thruster? Maybe some kinds of parts could be attached to other kinds of parts?

 

Learn from other Games.

I posted this in response to your Reddit post as well, but Nimbatus reminds me a lot of a little indie game called Gimbal released by 8888888 Labs. If you haven’t already, I would strongly recommend getting a copy of this game and trying it out because Gimbal had some fantastic innovations for a little shipbuilding game, but also some significant pitfalls that other games should try and avoid.

• Single player and multiplayer balance. This is one area where Nimbatus is already beating the pants off of Gimbal. Gimbal had almost no single player options, campaign map, or quest-like features. It was almost exclusively PVP, and because of that when the game community became large enough that people started hacking and cheating, the game pretty much died and fell apart.

• Flexible ship design. It seems like Nimbatus is already headed in this direction, but one of the things that made Gimbal great was that you could build a multitude of different kinds of ships. You could build supersonic hit-and-run fighters, slow armored tanks, or even stealth ships. Players really were limited only by their own creativity.

• Automation. Gimbal had a ship construction section called “software” that functioned a lot like Nimbatus’s logic gate selection, but with a lot more options. Additionally, these software pieces were attached to the ship core, and then applied directly to other physical objects, so they didn’t take up space, or add weight, and they couldn’t be destroyed. I think that Nimbatus’s ship construction would benefit a lot from similar mechanics, and parts.

• Community. One of the things that made the Gimbal community great was that the creator was frequently involved on the game forum, and also the way the game was coded allowed each ship to be saved as a .PNG, so that community members could easily upload and share designs and actually try out each other’s ships.

 

Part Suggestions.

With any construction game, but shipbuilding in particular, long-term engagement and replayability will largely hinge on that games part variety. More parts means more and different designs which means that people will want to play for longer and keep coming back. I have already suggested that a feature be included that would allow players to tweak and customize their own parts in game, but another suggestion could be having innate support for community modding so that the community can contribute to the number and variety of parts available.  However, even with a feature like that, Nimbatus would still need to have a large initial library of shipbuilding parts, so with that in mind here are some suggestions for parts:

• Differently shaped drone brains.

• A velocity sensor. Like the speed sensor but with a preset heading (and degree tolerance), only activates a key when the ship is heading at the set speed in the set heading.

• A mineable material setting for sensors instead of just terrain.

• A mining drill part as an alternative to mining drones.

• A gravity sensor and an atmosphere thickness sensor so your drone can automatically adjust to different planet types.

• A central processing core that would take a physical space, but allow all logic gates to be stacked onto it so that they don’t take up space or weight down the ship.

• A slider to adjust distance sensors from a straight beam into a cone.

• Canon weapons that fire shells instead of bullets or rockets (faster projectiles with heavy impact, but can’t change direction).

• More melee weapons, with higher damage (so that melee attacks are viable option).

• Maneuvering thrusters that have an initial burst of speed but drop off quickly.

• Armor plating. Maybe even advanced kinds that can convert types of damage into fuel or electricity.

• Different types of shields: shields that are better against certain types of damage, shields that are a different shape, impact shields to stop your ship from crashing into the planet’s surface, and shields that can be set to a shielding radius with more protection from concentrated shields and less protection from wider dispersed shields.

• More moving parts: joints, pistons, gears, extenders, winches, etc.

• Explosive packs that can be triggered by proximity, impact, or hotkey (for making things like detachable drone missiles).

• Salvo gates. After a button is pressed several buttons or objects are triggered in sequence.

• Mouse targeting for motorized hinges, and/or thrusters so that you could build a ship that follows your pointer.

• Nano bot hangar. A larger piece which releases a cloud of nano bots that slowly repair damaged parts over time.

• Rotation limits on hinges.

• Wing parts that provide lift (antigravity) proportional to speed and atmosphere density.

• Part layers/coatings. For example, choosing between coating your thrusters with solar cells to produce electricity, reflective coating that reduces energy weapon damage, or reactive plates that protect parts from impact or ballistic damage.

• Scanner or radar parts that allow you to pan the camera farther than the boundaries of your ship, or give you directional prompts towards points of interest (like hives or transmitters)

• Electromagnets. Use power, but can be set to attract or repel other parts, projectiles, other drones, etc. 2x as strong when attracting or repelling another magnet part.

 

Thank you for reading my absurdly long post, and thank you even more for making an amazing game and being willing to listen to your community to make it even better!

 

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I like what this guy has said, I would add my 2 cents after playing for 20 minutes.

 

Melee weapons should damage terrain as well - I really wanted to eat through a planet with a wall of saw blades and was disappointed that it didn't work.

 

It seems like the energy system isn't all connected? I added solar panels to my drone as well as and large batteries, but the batteries don't appear to fill up with power from the solar panels. Do I need to directly connect the solar panels to the batteries? If that is so, can I have multiple connections so that they can link and charge multiple batteries? Thanks!

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