Let’s Make Closed-Alpha Game Mechanics Fun and Add Some Flair Too

How are you all doing, Nomads? At Craneballs we’ve finally installed air conditioners to increase our survival chances for the summer crunching period, which will lead to the release of the alpha version of Planet Nomads in August. Now we still don’t have a date, but that too is coming soon. Let’s take a look at the progress made in the past two weeks.

Game Design

To make your stay in Planet Nomads more believable, Peter has been setting the values of all game objects – the weight of trees, building blocks, rocks, the land. The values also include health points, since everything is destructible. So things will feel real and when they drop down on you, you will feel that too.

The Electricity Design card on Trello is less fancy than it might seem on first sight, but still important – it’s a matter of setting the power demands of each active block, be that lights, motorized wheels, doors or cockpits, in relation to the power output of solar panels, generators and batteries. You will clearly see these power relations in the Build Vision mode.

Build Vision

Seeing people struggle with the previous block setting system, we’ve created the Build Vision to make tinkering with your creations easy. When playing Planet Nomads you’ll be navigating seamlessly between the settings menu and the world around you. We will show this in full in the next episode of .

Bigger Blocks for Bigger Projects

It’s nice to have 0.5 m blocks to create fine detail, but sometimes you just want to cover big spaces quickly and save time. That’s why we are introducing scaled versions of several building blocks. So you can build more with less. Optimizing your builds to use fewer blocks also means smaller hardware demands; in other words your creations have just grown bigger. Add the new possible combinations and your imagination just got a new pair of wings.

More Particles Being Created

We keep talking about particles... let’s stick to showing this time. Examples of particles from Cenda’s kitchen.

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