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Feedback for the Nimbatus Kickstarter Demo


Micha

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You can download the demo at http://www.nimbatus.ch/demo/

 

The demo is here to show you the core mechanics of the game.

When we start alpha testing we will coordinate the feedback gathering a bit more  and and let you vote on features that will be added to the game.

 

For now you can just post your feedback, or any cool Ideas you have about Nimbatus here :)

 

Bugs

If you encounter any crashes or obvious bugs please report them in the bug section

 

Things we would like to know

What part of the game do you like the most?

How can we improve the Drone Workshop? What features are you missing?

What is the thing you would absolutely love to see in Nimbatus?

 

 

 

 

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should you be able to use external fuel and power?

 

I've been playing the demo for about ten hours now, and one thing I came on pretty quickly was the potential of a decouple block.

 

I started with a droppable drone to carve it's way to the planet core hive while I mooched about on the surface, and later decided to have some offboard weapons (homing missile launching satellites for arena mode.)

I accidentally forgot to put any power or fuel on my main ship, and realised that I was still flying and firing my onboard weapons, whilst powered by the detached modules.

 

following this, every drone I've made since leaves a large satellite by the mother ship containing all the power, fuel and logic required for the drone, and the only thing headed towards the planet is a compact design of thrust and firepower.

 

This feels like an exploit to be fair, especially as the enemies prioritise your core over everything else.

 

What I'd like to see is having physical linkages being required for fuel and power transfer, and maybe a requirement for a wireless transceiver block for offboard logic.

 

This could lead to some interesting emergent gameplay, such as players designing drop tanks for fuel, (though some way to choose the priority for which tanks being drained first would be useful) Alternatively, if an additional module that allowed docking was created, you'd be free to use small tanks that you could dock with a floating unit to refuel.

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fix sprawling logic and the myriad keys required.

 

I recently used the in-game logic to combine several features within a drone:

+ ripple firing of eight long reloading weapons - 3 clocks, 3 not gates, 20 and gates

+ a thrust 'efficiency' package that lets me use every thruster on the ship for multiple purposes (it can turn on and off main, side and retro thrusters for turning, and strafing - 2 not gates, 16 and/or gates)

plus minor things like:

+ a shield toggle - 1 switch

+ an afterburner button - 1 not gate

 

While i'm sure I could have made this a little more compact, at this point I had used almost every key on my keyboard for the input and outputs.

 

So how about a computer block (wishlist):

a 2x2 or larger block that you can double click on (or otherwise enter) that expands to a screen that lets you place logic gates within the block, and drag inputs and outputs of these gates to connect them to each other. You could also maintain current functionality by dragging the gate input and outputs to a keyboard key field.

 

You could keep balance by requiring the block to be powered (maybe usage based on how many gates it contains) plus of course, it's destruction would completely destroy your logic functionality rather than just maybe part of it.

 

alternatively, for a quick fix - how about allowing us to assign inputs to a 2 digit hex value in addition to keyboard keys - that gives an additional 256 non-key possibilities (I would love both this and computer blocks, you could build incredibly complex drones!)

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Hey! First off, I love the game, spent way too much time on it, amazing ideas here, you guys are awesome!

 

 

>What part of the game do you like the most?

Drone building along with the arenas. Planet exploration isn't super interesting I find, 'cause it's easy to come up with an overpowered drone and just own that stuff. Also, I didn't explore much but so far it looked like all planets were very similar.

 

>How can we improve the Drone Workshop? What features are you missing?

-The logic bit is the worst part IMHO. I'd love to see a graph where I can link inputs to outputs. Some way of linking inputs and outputs other than a key... I don't think having it take that much space is super interesting. A small win that you can have in the mean time would be multiple outputs for blocks.

-Weapons kinda look the same to me. A massive array of beams usually does the trick anyway.

-I don't understand why is the physics so wobbly and unstable!

 

What is the thing you would absolutely love to see in Nimbatus?

-Some sort of multiplayer. I guess the arena is heading towards that way already.

-Also, for me to completely get hooked up on the game, I would need some kind of goal. But that's just the type of player I am... (I don't really understand MineCraft for example :P)

 

Hope that helps! Great job anyway, keep it up!

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One possible approach to logic programming is to have a separate "logic connection mode".  Instead of showing structural connections, logic mode shows signal input and output connections between parts.  Then you can create and manipulate signals via mouse drags and clicks, instead of assigning dozens of keys.

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I really love the demo so far. It is very fun to come up with cool designs for automatic drones and I can't wait to see what the future holds for this game. That being said I feel that it is a little off-putting to have the logic gates connect to the drone brain and sensor modules to be so large as this can easily become a real pain to work with on more advanced drones. I personally feel that it would be much easier and simple if the gates weren't an object but rather accessed in a UI by clicking directly on the drone brain to add in various logic gates in a way that they do not take up space as an attachment on the drone. I also feel that the sensors should all be a one by one square so that the drone isn't so easily taken over by them. This, of course, is just my personal opinion, however, I do feel that this would allow for more practical autonomous drones.

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hi!

i love this game so far (i say that many times now <3)

 

 

Things we would like to know

What part of the game do you like the most?

the sumo arena. I love the part of creating a totally autonomous drone to fight the sumo battles.

 

How can we improve the Drone Workshop? What features are you missing?

I said a lot about that in another topic

 

What is the thing you would absolutely love to see in Nimbatus?

I would like to see a PVP arena at the best of 5 of sumo where you can register your drone in some type of tournament and go earning a ranking (elo).

