Nimbatus: The Space Drone Constructor cover
Nimbatus: The Space Drone Constructor screenshot
Genre: Simulator, Indie

Nimbatus: The Space Drone Constructor

Patchnotes 0.9.0 Early Access Preview

Dear Drone Engineers,

We just released a preview version of our next big update on the preview branch. <
This new update adds Nimbatus upgrades, a snake boss and many more features.
Please report all bugs you find and tell us what you like and what you don't like about the new features.

Discord
To give us feedback, talk with the developers or show off cool drones, please join our Discord Server :)
https://discord.gg/6wu92F6



Please note:
This update resets the save files, however your drones should be safe. We extract them from your old save files and place them into the global drone list.

Patchnotes


New Features
  • Nimbatus mother ship upgrades
  • Added first Steam Achievements and unlockable drone skins. We will add more achievements in the next update. Please note that the corp skin is not yet unlockable.
  • New captain: Programmer
  • New save file management (freely create / name / delete save files instead of having fixed slots)
  • Added difficulty settings to the survival mode
  • New Jungle Ruin location
  • New Garage and Weapon-casino locations
  • Added new rewards when advancing to the next galaxy

New Drone Parts
  • Temperature probe
  • Audio part
  • Small Hollow Block
  • Programmable LED

Improvements
  • Reworked the brawl-mode
  • Added new travel events
  • Added Ambient soundscapes on planets
  • New music for the galaxy map
  • Options are now also accessible from the galaxy map
  • Snakes are now detectable with sensors as danger zone
  • Added detection layer for enemy projectiles
  • Added mission target as detection layer to detect mission relevant objects
  • Added container as directional sensor target
  • Added nearest enemy as directional sensor target
  • Added mission target as directional sensor target
  • Added fallback target to directional sensor and vtol thruster in case no direction could be calculated
  • Reworked drone skin selection
  • Drone skins can now be applied to all drone parts
  • Added ability to flip and offset skins
  • Added time slider to test area
  • Added ability to rotate the drone core and made the visuals symmetrical
  • Added option to hide sensor visualization
  • Nimbatus now supports wider than 21:9 aspect ratios
  • Added radius indicator for heat bubbles

Balancing
  • Increased inventory for shops
  • Decreased prices for shop items
  • Heat bubble radius increased by 50%
  • Default radius of TnT is now 10
  • Improved effectiveness of heat-seeking and laser-guided rockets
  • Adjusted captain starting parts
  • Rebalanced weapon upgrade prices and tech tree
  • Jungle chests now give 80 rare resources instead of 200
  • Made grenades heavier, less bouncy
  • Made meteors stay hot for longer
  • Increased radius of small magnet from 5 to 10

Bugfixes
  • Fixed bug where timer on ore planet would not work
  • Fixed bug where the travel screen would break while in creative mode
  • Fixed bug where Heavyweight perk effects weren’t applied correctly
  • Used tag list is now correctly updated when deleting parts or switching the drone
  • Several UI fixes where descriptions sometimes got cut off
  • Fixed collider size of "select drone", sometimes blocked the mouseover for rewards
  • Lava Heat Capacitor doesn’t radiate heat anymore when frozen
  • Fixed bug where you could use wireless fuel / energy by decoupling a subdrone using a factory part that has fuel tanks behind a decoupler.


Happy testing!

Cheers,
Stray Fawn Studio


Here is how you can get the preview build on steam:
– Open your Steam library
– Right click on Nimbatus in the Steam library
– Select Properties / Beta
– Select the Beta tab
– Select preview from the drop down
– Restart steam in case the game does not update automatically or you can't see the preview branch

Happy Holidays & Retimed Give Away

Dear Drone Engineer,

The holidays are coming closer and closer :D
And with them a give away for Retimed, a game that we help to publish!

Retimed is a 2D multiplayer arena shooter with nerve wracking slow motion moments. You can challenge up to 4 players, alone or in teams, online or offline on 8 different maps.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/760810/Retimed/

To celebrate the occasion, we are currently running a give away on Retimed's Steam page. A Steam key will be given away in the live-stream chat every 15 minutes! Come join us :)

We are also working hard on the next Nimbatus update! Which will come soon to the preview branch for you to test!

Cheers & Happy holidays,
Stray Fawn Studio

Patchnotes 0.8.4

Dear Drone Engineers,

We just released the 0.8.4 hotfix to resolve a critical bug in the fuel / energy management:

Fixes


  • The fuel and energy management was not working as intended since the last update. It was possible to use an unlimited amount of thrusters with just one small fuel tank. This is fixed now.


