I think it's about time for an announcement. No new releases yet, but this is a pretty big deal.

Shortly after the release of Naikari 0.12.0, I started to realize that development of Naikari has been… unfocused, without a very clear vision. This is a problem, so we spent a long period of time mulling over some questions about the future of the project. Truthfully, we very seriously considered just scrapping it. But after clearing our head, replaying some of the games that have inspired us before, really thinking about what game we want to make, and… watching Avatar: The Last Airbender, it became clear to us that Naikari is still the perfect candidate for a particular type of game we want to develop, and that we can make this into something truly differentiated.

So this will be Naikari's vision going forward: a creative exploration-driven space trading and mercenary sandbox game.

That mention of Avatar: The Last Airbender probably sounds like it comes entirely out of left field for a space sci-fi game, but rewatching that series reminded us of something we've wanted to turn into a video game for a very long time now: creativity in combat styles. In most games, even where combat is discovered (e.g. thru special combos), it still isn't something that you can truly claim is yours. You may develop a connection to the fighting style of E. Honda in Street Fighter, but ultimately, you still didn't choose how the character plays. Similarly, one game I rather like, Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, allows extensive options for what types of moves you can use, but you're still restricted to only those specific move choices. But what if you could design your own styles of attacks yourself?

A major problem with attempting to inject this level of creativity into a combat system is simply the need to animate graphics for each attack. But after awhile, it occurred to us that one particular setting is particularly conducive to a lot of variety with very few graphical variations: top-down games, and especially top-down space games. There's also plenty of room for creativity in fantasy space combat, as can be seen in, for example, The Ur-Quan Masters, which is one of my favorite games.

So we've settled on trying to realize this dream with Naikari. This is going to involve far more massive changes than anything we've done before. At the end of it, I hope to have a system that allows you to make a ship that is truly yours, via choice of your preferred combination of weapon(s) and both stat-modifying and behavior-modifying utilities.

As a starting point, we've entirely gutted the concept of CPU as a limit for what outfits can be equipped. From now on, the only hard limit on what you can equip will be the number of slots your ship has available (and we probably want to add a way for outfits to add extra slots, once we figure out how to do that properly). We've also started adding new stats and weapon properties. So far, we've implemented the capability of turning weapons into spread shot weapons. We're hoping to add more weapon behavior variations.

We also plan on completely scrapping the game's universe as it exists and redesigning everything from the ground up. There are a couple of reasons for this: firstly, so that we don't tether ourselves to a vision that we don't want to be bound to; and secondly, because we want to make the universe something that you are rewarded for exploring and discovering, while in the process, making it actually discoverable. The universe we inherited from Naev is basically just an arbitrary collection of systems and planets. What we want for Naikari is for players to be able to say, "Ah, I need [component]. I should go to [location type] for that." Then, they should be able to look in their map for [location type] and fly to it. I want to put an end to the necessity of memorizing specific high-value locations or using a search feature.

So that's what's going on with Naikari right now. I don't expect anyone is reading this, but in case anyone is, we'd love to hear: if you could design your perfect personalized ship, what would it do? Perhaps we can make your perfect ship a possibility. 🙂