Greetings, sinners!
It's time for the first update this year on the development of Nadir. We're constantly working hard on Nadir to bring you the best - hellish - experience possible. And by no means is this work fruitless - we have the pleasure to present you with the updated Demo!
More than that - Nadir will be present at the Demo Festival during the upcoming Steam Next Fest, which will take place February 21-28,
Read more below!
Steam Demo Festival
Yes, that's true - Nadir is coming to the Demo Festival! It's a perfect opportunity for us to put in some extra polish of the demo build, and see how you - the players - like the game which we love so much. We believe the players themselves should always be part of the development process, and that's why we want you to have an insight into what's going on with the project.
You will be able to see the changes we made by yourselves and share your feedback and opinion about them with us. And we have much to tell you about those new features and core mechanics!
Sacrum & Profanum
In the first place, Nadir is a roguelike, and as such it'll see you inventing and mastering new tactics, only to eventually switch to even better ones. Similarly in the development - we took our time to play with the combat mechanics and refined them even more. A new feature grew upon the basics and evolved into something we're really proud of: the Sacrum & Profanum system. it's definitely something else, something tactical, enjoyable, and unique among all the roguelike deckbuilding card games. So, what's it about?
Unique for the card-battling games, in Nadir both you and the enemy will make turns using the very same resources: Sacrum and Profanum. Those are conflicting types of energy - red and blue - remaining in a turbulent balance. Your cards utilize one of them, and after being played, they turn the consumed Sacrum points into Profanum, and vice versa.
What does it mean? After every action, your remaining resources become different – the cards which were too expensive just seconds ago, are now available to use, while the others might suddenly get unusable... until your change that in your favor.
This allows you to perform long and devastating combos by choosing the proper order of actions, expanding the gameplay with puzzle-solving mechanics. This way, Nadir’s combat is much more tactical than in average card-battlers. However, the enemy’s moves depend on the same pool of resources. You must also take it into consideration – besides planning your own moves, you're manipulating the future enemy actions to their advantage.
The map of hell
We're also working on the way we descent to hell. Inspired by the classics of the genre, we're developing the new run map - which is going to be the actual Hell from Dante's "Divine Comedy"! But be cautious while you explore the halls and streets of Nadir. Each level is distinct by the layout of nodes, eventually leading to a challenging boss fight, but with many tactical options to choose from.
We're already preparing our original approach to this feature, and we believe those are closer to the vision of Dante's Inferno, which is our inspiration:
And that's not all - we have improved the visuals of the game, made countless User Experience improvements, and we are implementing support for gamepads, and touchscreens, to make our game playable on more platforms. The journey started again, and we will be delighted if you would accompany us on it.
Play the demo, share your feedback, and reach us with any questions or suggestions you have. See you soon!