In today’s devlog I’d to talk about the UI changes, which is the reason why we’ve been silent for a weeks now, as well as the Hero Creation and World Generation screens, and your questions. There’s a video devlog about all this, so feel free to check out it on Youtube. Here’s the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QwXd_eoQZM
This is NIMOYD, our little game in dev. And it’s hot. And, uh, <3
DEVLOG - 15 July 2017
Hey folks
Nimoyd is a pixel art game now. It was not an easy change. It took us months of testing, prototyping, talking, before we admitted that we’ll do a pixel art game.
Just fooling around with my voxel engine of Proven Lands, without the villages and animals, because, you know, Santa is coming. ;) Voxel engine still runs like a charm, 300 fps with a view distance of 100 km, to my surprise. Maybe I should talk to a publisher or so, hmmm.
We’re sorry for the silence, but for some time we were not allowed to tell what was going on, due to a legal issue that surprised us when someone became greedy, out of stupidity, I suppose. Being a small team that only wishes to create the game they love, it hit us hard. It felt strange to not be able to talk about your own game.
The development of Proven Lands is on hold, unfortunately. There is a silly clone out there anyway, which hurts, but this is probably how the industry works. But, it is perhaps not that bad, so we told to ourselves this morning, because numerous survival games came out recently and it’s not like they add new features to the genre, right? Like, NMS surprised us too. So maybe it is quite healthy to take our time and see what else we can add to Proven Lands in the long term, that makes is unique. I find uniqueness and to name your influences, at least to some degree, important. Let’s see how it all turns out and how much we can tell next year. Proven Lands is an amazing experience for us anyway, because, when you look back to 2013 and 2014, how much effort it took us to shape the core of the game, with the help of so many fans on tumblr, when it started as a roguelike, or that character design (that little astronaut, if you recall, was bigger at first), or the creatures and the voxel-based terrain engine, and also that UI, or that multi tool that felt 2013 pretty unique.
I am not sure how much we should show about Proven Lands, so see below for 2 internal videos, both from early and mid 2015. It shows well why we hoped to release the game late 2015. :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6mz3q2uXQY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGur6y1UZzM
By the way, Jeffrey and I decided to work on a new game called Nimoyd in the meantime. Nimoyd is a top-down 2D sci-fi action RPG sandbox game about an alien on Earth. Nimoyd is influenced by Sid Meier’s Pirates and Mount & Blade, with combat like DOTA 2 and League of Legends, only in 2D and hand drawn. There is also a board game and a comic coming on Nimoyd, which nobody knows yet. ;) We really dig board games and to fool around with silly ideas. Sp, stay tuned and see for yourself here http://nimoyd.com and http://facebook.com/nimoyd
legal issues can be really damaging especially to a small team, but from what I’ve seen so far of this project it looks gorgeous so I hope you guys can return to it soon with peace of mind
Thanks, mate. I doubt that anybody will believe us, but tumblr really was quite influential and helpful on Proven Lands in 2013 and 2014. Thanks for that, like in general. It’s true, the legal side really surprised me too, to say the least. It is quite a story, actually. We will see how much I can share next year. I still love Proven Lands, the world, the premises, the story, the atmosphere. I see why I invented the core idea in the first place. I’m still missing such a game, despite so many great games out there. While working on Nimoyd, I think from time to time about Proven Lands. I’ve watched Planetes recently again. Did you know that it was a big influence on Proven Lands at the very beginning? But I’m too much into sci-fi, manga and anime, I suppose. ;) You bet it’ll be back one day.
We’re sorry for the silence, but for some time we were not allowed to tell what was going on, due to a legal issue that surprised us when someone became greedy, out of stupidity, I suppose. Being a small team that only wishes to create the game they love, it hit us hard. It felt strange to not be able to talk about your own game.
