Greetings, NIMRODS!
It’s been a while since we reached out, so we thought we should let you know how things are doing. Now that Thanksgiving is over, we’re working hard to put out some new content for you all:
If you, like us, want more information than can fit in a fancy image, read on as we explain a little bit more about each of these Roadmap items…
New Guns and New Augments
You might notice that there were five Underbarrels you could obtain, but only four of every other slot. This happened because we had an Underbarrel sort of like the Flamethrower but also sort of like the Energy Blaster, and we decided that by separating it into two different Underbarrels, we could fulfill their fantasies better. Still, that leaves us in a weird spot. Why should Underbarrels be the only slot with five options?
So let’s fix that, shall we?
We just finished up the design document for another six augment lines, enough to put a fifth augment option in every slot. It was so cool to work on them, because of how solution-focused we were able to be. When we did the first batch of augments, NIMRODS was hardly a game yet, so all we could do was plan augments that thought would work well together. But now, thanks to you, there’s a whole NIMRODS ecosystem we can examine, and design new augments to fill gaps in the current meta. In particular, you’ll find this batch of augments includes:
- Ways to help slow-firing builds by giving them more defensive options and making missing enemies less punishing.
- More ways for your drone to use more build types, particularly retaliation builds.
- More ways for players to get resources, particularly boss resources.
- More tools for a player to collect resources and XP.
- Augments designed to combo well with augments that are currently underperforming.
We can’t wait to get these into your hands, so keep an eye out for them during upcoming patches!
Guns? Oh, we did mention guns, didn’t we? We’ve got a lot planned, but for our next chassis, we combed our old brainstorm documents and found a pretty sweet gun that we think will generate quite a buzz, but that’s all we’ll say about it for now.
Ability Upgrades
The character’s abilities are simple to start, but for experienced players, there’s a lot of room there for interesting complexity. Because of that, one thing we’ve been excited to explore is the idea of evolving your abilities to give them more capabilities, providing simplicity for new players but depth for experienced players. When we release this, we’ll also release Vixen’s second ability. It’ll feel familiar to old hands in the genre, but its upgrades will put our own spin on the idea.
New Characters
We have three new characters planned! I know a lot of you have been clamoring for new characters, but we figured that we should take the time to do them right.
Grimm and Vixen are the only two NIMRODS. The three new characters we’ve got planned are new recruits brought in from outside the paramilitary structure the NIMRODS inhabit. Reluctant new recruits. One might even say unwilling new recruits. How does this happen?
These new characters are hidden in the world. If you encounter them you’d better be ready for a fight! If you can defeat them, you’ll have the opportunity to harvest their DNA, bring it back to the gene lab, and produce a clone of them that you can play as, increasing your roster of selectable characters
Relatedly, this is not how Grimm came to be. Grimm’s not a clone. He’s the original. Totally. We promise.In addition, we have plans for how to further differentiate the characters so they encourage different playstyles so it’ll feel more like you’re playing a different character and less like you’re wearing a different cosmetic skin. More details on that as we get closer!
Performance
We’ve been doing a lot of research and development related to fixing performance bottlenecks in the game. The engine we’re using is providing us with cutting edge tools that few people have ever used (DOTS Entity Graphics) so our fearless programmers have been forging their own way towards a faster game and a higher framerate, trying and testing dozens of different combinations of approaches to see what will buy us the most CPU cycles. The results of our research are looking very encouraging, and certain builds that would tax most computers (*cough plasma bladestorm cough*) are running solidly on our test machines. We can’t wait to get these performance improvements into your hands, but we’ll need to do a lot of testing to make sure our optimizations don’t break everything, so it might be a bit.
Gunporium
We’ve had uncountable requests for some in-game tool to view all the augments you’ve used, and we agree that it’s a great idea. We’re still in the design stages for this one, but our plan is to make a new station in the ship you can go to and see each augment you’ve used so you can check its stats, how it can evolve during your run, what unlocks the upper tiers of the augment, how many times you’ve used it, and other useful information. What information would you like to see about the augments? Let us know in the comments what you think would make this feature most complete for you!
Quality of Life and Bugfixes
It’s always tough to balance bugfixes and minor improvements with content releases. Content excites people, but sometimes it’s the little things that make the biggest difference, so we’re not going to neglect those either. Little touches, like showing what slot an augment will fill when you see it in the upgrade screen, or showing an augment’s upgrade tree in the shop menu, will go a long way towards helping new players understand how the augment system works.
New Biomes
And, of course, the big finale: New biomes.
These are the most challenging things to tackle, because there’s a lot that goes into it. New biomes need new monsters, a new map, new things to find while exploring, new augments to hide in the map, maybe even a new character to find and fight, new genes to discover while in the area, new drop pods to reassemble, a slew of new missions and achievements to complete… There’s a lot that needs to happen all at once for a new biome to be released, and we can’t really release any of it piecemeal. When we do release a biome, it’s going to be a big content drop. These are the largest tasks on our roadmap because they’re so all-encompassing, but I promise the wait will be worth it. We plan to have two more biomes to include before our 1.0 release.
That about sums it up for now. We’ve got other features in the works as well, but we want to wait for them to be a little more mature before we talk about them, so look forward to more news in the coming months!
Thank you all so much for the overwhelming support. We will not rest until NIMRODS is a game you can play forever—because every run should be another masterpiece of absurdity.
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