Nominal Reenters Active Development.
Nominal Patch Notes — December 1, 2021
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
Nominal Reenters Active Development:
Hello, commanders! After about six months of being on a Range Safety Hold, I am happy to announce that Nominal is back under active development.
While my last post in May was very serious and sad to have to write, at that point I really did need to step away from Nominal. It was my first game. I learned a lot of hard lessons. And, I was trying to figure out how to keep making games as a career. There were just so many unknowns, and while I have a background as a full-stack developer for enterprise systems, I just didn't have the gamedev skills necessary to do justice to Nominal. So, I set out to try other concepts, learning and improving my skills as I went.
And I did learn. A lot. And all of that learning led me back to where I started: Nominal. So, if you're up to it, keep on reading to see what all I learned, what I have planned for Nominal, and how I'm going to go about actualizing those plans.
Catching Up:
Heads up: This section is mainly backstory, so if you're more interested in just Nominal, feel free to skip ahead to the next section.
After I stepped away from working on Nominal, I had a lot of grand ideas. Amazing concepts for games that I thought I had the ability to make with the skills I already had. Instead, I ended up spending the last six months skipping from proof-of-concept to proof-of-concept. Each one was more technical and advanced than the last.
I did learn a ton from what I had made for those concepts. I was able to create fully animated, rigged, and dynamic character models, more detailed and immersive looking hard-surface models, complex third person character controllers, advanced and dynamic UI systems, Steam Lobby integration, IK rigging systems, database and network communication, and a lot of other smaller things.
While I learned so much from each of those concepts, I just couldn't stick with any of them. My heart wasn't in it. I wasn't thrilled at the genre or themes that I had picked. And that's where I learned probably the most important lesson I could: don't back-burner a (mostly) completed game that really excites me just to frantically pursue concepts that may have broader appeal and may bring in more money, but that I'm not happy working on.
So, I made the decision to come home, back to Nominal. Back to what excites me and what I'm passionate to work on.
New Development Direction:
With that decision made, I faced a hard question: how would I bring all that I learned back to Nominal and avoid the somewhat pigeon-holed gameplay problems that it has in its original form?
The answer was actually quite simple, and I'm kind of kicking myself for not realizing it sooner: Nominal doesn't just have to be the Odyssey capsule. It doesn't even have to just/i] be all about the pilot seats of spacecraft. Nominal can be anything fun and exciting about space. In fact, it can be many things fun and exciting about space.
With that in mind, I want to expand Nominal beyond the seat of the Odyssey capsule, slowly, but surely turning it into a celebration of space exploration, while maintaining the co-op friendly gameplay, lore-building, simulation-quality manuals and procedures, and everything else that makes Nominal promising and unique.
New Tentative Roadmap:
Before we can get to all of the fantastic stuff above, there is a bit of housekeeping to do. So, I've made a new development roadmap that starts with preparing for the good stuff, and then gets to it, rather than cramming in new features on top of the wobbly, house-of-cards that is the existing codebase.
All of the items on the roadmap will be pushed to a Beta Branch for the game (which will go live once the content is ready), so that it can be thoroughly tested and stabilized while the next update is in development.
Below is the new roadmap, followed by explanations for each item on it.
v1.2.0b - Code Refactor
I hate to admit it, but the original codebase I wrote for Nominal is a mess. It was my first time taking Unity seriously and I was just starting to learn C# (previously, I used Python). On top of that, Nominal had a four month development cycle, beginning to release. Those things combined led to a rats nest of code, that had no clear organization, structure, or format, and that doesn't meet or utilize C# standards by any means. So the first major update for the Beta Branch will be a full code refactor to get things up to par.
Fun fact: the refactor has actually been completed and just needs testing and QA before it can be pushed to the Beta Branch.
v1.2.1b - Code Optimization
For the same reasons as stated above, Nominal's original codebase isn't just a mess, it's a horribly optimized mess. There are a lot of scripts that have huge opportunities for optimization that will bring not just better performance, but better stability, maintainability, and scalability.
v1.3.0b - Expanded Content
With the base game all shiny and polished, here's where the good stuff will come in: more stuff! While I'm not ready to share exact details, I have a few solid ideas already in the works for hitting the ground running on making Nominal better than before. This will mainly be about major gameplay content, mechanics, and so on, but I also want to start slipping some quality of life and creature features in as well.
Beyond the Odyssey Capsule
As stated, the expanded content isn't quite ready for a full reveal. But I do have some work-in-progress and totally-not-final-whatsoever screenshots of models that I've been working on for it. You can check them out below. I haven't exactly been stealthy about what these models are for, so if you do some internet trawling, you can probably figure out what it's going to be.
Thank You
Congratulations on making it this far! I hope that you're as excited as I am for this new direction for Nominal. I know that I am. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this and being a part of the community.
If you'd like to stay in touch with the latest, not-publicized dev work and goings about, come join the other commanders and myself on the Nominal Official Discord server. I also welcome and encourage any feedback, questions, or suggestions.
Cheers,
Brian @ Offworld Systems