Nomad Survival
Shadowkin + Nomad Survival Bundle!
I'm happy to announce that I've created a bundle featuring Shadowkin with Nomad Survival!
This feels like I'm patting myself on the back here, but if you're interested, why not check it out?
Stay awesome.
Upcoming playtest for Shadowkin and new bundle with Plantera 2: Golden Acorn
In case you haven't heard, I'm currently working on another game in the Horde Survival / Bullet Heaven genre called Shadowkin. I plan to do a playtest for the game in our Discord before the month ends.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2212410/Shadowkin/
If you want to check that out, you should totally join our Discord so that you'll know when it's available. Here's the Discord link: https://discord.com/invite/779FCkeeWT
Lastly, Nomad Survival is currently bundled with a very unlikely (though great) game called Plantera 2: Golden Acorn. It's actually not in the Horde Survival genre at all, but is more of a relaxing idle/clicker game. It seems like there's a bit of an overlap between people that enjoy these genres though, so why not? It helps that Plantera 2: Golden Acorn is actually pretty cool (I played it myself!). Check it out if you're looking for something a little different.
As always, stay awesome.
Hotfix 1.0d
It's coming to my attention that "Infernal Ray" has been the cause of a few game crashes. I'll admit I'm not entirely sure why this is happening, but I have a few ideas, so I went ahead and implemented all of what immediately came to mind as potential causes and pushed them into this update.
If this issue continues (and you're on version 1.0d), please let me know over on the Steam Discussion Boards so I can attempt to look into it further. Unfortunately, this bug isn't easily reproduceable, so I can't be completely sure that I've actually fixed it. I won't know unless it happens again.
Sorry for the inconvenience, everyone. Thank you for the reports and your patience on the matter.
As always, stay awesome.
Bundle with FatalZone!
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/35917/Monsters_and_Zombies/
Also, in case you weren't aware, I'm currently working on a new game myself called Shadowkin. I made a post about it here (while also covering some other things), if you're curious:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1929870/view/3750992508051995179
That's all for today. Stay awesome.
Challenge Hotfix
My apologies for the delay on this. It was pretty unexpected!
SHMUP Fest, New Game Project, and Price Change.
SHMUP Fest!
I'm happy to announce that Nomad Survival is in the Steam SHMUP Fest (ongoing right now!) and is currently 30% off. To get right to the point, however, this is the last time Nomad Survival will be this cheap. I'll explain more on this later.
New project: Shadowkin
For some good news, I'd like to announce that I'm currently working on a brand new project in the genre. I announced this in the Discord server a couple days ago, which you can join here: https://discord.com/invite/779FCkeeWT
I am deeply in love with the bullet heaven genre. I love playing games in it and I love what's possible with the formula, but I also have noticed that the surface has barely been scratched with what can be done in this genre. It was through this realization that I began working on Shadowkin...
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2212410/Shadowkin/
...which is early enough in production that I don't even have a trailer made for it yet. Shadowkin is a whole lot of stuff that I wish I could've put into Nomad Survival, but simply wouldn't have made any sense. It's a game that's vastly different and I think you guys are going to love it. If you're interested, please check it out and perhaps even wishlist it (this helps a lot!).
I have a lot to say about the game but I think it'd be even better if I could get a demo of the game in your hands so you can see for yourself, so I've been hard at work getting it ready for that. If it seems interesting to you, joining our Discord server is the best way to stay updated: https://discord.com/invite/779FCkeeWT
Price Changes
Back to the bad news of pricing, I've actually been doing 30% off for a while now, but Steam recently changed their policies when it comes to pricing. They enforced new price minimums and ultimately what this means is that Nomad Survival is too cheap to ever be discounted again. I can't even discount it at 10% off because Nomad Survival is so cheap that it's actually below Steam's threshold by default.
I wasn't expecting this to happen. I was perfectly content keeping Nomad Survival as one of the cheapest games in the genre because I made a promise that that's exactly what I'd do. I promised that I wouldn't increase the price. However, sales are a very big deal for the game. You would be surprised to learn just how many more sales Nomad Survival gets when it's on a discount. But, in its current state, I can no longer give it discounts, which also means I can no longer participate in many Steam sales.
