Overview

Apologies for the lack of updates, but rest assured, we are still working very hard on the game and things are ramping up!

Since we haven’t done one for a long time (and this one being the first devlog on Steam) this is a big update which can be split up into the following chapters:

Improved enemy ship models

Gamepad everything!

Menu and Ingame HUD Overhaul

Dissolving ships

Optimizations

Upcoming Demo

Improved enemy ship models

From October until End of December I worked full-time in the game industry as a 3D generalist, and now I can take full use of what I have learned. Byebye low-poly spaceships, hello smooth shading!

Enemy ship “Reaper”, new version compared to old version:

Enemy ship “Brute”, new version compared to old version:

Enemy ship “Moth”, new version compared to old version:

For every enemy ship we have implemented LODs, so the game doesn’t render detailled ships far away, when it’s not necessary to do so.

LOD0 is referred to as the original (highest quality model) and LOD1 a lower detailled one. For this purpose we did not need to have more than LOD0 and LOD1, but you can of course have also LOD2 and 3 and so on in a game engine.

Gamepad everything!

For some time we had a second programmer “WildRikku” who really helped us out and worked very hard on gamepad functionality for the Ship Hangar and game menus as well as general game logic. Gamepad functionality is now fully implemented.

Menu and Ingame HUD Overhaul

During February we reworked the Main Menu two times (it’s now completely dynamic and shows an ingame city).

First, at the start of February we just had our old background swapped with a new one, in preparation for a new build for another convention “Kokoro-Kon” that happened in February:

Recently we decided to make the menu background fully dynamic:

We also reworked the Ingame HUD (the old one was from the very beginning when Nion Forge was in its game jam infancy).

Before:

After:

As you can see the minimap is much bigger, an often requested feature change, and the HUD looks more modern and elegant. Of course GIFs are not ideal to show this in detail, but just to have a general idea what to expect.

Dissolving ships

Enemies and all ship modules of the player ship have a dissolve effect implemented now, for when death strikes or a laser from the player hits.

In Unity it looks like this. This is a preview, so the weird visual artifacts are not in the actual game:

Optimizations

Of course we have worked on much more than this, but most of it is behind the scene stuff, so it is not so suitable to show in GIF format.

Notably though we have rewritten and optimized about 60 percent of the game, making it run as efficient and stable as possible. So even if you build a crazy ship, performance is still stable as the following example shows:

Upcoming Steam Demo in May

As we are going to exhibit Nion Forge at a convention in Leipzig on May 10th we are using this opportunity to flesh out the early parts of the game and provide our first Steam Demo. Release will probably be a week after our exhibition - so around May 16.

Thank you for reading. We promise to deliver more updates along the way. We are well on track for our demo release and our full game release in 2026.

If you have any questions about the game hit us up on our social media platforms and/or join our dedicated Nion Forge Discord:

https://discord.gg/yKRZcNMhUC

Until then we rely on your support and thank you for every WISHLIST and FOLLOW you can give on Steam and our socials.