Unfortunately we also have to reset the racing leaderboards, as some of the top entries used this bug to get the fast times.

On other news: we are working hard on our new big content update, which should come to the preview branch later this month!

Cheers,
Stray Fawn Studio

Patchnotes 0.8.3

Dear Drone Engineers,

We just released the 0.8.3 patch to fix some bugs.

Fixes

  • Enemies are no longer super fast when unfrozen
  • Fixed a bug where the race would not end when a drone got destroyed


Cheers,
Stray Fawn Studio

Brawl Tournament Update

Dear Drone Engineers,

We just released the Brawl Tournament Update!
Enter the Brawl Arena and fight other players drones using close combat weapons like saw blades, spikes and drills. We also added a couple new drone parts to the game.

To celebrate this update, Nimbatus is 20% off on Steam for the next two weeks!
We are also running a giveaway on Twitter



Patchnotes 0.8.2


New Features:
  • New Brawl Tournament
  • Added German localization
  • Added different camera modes to the tournaments
  • Added sound effects to all travel events

New Drone Parts:
  • New mechanical part: Flipper
  • New melee weapon: Bumper

Reworks:
  • Changed the look of the Tournament UI
  • Reworked all the UI labels to be able to scale dynamically in size
  • Added torque and option to reverse rotation for saw blades
  • Balanced the damage of all melee weapons
  • Added timescale-slider for Autonomous Racing
  • Added Music for Asteroid fields
  • Updated melee weapon sound effects
  • Updated melee weapon particle effects

Bugfixes:
  • Fixed sorting issues with Drone and Container on Space Missions
  • Fixed rare case in which cryo container would not spawn on lava planets
  • Fixed bugs where the game still ran in the background after exiting

Misc:
  • Upgraded our engine to Unity 2018.4.6f1


We are also preparing for the full release and working on the localization of Nimbatus. This update adds a first version of German translation. More languages will be added in the following months.

Cheers,
Stray Fawn Studio

Patchnotes 0.8.1 Brawl Update Preview

Dear Drone Engineers,

We just released a small patch on the preview branch for the brawl update.

Thanks a lot for playing the update and providing us with some opponents.


Patchnotes



New Features

  • Added free camera to versus mode camera options
  • Added sound effects to all travel events
  • Added first version of brawl sound

Bugfixes

  • Fixed Shield status translation
  • Fixed corp attack travel event translation
  • Fixed workshop browser UI
  • Fixed sorting issues with Drone and Container on Space Missions
  • Fixed rare case in which cryo container would not spawn on lava planets
  • Fixed text displayed in timer on timed missions
  • Fixed bug where your drone won, but it counted as a loss

Balancing

  • Broken bumpers now apply only 10% of the impact force


Happy testing!

Cheers,
Stray Fawn Studio

Brawl Tournament on the preview branch

Dear Drone Engineers,

We just released an update on the preview branch to test the new Brawl Tournament!
Please play the new Brawl Tournament and upload your drone as opponents, so we have many drones to test the balance.

This update also adds German localization. If you speak German, please switch the language and report any grammatical or UI layout errors you find :)

Here is how you can get the preview build on steam:

– Open your Steam library
– Right click on Nimbatus in the Steam library
– Select Properties / Beta
– Select the Beta tab
– Enter imadeabackup as password to unlock the preview branch
– Select brawl_preview from the drop down
– Restart steam in case the game does not update automatically or you can't see the preview branch


Patchnotes 0.8.0


New Features

  • New Brawl Tournament
  • Prepared the game to be ready for localization and added German localization as a test

New Drone Parts:

  • New mechanical part: Flipper
  • New melee weapon: Bumper

Reworks:

  • Changed the look of the Tournament UI
  • Reworked all the UI labels to be able to scale dynamically in size
  • Added torque and option to reverse rotation for saw blades
  • Added options to better control the camera in competitive modes
  • Added timescale-slider for Autonomous Racing
  • Balanced the damage of all melee weapons

Misc:

  • Upgraded our engine to Unity 2018.4.6f1


Happy testing!

Cheers,
Stray Fawn Studio


Keep in mind that this preview build is still a work in progress, therefore I strongly recommend to back up your savefiles before downloading the preview branch. Here is where you can find the savefiles and logfiles: Savefile Location

Patchnotes 0.7.4

Dear Drone Engineers,

We just released the 0.7.4 patch to fix some bugs.

