Whoop whoop - it’s time!

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We’re releasing Neon Nova Ultra Space Rumble at 28th February 2020 here on itch!

Until then you can check out the Demo for the game!

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We had a blast optimizing and adding to the game over the last few month and we are super proud of the result. We might not have reached all our goals, but that’s okay. Neon has always been so close to our hearts and so much fun to work on, from the first moment when we came up with the prototype at the Global Game Jam in 2018 (ah, the good old days...). So we wanted - no, we needed to complete it. Now we will be moving on to bigger broader adventures.

So here are the major and minor changes we made since the Alpha 2.

Major Changes

- Complete Ability Rework!

  - The Tank recieved a little love to allow for a more diverse playstyle.

    - The shield is now directional to increase the challenge

    - The cooldown is now energy-based instead of time-based to allow for more “precise blocks”. The shield energy will reduce over time and when damage is shielded. When the energy reaches zero, the shield will break, needing you to wait for the energy to fill up completely before you can reactivate it.

    - The Tank is now able to bully the Boss by simply standing in his way (for as long as his shield is up).

    - The Orb can no longer pass the shield. Therefore, the Tank is now able to help the Runner protect his teammates and further punish the Boss.

  - The Runner now has an active ability that gives the Orb a significant speed boost for a short time.

    - This improves the Runner’s ability to punish the Boss with sneaky Orb attacks.

    - The cooldown for this ability is energy-based, meaning it will constantly drain energy as long as it remains active. When all energy is depleted, you have to wait for the complete energy to refill before you can reactivate the ability.

  - The Boss just became 100x more frightening by recieving a 2500% buff to his ultimate ability.

    - The Boss Nova now shoots 25 waves of projectiles instead of one

    - To give the heroes a change to react to an ability this strong, the Boss needs to charge up this ability for 1.5 seconds. During this time, the Boss’ movement speed is cut in half.

- The game now supports a full-fledged scoring system

  - The rounds are played as “Best of X” matches. As soon as one faction (Boss or Heroes) wins a fixed amount of matches, a winner will be declared.

  - The performance of all players will now be tracked and rated after each match.

  - The Heroes collect points every match and should the Heroes be able to win the total round, one of them will be awarded as “best performing Hero”.

- Added a lobby to choose characters and colors

  - Every player can now choose his favorite role in the lobby. The AI will fill all missing spots.

- Major engine update from Unity 2017.4 to 2019.1 to invest in the future (that’s right, we warp-jumped a complete year)!

  - You won’t experience any major differences from this as of now, but under the hood the change means a ton of more options for the future development of the game

Minor Changes

- App Icon. Neon now has a custom icon for your file explorer. Unbelievable, I know!

Bugfixes

- Fixed multiple errors and unintended edges in all levels for a smoother game experience.

- Fixed a bug where the tutorial wouldn’t start after the lobby was started once.

- “Fixed” the quirky options menu by removing many options. Graphics settings can now be adjusted in the Unity Launcher before game start.

- Fixed a bug where the shield would stay active indefinitely after switching abilities with another Hero.

- Pausing the game during countdown for match start is now possible

So that’s it

NNUSR is the first game we developed start to finish. We made the prototype for the Global Game Jam in 2018. The theme that year was “Transmission”. So we came up with the idea to make a brawler in which three heroes have to swap their weapons (or “transmit” their weapons (; ) to defeat an overpowered boss.

After the jam we were so proud of the result that we took it with us everytime we went to a networking event or game convention. And it always good great feedback. It obviously was a lot of fun!

That’s why we decided to make it out first game project to complete the development cycle when we founded our own Indie Game Studio UniGlow Entertainment in spring of 2019

So much has happened since then, but NNUSR was with us all along. 

We hope you have fun with the game and please send us your feedback, we’ d love to hear from you :)

So long and stay tuned for our future endeavors....