Nebulous

The Enemy is your greatest weapon

Nebulous is a top down space shooter (Don't fall asleep yet) where players control a "Space Ghost" trying to protect its nebula from incoming raiders. The ghost has no weapons of its own to defend its precious asteroids, however it is by no means defenseless. The ghost can possess enemy ships and turn their guns and the very ship itself against them. What follows is an intense arcade survival game where players learn how to quickly jump from ship to ship, slamming them into each other and unleashing deadly barrages.

I love space. There is something about it that fascinates and enthralls me. Now granted I don't think I love real space, where everything is orbital mechanics and inertia. I love fake space. The space we see in Star Wars, or Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, or Cowboy Bebop. In these more fantastic depictions we see space as dangerous yes, but also liberating. There is a freedom in these depictions that I have always latched onto. With that in mind let me tell you a bit about Nebulous, where is started, how I wanted it to feel, and where it ended up.

Nebulous started out as a narrative driven space shooter inspired by Battlestar Galactica and Firefly. Players would take on the role of a pilot on a lone carrier where family and duty were closely linked. The players mother would be the captain and their father the ships engineer. I wanted players to get invested in their crew, to see them as an extended family. On missions the player would choose who to take with them as their wingmen. It was the game I had always wanted to make. I had three months to make it. So we scoped down.

As the lead programmer I knew how I wanted the ships to feel. I just had to figure out how to get there. I wanted small ships to handle responsively and to be able to pull skillful maneuvers.  For example, if players had an enemy on their tail I wanted them to be able to cut the engines and spin the nose of their ship around so they could shoot backward while letting their momentum carry them forward. Getting this maneuver to work proved tricky. The first mistake I had to get past was setting a max velocity for the ships so they would not speed off into infinity. The next problem was that the ships felt slow and sluggish when turning, not at all like I desired. The key here was I had ignored any drag forces, thinking that space does not have any drag. This may be true but it is not fun. So to solve this I had to first calculate my regular acceleration force then apply a drag force by picking a drag constant and multiplying it by the normalized velocity and the square magnitude of the velocity. this produced a force that opposed my velocity and would scale effectively limiting the velocity and producing a more responsive ship. However I still wanted ships to be able to drift so I only applied the drag force when the ships engines were engaged. This got me much closer to my desired game feel.

In the end Nebulous turned out to be a very different game than I had first imagined. However it taught me something about the design process. Sometimes when you are making a game it is less like building a skyscraper and more like mining for precious metals. You might know what you want to find but you don't know what shape it will actually take until you find it, dig it up, and refine it.

Developed with Unity and C#