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Flower mountains - 2023 Year-end Wrap-up post!
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Devlog updates

🎉🌟 2023 Year-End Wrap-Up 🚀✨

🎉🌟 Welcome to the 2023 Year-End Wrap-Up post! 🚀✨

 

As we reflect on the past year, our journey has been filled with innovation, design, and community engagement.

Planetary Governance is live on the Playstore!

2023’s major update has been the soft-launch of our Alpha, with planetary governance mechanics on the Google PlayStore!

There have been a few updates and bugfixes since the first release on the store in january, but the alpha is still available!

Play here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.northernlights.nebulae

Don’t forget to join our Discord to share your thoughts & feedback: https://discord.gg/4X5gehTuKW

Feedback Acknowledgement

You are now more than 2000 registered players! And Nearly 1/4 of you have tested the planetary Governance!

The objective of this soft-launched version is to validate the planetary governance mechanics by a single player. The vertical slice isn’t the definitive version of the game (notably, the current onboarding sucks, we’re revamping it from scratch, and graphical polishing and balancing of certain planetary mechanics is still work in progress). However, this version does already include important planetary gameplay aspects such as unemployment, environmental balance and societal well-being for planetary residents!

Thanks to your gameplay analytics, we’ve uncovered some interesting insights:

– The depth of planetary governance gameplay is remarkable, with as little as 45 minutes of content (different districts, missions, and events), some of you are even continuing to play beyond 60 days!
– Political objectives have proven to be a key driver of player retention.
– Our icons are generally intuitive and easy to understand.

However, we’ve also identified areas for improvement:

– Our tutorial is too linear and text-heavy.
– Some interfaces and UX flows need a makeover.

We’ve gathered most of this feedback through qualitative interviews conducted via our social networks and during on-site testing sessions.

Don’t forget to share your thoughts on Discord! Your input is invaluable as we continue to refine our soft launch and enhance the player experience.

 

Production progresses

Following the Feedback gathered throughout the year, we have paved the way for Planetary Governance improvement. Keep an eye out for the upcoming release of Nebulae Planetary Governance in March-April 2024!

Here are some User Interface (UI) revamp examples

 

 

Art Direction Improvements: Water Shader rework

Character revamp and animations

Character Skins & Costumes first concepts

As we continue to develop concepts (bearing in mind that none of the following illustrations for concepts and costumes are finalized yet), we’ve reached out to you to choose your favorites. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and/or Instagram to cast your vote for your preferred skins and costumes! The concepts with the highest number of votes will move into the production phase!

 

Event illustrations

In 2023, we crafted over 40 new events and began illustrating them. It’s been quite a long work, but these events are what will truly showcase your planetary impact on the system. These events are semi-random, meaning that your decisions, the quality of life (QOL) of your citizens, environmental health (EH), and planet attractiveness (ATT) will heavily influence which events occur. The higher your QOL, the more positive the social events, and the fewer and rarer your setbacks will be!

While we won’t be sharing all the illustrations here, we’ve unveiled 24 of them as part of our Advent Calendar on Instagram! We may continue this tradition next year, so be sure to check out our Instagram stories!

 

New features cooking: Gifts & politics!

New features at various stages of development have been in the works. Gifts are already set for integration, as demonstrated in the UI video below, but elections & law enforcement (fully conceptualized and balanced) will enter the UI production phase next year!

 

Beyond

Zero-budget User Acquisition podcast
How do you acquire your very first players without a marketing budget? What guerrilla marketing tactics work for games, and how can you execute them creatively? Here is a sneak peek of our podcast with Deconstructor of Fun! Enjoy our founders’ energy!

Listen to the full podcast on Spotify!

2023 Was also our first GDC!

Our Co-founder & Chief Content Officer traveled all the way to San Francisco to explore potential partnerships and gain insights from industry talks. To mark the occasion, we teamed up with XandImmersion to create an exclusive video spotlighting our Gaultherian species!

We wish you a HAPPY NEW YEAR & We’ll meet you in space!