Unfortunately, this means that when SHMUP Fest ends, I'm going to have to increase the price of Nomad Survival from $2.99 USD to $4.99 USD, which is more standard for the genre but feels weird because I'm increasing the price without doing any kind of big update. Please understand that I don't have much choice in the matter. Here's the article if you're curious: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/3700310527377680732
Anyone who checks the article may misinterpret that I could still do discounts at $2.99, but there's a problem. From the article: "The minimum base price that can be entered for any and all products on Steam must be at least equivalent to Steam's recommended currency conversion for the $0.99 USD tier." It's the currency conversion that gets me. Unfortunately, there are some countries where their currency is very weak. It's not their fault and I certainly don't blame the people living there, but with keeping that in mind, Nomad Survival is way below threshold.
This means I'm actually going to need to do one other thing on top of the price change, and I hate having to bring this up. A while back, Steam offered devs new currency conversion recommendations: https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/3314110913449340510
Nomad Survival never updated. I didn't want to alienate people in countries with weaker currencies. However, with the new minimum price threshold, if I don't change currency conversions, my game will still be in a bad spot with the price increase. Unfortunately, this means I'm going to have to increase currency conversion rates at the same time as increasing the price.
This means that Nomad Survival is EXCEPTIONALLY CHEAP in some countries, but that will change shortly after SHMUP Fest ends. If you wanted to buy Nomad Survival, now is the best time as it'll never be cheaper than what it is right now.
I sincerely apologize to everyone who would be affected by this. There's simply not much I can do at this point so I wanted to let you all know now that this is going to be happening.
No matter what, thank you for reading. Stay awesome.
Bullet Hell for my Valentine Bundle!
I'm happy to announce that Nomad Survival is a part of a new Horde Survival / Bullet Heaven bundle. Included are some really stand-out games in the genre. It includes...
- Nomad Survival: Surprise!
- 20 Minutes Till Dawn: This game is a total break-out success within the genre and there's a good reason why. It plays well, it's super aesthetically pleasing, and offers some unique twists. Highly recommend checking it out, but you probably know of it already!
- Rogue: Genesia: This game adds more Roguelike elements to the genre such as stage progression (i.e; Slay the Spire) and special boss battles to face at the end of your run. Words alone can't do the game justice, you'll need to play it for yourself.
- Void Scrappers: A fairly new game to the genre, but it deserves a high spot. Fast-paced and action packed. You control a ship in space and aim to destroy alien ships. Honestly a lot of fun and deserves way more recognition.
- Project Lazarus: This one is super cool. You control a mech and destroy hordes of alien creatures with guns, missiles, lasers, and way more. It's fun, the types of mechs you can play as change the game in meaningful ways, and who doesn't love piloting a big killing robot?
Check 'em out if you're looking for more cool games like Nomad Survival to play. They all do their own thing and they do it well. Highly recommend checking them all out.
You can find more info on the bundle here: https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/30627/Bullet_Hell_for_my_Valentine/
As always, thanks for being awesome.
Horde Killer Bundle
Hello!
Hope everyone is doing well.
I'm happy to announce that Nomad Survival is going to be part of a little Horde Killer styled bundle, including games such as Bounty of One, Spellbook Demonslayers and Nomad Survival (hey, that game sounds familiar!).
Bounty of One is a pretty cool title and I think you'll have a good time with it particularly if you've got some friends to play with because it can be a solo or a multiplayer experience, and everything is better with friends!
Spellbook Demonslayers is brand new and looks pretty promising. It just came out, but I've already seen some people play this and it looks like a fun time.
Nomad Survival looks neat. I've heard good things about it! ;)
All of these titles are $5 or under, so if you're looking to try out some new games in the genre, why not check them out?
You get a bit of a discount for purchasing the bundle, and if there's any games you already own in it, that cost is automatically deducted (I'd imagine you already own Nomad Survival, but that's just a guess!).
I totally get if you don't care, but I've spoken to both of these devs and they seem like cool people, so I'm more than happy to be a part of this bundle to try and help support them (of course, Nomad Survival gets some visibility too, which is always nice!).
I'm still working on a new project myself, but it would be inappropriate to speak about it now, plus I don't have a whole lot to share just yet anyway. Stay tuned!
Anyway, that's everything. Hope you're having a good time out there with whatever you're playing!
