#nanosteam

[trainwiz]

Something I realized a while back with Nanosteam (the post-underspace game) is due to how it’s meant to be stylized, I can get away with full-frontal nudity in it without much worry. 

Your mind, because it’s in the gutter, immediately jumps to something smutty. My mind, because it sits among the stars, realized that I could add perks where you terrify your enemies if you fight in the buff. So I did.

The way I envision this is you’ll be taking a shower on your starship when some pirates roll up in a cruiser to steal your lobsters or whatever, and you leap out and bash their brains in with a bottle of cetaphil. 

You’ll get an achievement if you detonate their ship’s reactor armed with nothing but your bad decisions.

[nanosteam]

What have you even been doing? You've been dead.

Real life is a harsh mistress, the kind that wears the kind of leather your parents have in their closet that they think you don’t know about.

There has been progress made though. Weather has been added (along with the glory of dynamic timezones, which can really FUCK perception up), and I was looking over just how to get dialogue to work in a format that can be easily modified.

The thing I’m picking through now is a name generation system. I liked it in Freelancer, so generic enemies can pull from a list of titles and designations so each individual you fight has its own “unique” name.

[trainwiz]

can I be a robot in Nanosteam? Can I fuck the robot in Nanosteam? Can I fuck the barrels in Nanosteam?

Barrel marriage was the first quest ever programmed for Nanosteam.

As for robots… I mean no. Robots are like, trains or beloved forklifts in Nanosteam. Do you really want to fuck a forklift?

Now self-aware AI, those are more capable. Nanosteam got its robot rebellion over and done with centuries ago anyway, so sentient AI has long had its rights and its place in society. Your brain is technically welded to one, that’s how you get an interface.

[trainwiz]

How does Nanosteam's morality system work?

There isn’t one. To be honest I really don’t care too much about karma/light side dark side systems, or the whole branching narrative stuff. Kick the puppy, pet the puppy, establish a nonaggression pact and subsequent trade agreements and tariffs with the puppy, either way you’ve interacted with the puppy. 

I’m more a fan of consequence than choice. Nanosteam’s less about what you’re able to do to the puppy and more what results from the puppy. Like I want games where your previous actions are acknowledged and shown, especially in relevant situations. In Fallout 4 if you save a settlement, nothing really changes, it just gets attacked again. It doesn’t rebuild or expand or give you tribute in the form of a popular song. Or if you’ve encountered this one kind of enemy and Dumb McTutorial is like BE CAREFUL THERE’S AN ENEMY, I’d like the choice to say “Yeah, I’ve seen that before McTutorial”. 

So Nanosteam goes down that route. Exposure to elements allows the player to recall those elements later in the game if they’re relevant, and things they do, while not always expansive, are acknowledged and have a visible effect on the world.

[trainwiz]

How's the character creator for Nanosteam coming?

Understand when I say “character creator”, it’s not like, a spore style thing where you can use sliders to make your waifu. I want some preview to give to people, but we don’t have models at that level. It’d be like a DnD character sheet. You get to fill out your stats and background (parents,  birth, education, all that) and it’d generate a brief narrative sheet describing your character. I assume there’s still an interest in that?

[trainwiz]

You kind of have a taste for horror and vaguely lovecraft-style stuff. How much of that ends up in Nanosteam?

I like to fuck with people, so…

A fair amount. Nanosteam’s bright and colorful but it’s got lots of freaky bits.

[nanosteam]

R-r-reloading! 

So I bet you’re used to like, having 100 rounds of AK-47 whatevers, scrounging for ammo and reloading in cover and all that, right?

Well don’t think like that. Nanosteam handles ammo and reloading a bit differently. Everything in Nanosteam is a battery (or for ballistic weapons, a huge cartridge that contains the base materials the gun then constructs into bullets/missiles), which has a charge percentage. Each individual gun has its own maximum ammo count. Spending rounds drains the charge on a battery, but batteries can be swapped out (so a 1000 round gun with a 90% charge battery gets 900 rounds, but a 100 round gun gets 90 rounds). Some abilities you can get let you utilize spent batteries, with things forcibly ejecting them into the foreheads of enemies, or consuming them in a dish for additional power. 

Finally, reloading takes a VERY long time. It’s not something you should be doing in combat, hence why many guns give a shitload of max ammunition. Do it before you go into a fight.

[nanosteam]

The oh-so very basics of dialogue are dialogued. It’s not impressive, it’s more proof of concept and getting the basics integrated (talking to a non-hostile NPC allows you to go through a conversation), and making sure its modular enough that it can be easily improved upon.