Hello Nomads,

First of all we hope that all PN backers with "Digital Copy of the Game" as part of their rewards have received the game key. Try this page if not.

Now, on Monday we decided to make a bold move, which stirred a lot of emotions. Enough for a long while, if you ask us. Fortunately no death threats. In any case, there was enough backlash that we're certainly not going to postpone the May release.

We'd like to take a moment to thank everyone for their patience, to thank those with understanding for our decision, those who defended us and Planet Nomads against the pissed ones and those who didn't lose faith in our ability to deliver the game to you. Come to think of it, we'd even like to thank the pissed ones because at the end of the day they show that Planet Nomads matters.

Planet Nomads New Release on 25^th May 2017

That's right. The upcoming survival sandbox game Planet Nomads launches as a game under development on 25th May 2017. It will be available on Windows, MAC and Linux as Early Access game on Steam and as a Game in Development on GOG. It will also be available on Humble Store.

The Changes That Will Be Happening

We've held a big meeting on what can be done in a month and decided on three core aspects of Planet Nomads that will improve the first impression the game's going to make. It's optimization, playability and immersion.

Optimization

We've been continuously optimizing Planet Nomads throughout the whole development process and generally speaking the game is friendly on hardware as shown by the minimum system requirements. However, as Alpha Nomads and Youtubers have experienced, performance spikes and stuttering is plaguing the game from time to time - we're now using deep profiling of the game processes to figure out what exactly causes these spikes. The optimization steps will also include reducing the number of colliders on game objects and using the newly developed tool by Tomas that spots every texture and model that have been blown out of proportion in terms of polygons and size.

Playability

On one hand playability is a term we use for balancing of survival. From the rate of your stamina decreasing, to the number of inventory slots and the number of resources required for building. But it also includes the way the game unfolds for new players. Generally speaking we'll be making the game more user friendly. Make the progress through the tech tree more intuitive. Turn building into a more fluid and faster experience. Introduce un-intrusive tutorials and explain various game mechanics. So the blinking lights on your vehicle when you don't have enough juice to power the wheels are not reported as a bug, but a complex feature of the game's electric system management.

Immersion

An overused word these days, but one that perfectly suits what we're trying to achieve here. You can expect a more powerful experience when playing the game. This includes better animations of the main character and a more impressive multi-tool wielding. We're going to use a subtle screen shake where appropriate and introduce full-screen image effects for various game events - mostly when you are poisoned, tired, taking damage or generally close-to-death. So that you get sucked into the game and can better relate to your character's unenviable fate.

The list is not new. We've had these features planned, but as development goes, the core game mechanics such as physics, world generation, survival and crafting took longer than expected. Now that we got another month of work before release, we reviewed the features and prioritized the most important ones according to Alpha Nomads feedback.

We've already started adding these improvements as you can see in Tuesday's 0.5.1 patch notes on our forum and on Steam.

Five weeks then! We'll make them count.

 

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