Nova Drift's Free Demo Is Now Available!
If you're one of the many people who have wishlisted Nova Drift, but haven't pulled the trigger, the demo is HERE. Tell your friends. They must know the exaltation of biomechanical wings cutting graceful arcs through luminiferous aether. You can show them.
The Demo Version allows you to reach wave 60, and rank your account up to 15. We even snuck in some Super Mods so players can learn how they work earlier than you'd normally access them.
Porting Prep
Even though we've been pretty quiet, we've been busy:
Steam Deck Verification
Nova Drift is already perfectly playable on Steam Deck, but it isn't listed as "Verified" for a few trivial reasons, which we're solving. Getting verified means players can easily find it while shopping on their Steam Deck.
Switch & Mobile Needs: GUI Improvements
We've started working on the many obstacles in the way of smooth console and mobile porting. Devices with small screens or low resolutions would benefit from larger and crisper text.
The first order of business has been using tabs on menus so we have the screen real estate to increase text size, or to add any new features we want.
For readability on small screens, we've improved text rendering, which will benefit all versions of the game. No more jaggy pixels!
Optimizations
The hardest part of porting is getting the game to run smoothly on low-end devices. Namely, Nintendo Switch and phones. Computers are beasts compared to those. For better and for worse, Nova Drift is a game that won't try to stop you from filling the screen with projectiles if that's how you want to play, so we have a lot of work to do on optimizations for projectiles and collision detection.
To stress test, I asked players to create the most degenerate builds they could in terms of performance, they said "challenge accepted", and it was so much worse than I ever could have imagined. 50,000 Torrent projectiles on screen at once, easily.
The two worst offenders were builds aptly named "Lag Mines" and "Lag Ceptors", which maximize Torrent projectiles using mines or interceptors. And they only take around 22 mods to assemble.
"Lag Mines is unrivaled in fps krangling powers if you save up all 18 mines, but Lag Ceptors provides a constant stream of lag instead of a single burst. Though, the funny thing is you could totally build both of these at once."
Obviously, we can't solve this only through optimization, but I doubt that from a gameplay perspective, 50,000 projectiles is truly more meaningful than a thousand, assuming the damage expected is being done. We'll look into dynamically controlling the number of objects on screen, trading quantity for power when needed, among other things.
New Content For Nova Drift?
Most players and our team seem to agree that the most valuable addition to the game would be a Daily Challenge mode, which we discussed in our previous post. Today I will talk about by far the most popular feature request, Gear Mutations, which are also on the table for a potential future update.
Gear Mutations
So the idea is that around the level 20 mark, you're offered a chance to "mutate" a weapon, body, or shield gear in a way that changes its fundamental behavior. While they can be very strong, they're more side-grades than direct upgrades to existing gear behaviors. We'd probably start with 1 mutation for each weapon for the first update. I can see a few ways it could be handled...
Gear Mutations could completely replace weapons:
Vortex Mutation: Orb
- Create and release a massive orb. The orb is slow-moving, decelerates, and deals burn damage to enemies it passes through.
- Only one orb can exist at a time. While an orb exists, firing creates a torrent of twisting, damaging submunition projectiles that erratically home in on the orb.
- Submunitions that make contact with the orb are consumed by it, increasing its size. The orb also consumes any targets it destroys.
- The orb detonates after a short time after it stops consuming, dealing blast damage in a radius proportional to its size.
- Modifiers to projectile count instead apply to submunitions.
Or it could instead modify existing weapon behaviors:
Pulse Mutation: Pulsewave
- Pulsewave fires a single, intangible projectile instead of a cone of projectiles.
- Your pulses now originate from the projectile instead of from you, with 50% reduced damage and size.
- During the projectile's lifetime, it creates 7-10 pulses in random positions around it, each with randomized size and damage.
- Modifiers to projectile size affect the number of pulses.
Years ago, when Thermal Lance was added to the game, Weapon Mutations were pitched like this:
I'd also interested in creating a particularly special mutation for the Blaster weapon, rewarding players for never swapping off of it. You know, kind of a Magikarp situation.
We'll see where we're at after porting is well underway!
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Thank You
To everyone who has patiently awaited the release of Nova Drift throughout its long development, I appreciate you! It wouldn't be half the game it has become without its community, and I thank you for the opportunity to do what I love for a living. I can't wait to show you what I've got planned for the future. Good luck out there, in the cosmos!
Jeffrey (Chimeric)