It's like raising your own fighter child. thats the best part.

I would like to be able to test my design against many other different drones

 

I understand that the part of the planets is in development. but for me you should focus more on the pvp autonomous (just because it is what I like xD) or the arenas.

the exploration should focus more on the collection of different types of resources. as exp and fuel maybe some classic resources such as iron gold I do not know. Add missions such as capturing a number of the same enemies to learn a new weapon.

 

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hey! I'm loving the game I've been playing it all day.

 

I was amazed by how realistically the enemies move and love the little touches like how the fuel moves around in the tanks.

 

One thing I would LOVE to see (because I want this to be a great game)

is a bigger variety of missions because who wants to destory 5 hives and a transmitter all their lives.

 

SO I've got some ideas:

 

1. Mining! Mining below the surface for valuable resources that can be spent in shops! (in fact I made an account on this forum just to say this)

2. Secret/ancient caves. Retrieve an artifact and bring it back to the ship.

3. VIP transport missions. Get the VIP/Vaccine that's needed for a colony to the other side of the map without getting destroyed. (may require a grabber arm mechanic, I saw one on the terrain bot on kickstarter)

4. Maybe a mission can be one where you don't have any drone parts available you're just a terrain bot anad you have to explore looking for parts to build a drone. You find one thruster, then another and then you can build your drone to fly the brain to the ship.

5. Destroy the BORG. There's a virus upon the planet. It's destroying the colony! You gotta kill the borg before it's too late.

6. A scientist is working on the planet on a new laser device but enemies are closing in. It's a 300-type situation requires tactical planning.

The scientists lab is underground. There's a narrow tunnel opening but other bots are burrowing from other directions. Barricade bots must be placed carefully.

 

Other great ideas:

Tutorial planet for logic sensors. I've made a simple sumo bot but I'm not sure at all what the other things do.

More battle planets. I looove this. Particularly the autonomous ones it's insane. Some weapons allowed planets would be really interesting. May with some obstacles in the way like worms and they have to navigate themselves around. Maybe if the terrain bots could have a jetpack that can be fired autonomously too.

 

Thats my two cents

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  • 2 weeks later...
What part of the game do you like the most?

How can we improve the Drone Workshop? What features are you missing?

What is the thing you would absolutely love to see in Nimbatus?

 

  I like making automated drones.  Making many minor adjustments till I have nowhere to go with the design, then starting fresh with a different idea.

 

  The Drone Workshop could have a "Shake Test" button, where a few high knockback, low damage, missiles hit the ship in random places, and the ship shakes around.  To test how solid it is, and if there are any big flaws.

 

  "Retry Mission" button on fail screen, right now there are too many menus to go through to retry.

 

  An "Edit Drone" button on the screen you see right after dying, it would save time to be able to go directly to modifying the drone after a loss.

 

  A Camera block that moves the screen to somewhere else so you can see what your detached Drones are up to.

 

  Still love the game btw.  Super fun.  Thanks for the game guys :)

 

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I like the shake test.  Just shift the brain back and forth along an axis the player can alter.  Give the player to change the frequency of the vector change, speed of motion, and whether it's back-and-forth on a player-defined  axis, or twisting left and right.

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  • 2 months later...

Hello, I have discovered the demo a little bit late and I'm very sad I have missed the kickstarter. I have really enjoyed the demo (and I have also just bought Niche to test it out as well). While playing and reading other comments here, lot of ideas some to my mind! Just a quick brainstorm of whatever that just came to my mind.

 

 


  • Shields - As far as I can see shield has fixed energy consumption, so I just add shield, add solar panel and I have non-stop shield. It might be much more interesting to manage shields if they would drain more energy while being hit.
     

  • Mining - As mentioned many times before, I really enjoyed minning but right now there is no purpose, challenge or reward for mining
     

  • Logic Blocks - I really enjoy automating drones but then I end up with half of my ship covered with logic blocks, maybe logic should not be baked into blocks? Also the logic baked into keys is not the most powerfull one but I understand it's easy to understand and use for most users.
     

  • Game Modes Many many game modes comes to my mind. It would be so nice to have multiplayer arenas, leaderboards, matchmaking and on the other hand story / campaign with progress and so on but I understand it might be totally out of scope to implement and also those ideas sometimes exclude each other.
    • Fight - Automated / Manual - Same like sumo in the demo but with weapons, 1v1 or ffa
    • Race - Automated / Manual - with / without weapons  - Basically having a race track and compete which drone reaches end line as first or race against time
    • Story / Campaign - With some resource management, like mining / buying resources, each part costing resources (maybe better equipment costing rare resources), maybe some mothership upgrades / team / management
    • "Football" - Automated / Manual - Something like sumo but with ball and objective to score it or something like that

     

     

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On 11/14/2017 at 1:41 PM, OsoMoore said:

One possible approach to logic programming is to have a separate "logic connection mode".  Instead of showing structural connections, logic mode shows signal input and output connections between parts.  Then you can create and manipulate signals via mouse drags and clicks, instead of assigning dozens of keys.

Did you get that idea from Oxygen not included? They use it and it works, almost, flawlessly. So yes that's a really good idea.

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  • Philo unpinned this topic
On 3/8/2018 at 1:43 AM, 64-bit_dragon said:

Did you get that idea from Oxygen not included? They use it and it works, almost, flawlessly. So yes that's a really good idea.

I haven't played Oxygen, but back in the day I played lots of Mindrover. It had something similar where there were separate Build and Wiring views.

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