Hello everyone! Its time for another Nomads Dev Diary!
This week we will be talking about the development of our campaign, some units and other things too, but before we get started, we open with a fantastic piece of artwork by spectrez! We welcome and encourage all things like that, so if you make something and its great, it might be posted in a future dev diary, so dont be afraid to show us your work!
As usual we are posting content that you can get sneaks of in the Nomads Development Discord, so if you want all the secrets, or would like to chat with the devs, or even contribute, dont be afraid to join!
Nomads Campaign Mission 2
As you may know, part of the Nomads project also includes its very own custom campaign, which you can play here. We have been working on a few missions at once, and while missions 1 and 3 are coming along nicely, mission 2 we often had issues with getting it to be engaging and challenging.
So earlier this week Shadowlord (one of our resident mission makers, check out his other custom missions in the FAF client!), proposed a rewrite of the mission to help things flow better. One of the issues that kep coming up was a part where you are supposed to defend some civiilians and the difficulties with getting the AI to not run over it immediately, while also making it actually able to kill them later.
As a result of this and other things, we got into a call and discussed some plans for the mission layout, and after some back and forth between Shadowlord and speed2, we came up with a plan that was amended to this:
We wont be spoiling the whole mission here, so you will have to guess at what happens in the story at this point. What plot twists might you predict?
We might be seeing a playable version of the mission up soon, so in the meantime you can check out the other missions in the campaign.
T1 Air Scout
So, in the past few weeks the T1 air scout model has made a fair amount of progress, and its time to finally talk about it a bit more. The T1 air scout for nomads was going to be a fairly typical unit, but we did consider a deployment mode for it, so it could become a mobile radar station or similar. We still arent entirely sure if we want to implement it like this, but it resulted in a neat concept and so it doesnt hurt to add the option for it if its required in the future:
Starting from this sketch, the model got some improvements from Armaster, our resident modelling pro. He took what would have been an ok model and turned it into something with character:
Also, while modelling we talked over a lot of variations, and had some interesting spinoffs which werent used:
This one in particular was pretty cool but we chose not to use it in the end, going for a simpler design since its a T1 scout. After working on the model some more, it got cleaned up to use more standard nomads parts, and is now ready for geometry cleanup, and then texturing. If everything goes to plan it might be in the next major Nomads patch, so you can see if anything has changed to it since then.
And thats it for today! If you want to see top secret stuff, join the discord server where you can chat to the devs, ask questions, spy on the process and get all the exclusive goodies and more! Also feel free to leave feedback either on the forum thread or in the discord. Remember, feedback is very important!
Lastly, we are always looking for more contributors, so if you are interested in creating things, whether thats code, 2d art, models, music or anything else, do get in touch! We also provide all the resources and guidance needed, so don’t worry if you think you are missing any skills, we will be glad to see you!