Nelvaris: First Contact (Demo 8.0)

2 years ago by Splendid Fox Games (@TheSplendidFox)

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Nine months ago I completed Nelvaris: First Contact (Demo 7.0), and at that time I said that was the last version, it turns out I was wrong, because I have just completed Nelvaris: First Contact (Demo 8.0) and this will be the final version of the demo.

The main reason for this was, while I was happy with the demo back then, it didn't have a logical conclusion. Although it is just a demo, I thought it would be good to include the final level of Chapter 1 of the game. There have also been other smaller tweaks, fixes, and additions to the demo.

There will not be another update to the demo now, and I am unlikely to continue working on the game, at least not for a long time.

Development of this game, which being fun, has taken a huge amount of time, over 4 years at this point, and it seems like it could take another 5 years before it is released. I really wanted to see my own version of a Freespace inspired game be released, however it looks like that now will not happen. I am sad and disappointed to have to stop development at this point, however, real life gets in the way and I simply do not have the time anymore. Perhaps in the future when I have released my smaller 2D projects and have a day job where I can learn and practice game development all day.

For now, I hope you all enjoy the demo. I look forward to hearing all of your feedback.

Additions and changes in Demo 8.0

Updates

Level 6 has been added, as well as its briefing and debriefing screens.
Xbox Live integration has been removed. The library was terrible with little to no documentation, and it felt like I was stumbling around in the dark trying to get it to work. I did eventually get it partly working and the game was running on my own Xbox, but the Live integration wasn't great. Perhaps if they make it easier to use I can try again on future projects.
Xbox controller support has now been dropped. Some controls will still work with the gamepad, but many wont. Only Keyboard and Mouse is fully supported
Removed references to Xbox controls in Training Mission 1
Music has been added to the debriefing rooms
The Comms chat from pilots has been updated to allow up to 3 messages to be displayed at any one time, so that new messages dont cut off old ones. The design of it has also been tweaked slightly
The pause menu has been updated to allow the user to change music volume
Many unused assets have been removed
Lightning intensity inside the nebula fir level 3 has been increased
An extra control has been added, R to target the last ship that attacked you.
AI has been tweaked slightly to better avoid collisions between ship mates, although it still has problems negotiating large objects
Fixed bugs with ship collider boxes. Sometimes weapons fire would pass through them. This had the knock on effect of making the game much harder, and so each level has had enemy count and emplacements altered to compensate.
Increased the width of dialogue boxes, so they stretch nearly the whole width of the screen.
Manually changed some dialogue in Mission 3, 4 and 5 to move onto a new line in the correct place so it doesn't word wrap and clip the profile image.
Set all mission and cut scene dialogue to display the profile pic for the full length of time. Any other dialogue from ships calling for help etc will last half as long, in case other dialogue tries to come in.
Moved the objectives window slightly to the left to line up with the communications dialogue
Added a small bounce-back when the ship collides with another object, to stop them getting stuck colliding into them

Bug Fixes

Correctly named the generic pilot in Mission 5 to Oolong
Fixed sudden appearance of Nelvaris planet in the Intro 2. This is because it wasn't turned off in Into 3 Pt7 of the animator.
Set the music volume of Intro 2 to 1. In some places of the intro the volume had dropped then risen again
Fixed the fire rate of the player weapons in the Training Mission 1
Fixed bug where the Intro would crash when it failed to load the correct piece of music
Fixed the cameras in the Intro to use Post Processing and correctly mask certain graphics
Fixed instances of clipping dialogue text in Training Mission 1
Fixed a bug with some DragonFly ships throwing errors when their Radar Spheres attempt to turn on/off
Fixed bug where Ships in mission 3 and 5 were added to the Squad monitoring section twice
Fixed dialogue in Training 1 which explains ship controls no longer used.
Fixed bug where Training mission 1 drone ship's shields were not working.