Here's a direct link to the bundle if you're having trouble finding it, but it should be displaying right on th store page for Nomad Survival.
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/28742/Horde_Killer/
Steam Cloud Fix (Please Read)
Last night, Nomad Survival 1.0 was released. Unfortunately, with it came a bug that wasn't caught in Beta testing - it wasn't connecting to Steam properly.
This means that it also wasn't updating your Steam Cloud, so for any progress you made between the 1.0 Release update and now was not put into the Cloud. However, once you play with this patch, it'll read from the Steam Cloud, which means you will lose progress, which is awful -- but there IS a fix.
Check out this thread: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1929870/discussions/0/4990570993592525594/
This runs down how to update the Steam Cloud with your Local save files. If you go through these steps, you won't lose any progress when the Steam Cloud starts being loaded again.
I feel absolutely terrible not catching this before releasing 1.0, but everyone Beta testing already have all of the achievements so nobody noticed a de-sync.
Let me know if you have any issues and I'll see what I can do about fixing them up, but hopefully, ideally, this is a pretty straight-forward situation.
Your version should be 1.0b as of this patch.
Nomad Survival 1.0 Release
As discussed before, the 1.0 release is not going to be particularly magnificent. What I wanted to do was fix up some bugs, change around some things, and give Gemstones more use. That's exactly what this update does.
Anyway, here's the list!
Changes tagged with were suggestions from you, the players, in the Discussion board, in YouTube videos, in Twitch streams, or in the Discord. Thanks!
CHANGELOG
- A button to switch over to spending Gemstones has been added to the Upgrades menu. These Upgrades are separate from Upgrades bought with Coins and stack additively (as everything else does).
- The language of your Operating System is no longer taken into account when loading Nomad Survival. It was instead always default to English, with exception to the Chinese language, which will continue to refer to the Operating System for its language default.
- When selecting Challenge II for The Dry Marsh, Retaliation bonuses from Upgrades are now disabled. This should prevent you needing to reset your stats to do the Challenge.
- Reduced hitbox size for enemy lightning attacks in the 4th map.
- Fixed visual bug where map modifiers for enemies would incorrectly show as reducing enemy stats instead of increasing them. This was strictly a visual bug.
- Fixed a lot of little, miscellanous bugs.
So, what does this mean for Nomad Survival moving forward? I'm still going to fix bugs as they're brought up, I'm still going to put in updated translations as they're created, and overall I'm still going to curate the game as necessary. The big thing here is that there likely won't be any new content moving forward.
I've learned a lot making Nomad Survival, and as some people have pointed out (often in a particularly negative light), this shows in some of the way things are presented in Nomad Survival. Someone wrote a review that said the UI was made by a programmer and it cracked me up. It's true. The UI in Nomad Survival isn't super great. The way some skills interact isn't super great. Lots of things could be better, but they could be improved on forever. There has to come a point where I say things are in a good enough spot and move on, and that time is now.
I won't try to change the minds of people that are convinced this is "abandoning the game" (seriously I even said Early Access would be 3-6 months and considering it was released in April, this would be almost 6 months).
I won't try to argue with people that think it should be better, or that I made mistakes doing this or that.
Instead, I want to say that I appreciate the people who enjoyed the game and voiced that. Motivation often came in the form of people telling me they had a great time playing the game and I appreciate that more than you may ever know.
As a one-man dev team and said dev not being super experienced in the process of creating games, I have to take a step back and say that Nomad Survival came out pretty well, all things considered, and I'm so glad that so many people agree.
The biggest thing was that it was a huge learning process. I've learned so much about what makes games fun and have come up with so many ideas that I'm already wanting to work on a new project. If you'd be interested in that sort of thing, I'll be posting information when the time comes in the Discord (you can find our Discord here: https://discord.com/invite/779FCkeeWT ). For those of you who aren't, I understand, and I hope you have a good time playing the many great games out on Steam, made by much more competent devs than me.
Anyway, this is already turning out to be pretty wordy, so I'll wrap it up.
Thank you everyone for your support. For the bugs you've reported (and I've hopefully fixed). For the encouragement you've provided. For enjoying the game, a game that I made, which is an incredible feeling.
I wish you all the best and I look forward to creating more games. I hope to see some of you around in the future. Many of you are genuinely kind, awesome people. Never change.