The development of Proven Lands is on hold, unfortunately. There is a silly clone out there anyway, which hurts, but this is probably how the industry works. But, it is perhaps not that bad, so we told to ourselves this morning, because numerous survival games came out recently and it’s not like they add new features to the genre, right? Like, NMS surprised us too. So maybe it is quite healthy to take our time and see what else we can add to Proven Lands in the long term, that makes is unique. I find uniqueness and to name your influences, at least to some degree, important. Let’s see how it all turns out and how much we can tell next year. Proven Lands is an amazing experience for us anyway, because, when you look back to 2013 and 2014, how much effort it took us to shape the core of the game, with the help of so many fans on tumblr, when it started as a roguelike, or that character design (that little astronaut, if you recall, was bigger at first), or the creatures and the voxel-based terrain engine, and also that UI, or that multi tool that felt 2013 pretty unique.
I am not sure how much we should show about Proven Lands, so see below for 2 internal videos, both from early and mid 2015. It shows well why we hoped to release the game late 2015. :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6mz3q2uXQY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGur6y1UZzM
By the way, Jeffrey and I decided to work on a new game called Nimoyd in the meantime. Nimoyd is a top-down 2D sci-fi action RPG sandbox game about an alien on Earth. Nimoyd is influenced by Sid Meier’s Pirates and Mount & Blade, with combat like DOTA 2 and League of Legends, only in 2D and hand drawn. There is also a board game and a comic coming on Nimoyd, which nobody knows yet. ;) We really dig board games and to fool around with silly ideas. Sp, stay tuned and see for yourself here http://nimoyd.com and http://facebook.com/nimoyd
I’ve been working on the road system longer than expected. The roads or streets connect villages and fallen cities. I realized that roads give instantly depth to an open world game such as ours. Jeffrey, the other dude on Nimoyd, yea it’s a team of two, uh – he told me that he spent hours in Minecraft building and crafting roads. I think that roads are underestimated in smaller open world games, because roads add structure and linearity to gameplay as soon as you wire most villages and NPC’s with it. Not all sites and locations are connected to roads though, it’s more like Skyrim, with those hidden and lost cabins and caves in the woods and wild, despite roads between castles and villages.
Nimoyd Dev Update: Publishers, Publishers, and Villages
Hey guys
It’s been a few busy weeks in a row, because publishers. Yea, we talk to a few publishers, doing presentations, a demo. Nimoyd is quite playable already, although it is not polished, nor well animated. After all, it’s only the two of us, so, well, you know, we’re focusing on gameplay and world first, and hope that you and all the others, like the publishers, like it as both of us do. : )
I think that these screenshots give you a good impression on why Nimoyd is an open world RPG with a huge randomly generated planet, filled with enemies, villages, humans, aliens, ruins, and quests, and it’s size. It is not a scripted big “Mad Max” or “Skyrim” open world RPG, nor a survival game, nor a sandbox game. We have our own ideas on how to work with RPG quests and NPC’s in order to avoid that “No Man’s Sky” brown-soup feeling about today’s open worlds, right? Not another nice looking sandbox thingy without direction or gameplay. Duh. And combat. Because combat and big guns, and vehicles, are important. And aliens, hey. The world is 100 x 100 km big so far, even if you load an Earth heightmap (which means you can also load other maps such as Mars), but you will able to resize the world whether 1 x 1 km or 12,742 x 12,742 km, it’s up to you. Nimoyd is in general very modding friendly. All items, creatures, stats and even the human nations base on text files in the game’s /mods folder. And, there will be probably 6 heros you can pick at the start, but we will add more after release, because cool.
When does it come out? Early to mid 2018? So stay tuned for our development updates every few weeks. Next week, Tuesday?, I will talk about the comic, because we work on a cool and free short comic series as a sideline, you know, loving comics and stuff, and the combat abilities.
Oh, guys. Check this out. Masquerada just came out on Steam. A story and action heavy 3D top-down RPG made by a small indie studio, by friends, really nice guys. Beautiful art, effects, voice acting, and a nice story.
Hi folks and welcome to this week’s update where I will summarise some of the thoughts, tools and techniques, that I use for paintings like the recent Slaver’s mine.
“I feel like I’m attracted to artists who are looking for the meaning of life, people seeking to understand the universe through their work”, he says. “I feel like I know when you hear it.”
-- Flying Lotus on his own label Brainfeeder in The Fader, 26 August 2015