Alongside the release of the new version of Nomad Fleet's playable prototype I decided to flirt with the idea of going multiplatform instead of PC only. Check the new Mac and Linux versions and help me improve them with your feedback please.

Posted by Autarca on Mar 14th, 2015

The New Release

This new version of the prototype includes a new sample level and a new enemy: pirates. Unlike the main antagonist, pirates won't always shoot first, if they see you as a threat they will try to... "parley", that means that attacking or ignoring a pirate party will be decided by the player. This decision will hinge most likely in a rewards vs risk logic but I expect to include some moral conflicts too.

There's also many features that I added to the game like:

Building Capital Ships.

Changed the ships to Physical Based Shaders (my objective is to make them look more metallic instead of the "toon" look they had before... let me know what you think of the new graphics).

Full tutorial explaining building, gathering resources and researching.

Ability to dock ships in the Mothership.

Now the Hyperspace jump is not immediate but your ships will wait for all smaller ships to dock (if your Mothership is in problems you can always press the new "Emergency Jump" button though and you will jump abandoning any stragglers).

Now you can assign groups to your units like in most RTS by using Ctrl + a number.

Added tooltips and all UI buttons are now functional.

Added spanish localization.

I also made many fixes regarding AI, UI and some errors.

The Multiplatform Experiment

Alongside the new PC version I made a Linux and a Mac version (check the Downloads section). I'm really interested in trying to reach these audiences but I will need the help of the players here because I don't have the means to test these versions by myself. So far I have managed to get them tested by a few players with different results (working instantly, needing some configuration or plainly not working).

Please if you try any of these versions and have any problems, let me know so I can look into them.

What's Next?

Well, now that most of the core features of the game are working I'll focus in start creating new content: more levels, more ships, etc. There is one core feature that is still unfinished though and that is dealing with neutral factions. These are the alien races that won't attack you if you don't provoke them: alien empires, traders, etc. You will usually find them in "trading hubs" so I need to work in a trading system but the player will have also the chance to attack them (again in a risk vs reward logic) so I need to expand the AI to deal with these cases of a neutral AI turning into a hostile AI... fun.

I hope this sounds interesting to you, as you can see this project is advancing fast and I intend to keep it that way.

Thanks for your attention!