Hello players new and old,
It's time to give some brand new peeks at what's coming up for Nova Drift in 2021. The full details on everything can be found at Chimeric's Blog, but here's a pretty comprehensive review in case you want to keep your experience fully in-Steam...
Quick note - the Nova Drift OST is currently 55% off for the next week!
Enemies 2.0 Progress
Battlefield Zoom
One of the more common complaints about Nova Drift is dying to late-game confusion. Player feedback indicated that things were feeling cramped as waves get into the several hundreds the screen begins to fill and with bullets and explosions. Also, the more tactical enemy formations that we wanted to create required more room to work correctly. We needed a way to control the battlefield size. To mitigate these concerns we added camera zoom functionality allowing us to pan out and view a larger battlefield. In future versions, the game will gradually zoom out as waves advance, or zoom way out for certain big encounters. We also added shiny new parallaxing starfields.
Boss Overhauls
In order to make the zoom changes super-noticeable we revamped Station Omega. It was made 70% larger, much bulkier, and more visually interesting. We also gave all of its visual effects a once-over and added some new ones. It's more or less the same fight, but now it is easier to access its vulnerable nodes. Most bosses will similarly receive a revision before we're done and a few will receive drastic overhauls.
New Enemies
Most bosses and many enemies will be overhauled over the course of the Enemies 2.0 updates. Additionally, many brand new enemies and alternate boss encounters will be introduced. Here's a preview of some of them:
Enemy Formations
The backbone of enemies 2.0, enemy formations allow us to assign enemies certain behaviors while their leader exists. Currently there are 6 formations:
- Trail - Enemies follow their leader in a line
- Orbit - Enemies orbit their leaders in an ellipse
- Flank - Enemies flank their leaders at a certain angle
- Rank and File - Enemies line up rank and file behind their leader
- Support - Enemies focus on healing and supporting their leader instead of nearby allies
- Protect - Enemies will place themselves between you and their leader
Discord Upgraded! Come Hang
We've got quite an active discord with a very chill and inclusive community. The dev team is also pretty active there. We recently upgraded the server to level 2 and opened some new channels like #ask-the-devs and #feedback. The latter allows you to submit feedback to a bot that lets players upvote or downvote the suggestion. I'm also quite proud of the #game-dev-help channel, which is a space for current and aspiring developers to learn and collaborate. So... come chat with us!
Finally, please consider leaving a review if you haven't yet - it always helps the game reach new players, which is nice!
Thanks for reading,
- MIles @ Pixeljam / Jeffrey @ Chimeric