Fixes


  • Researcher doesn’t get fuel tanks as rewards in asteroid fields and travel events anymore
  • You can no longer bribe pirates if you don’t have enough resources
  • Fixed that collecting bio barrells or meteors gave no resources anymore and corrupted the savefile so the resource amount was reset to default.
  • Dynamic thrusters no longer work when frozen


Cheers,
Stray Fawn Studio

New Campaign Update (0.7.3)

Dear Drone Engineers,

After a month of testing and improving, we finally released the new Campaign Update on Steam!
At its core this update is all about the new campaign mode. It features different captains, progression through unlocking drone parts, travel events, asteroid fields, drone skins and much more :)



The old savefiles are no longer compatible with this version. However, all drones from older savefiles will be imported automatically and should be available to use in the competitive and creative mode.



Thanks again to all testers of the preview version for all the great feedback and bug reports!
Here are the patchnotes of the new update:

New Features


  • Split the game into 3 different modes: Competitive, Campaign and Creative
  • New Campaign Mode with new progression system, different captains, travel events, new locations and rewards
  • New Creative Mode with different settings to change the gameplay
  • New shared drone list for creative and competitive mode
  • Added in-place replace functionality for drone parts (hold alt when dragging item over another)
  • Added multiple gravity and air resistance modes to the test drive
  • Added Kickstarter backers to the credits
  • Added planet names from Kickstarter backers to the game
  • The minimap now has a dynamic planet display
  • Added live weapon previews to tooltips
  • Added drone skins as setting for basic parts

New Drone Parts:



  • Piston that can be extended and retracted
  • Small magnet, small and easy to use but not as configurable as the big magnet

Drone Part Changes:



  • Changed the look of the Magnet, so it matched its collider
  • Added the option to choose a Drone Skin for the basic parts
  • Spikes now cause damage on impact rather than continuous damage on contact
  • There is now only one resource tank which can hold all resources
  • We increased the rate plasma and cryo ammunition change the temperature of enemies
  • Drills now only cause damage while they are activated
  • Particle weapons now heat up or cool down enemies faster than other weapon types

Reworks:



  • You can now access the drone hangar directly from the map without having to travel to a location
  • Most missions now have different difficulty levels 
  • We balanced the health of the enemies to match the difficulty level of the new campaign mode
  • Enemies now target you if you attack them, even if you are out of range
  • Snake damage changed from 100 to 180. Aggro speed increased by 20%
  • Balanced all weapon-stats
  • A lot of small UI changes, especially for the campaign mode
  • A lot of sound effect changes and new sound effects
  • Changed the drone import file dialog to use native dialogues
  • You now only can mine a finite amount of resources from one planet, even if you launch multiple drones
  • Lowered health of shipwreck-parts
  • Slightly increased durability of Energy Shield
  • Reduced the burning damage scaling
  • Objects now stop burning after 5 seconds, unless they get heated up again.
  • Increased rate at which fire and cryo ammunition change temperature
  • Plasma and cryo weapons now increase / lower temperature at the same rate

Bugfixes:



  • Race finish line is no longer detected as obstacle
  • Fixed afterburner collider
  • Proximity and distance sensor overlays no longer stretch the drone image
  • Fixed that some objects did not heat up neighboring objects
  • Fixed small spawning bugs in different missions
  • Fixed bug where hammerheads that haven’t targeted the player before were faster
  • Stonemantas don't spawn fireflies anymore when they are frozen
  • Fixed placement of resources on lava planet corridor
  • Fixed bug in corp laboratory mission where no laboratory would spawn
  • Fixed drone workshop max diameter not being displayed correctly in racing modes
  • Fixed Continue button collider so it does not overlap with the upload drone checkbox after a Tournament
  • Fixed a bug in the main menu UI that occurred when deleting saves
  • You should no longer be able to print sub drones inside the terrain and fly underground. The parts break if they spawn inside the terrain. 

Engine:



  • Upgraded our engine to Unity 2018.4.3f1



We recorded a video showing the new features of the campaign update:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M2qtc0RaaM
To celebrate the update we are running a 25% discount for the next two weeks!

Cheers & Have fun!
Stray Fawn Studio

Patchnotes 0.7.2

Dear Drone Engineers,

We just released the 0.7.2 patch for the new Campaign Update on the preview branch.You can find the patchnotes and instructions on how to access this branch here:

Patchnotes & Instruction

Happy testing and thank you for your help!

Cheers,
Stray Fawn Studio