#nowheremi

[feverdreamjohnny]

I haven't made music in a really long time, but recently I was inspired by a friend to pick up FL Studio again and try to compose some combat music.

This is a WIP for Fusion Mourner Jupiter's boss theme.

WARNING: This track is a bit loud lol

[midnightcrustcat]

recently saw the Nowhere, MI demo in the newest haunted ps1 demodisc,and already in love with it

drew a lil Concord too

can't wait whenever the full game releases!! :0

[feverdreamjohnny]

Nowhere, MI - Weapon Sound Design

Threw together some new sounds for the shotgun and rocket launcher! Also bullets now have proper tracer behavior and don't just "winkle out of existence" as someone once told me.

[feverdreamjohnny]

Nowhere, MI - Jogging Bombs

Every game has to have some kind of explosive-adjacent enemy in it. I don't know when this rule got put into place, but it holds true to this very day.

In keeping with this natural law, I've implemented a LEGALLY DISTINCT WALKING BOMB WITH FACE into my game. They're called Jogging Bombs. Because they jog at you. I'm very creative.

Anyhow, you can parry their leap by shooting them in midair, allowing you to juggle the bombs and redirect them into nearby enemies. Jogging Bombs always explode on death, but if they aren't parried during their leap it won't damage nearby enemies.

Below is some concept art from when I was trying to figure out how to design them without it feeling too similar to Bob-ombs. I ended up going for the spherical-bomb-with-fuse design anyway because I managed to make the face and appearance feel distinct enough in practice.

The landmine design will probably also be coming in as a high-heat obstacle that appears in areas that were previously free of low-cost leg removal services.

(Background music is Permission Slip by Mainland)

[feverdreamjohnny]

Nowhere, MI - Meet The HNX Snapdragon

The DoE built the snapdragon in response to a research incident that created a powerful supernatural predator that could not be slain with conventional weapons. This same creature ended up ripping a hole in space and disappearing, rendering the snapdragon completely unnecessary.

Rather than a bullet, the HNX Snapdragon uses a concentrated hair-thin beam of ephemeron radiation to "trick" the universe into believing that there's solid matter where the beam travels.

What ends up happening is that once the radiation dissipates, the laws of the universe realize there wasn't any solid matter to begin with and in an effort to over-correct, it replaces the space with a hard vacuum. The speed at which this happens causes a localized implosion that destroys everything in the beam's path, organic or not.

By using this exploit the beam can technically pierce any armor (since ephemeron cannot be stopped by most solid materials), but risks destabilizing space-time as a result. Oh well! I'm sure nothing will go wrong if you keep erasing matter over and over again. For fun.

[feverdreamjohnny]

Nowhere, MI - Aquajet

Let's go for a swim! Ha! Ha!

[feverdreamjohnny]

Nowhere, MI - Souls

Needed some kind of boss drop for important items, slapped together a lil thing today.

[feverdreamjohnny]

The new toolbench system is done, so you can get augments and frames for your guns to make em really unique.

Need your rocket launcher to become a primary? Put an assault frame on it and just go ham. Need the shotgun to be meatier? Try the ivory tusk frame and get 500% more damage per-shot.

[feverdreamjohnny]

Nowhere, MI - Burdens and Augments

Diabolical Combos

I always love it when games let you make these really ridiculous combinations that can clear an entire room if you line everything up right. My first experience with something like this was actually Dead Space 3, which I played as a young teen and quite enjoyed (despite it apparently being the worst in the series lol).

Keeping up with the joys of tinkering and making horrible combos, I implemented augments and burdens as a part of Nowhere, MI's core experience. I've shown augments off before, but I don't think I've ever really spoken in-depth about it much, so I thought it would be cool to do that here.

ANYHOW, so as you play you can unlock new forms for Concord that have different specializations. There are four planned (with three already implemented). These are: The Revolver, The Rocket Launcher, The Shotgun and The Railgun in that order. Each of these forms has three modifications slots:

Slots A and B are for augmentations, which fall under two different categories: Elemental and Mechanical.

Elemental Augments cause rounds to trigger unique effects as well as deal specific types of damage to enemies. An easy example of this is Magma Casing, which causes your rounds to explode and light enemies on fire. These types of augments also change the gun's color, so at a glance you know what effects the gun should have.

Mechanical Augments are meant to synergize with elemental augments and modify how projectiles behave. For example, Nut Cracker DX is a mechanical augment that causes projectiles to leave small bombs behind, which then take on the traits of their source. Bombs modified with Willow Wisp will levitate and fly after enemies, Rolling Dynamo bombs will fire small jolts of electricity at nearby targets before exploding into a large bolt of chain lightning, and Nobi Gen causes bombs to explode into a cluster of smaller bombs.

The third slot is the weapon's frame. Frames are rare modifications that overhaul how a gun behaves, allowing it to cover a different specialization. For example, PX-2 Hornet causes the associated weapon to act like an assault rifle, which allows you to take the relatively slow-firing shotgun and rocket launcher and use them as primary weapons. It also makes the revolver act like an SMG. A weapon's frame can have drastic effects on how that weapon can synergize with different augmentation combos, such as in the video above where I use PX-3 Ivory Tusk to get huge slow rockets that deal a lot of damage, and I use Rolling Dynamo to make them shock nearby enemies. After that I throw on Vega GAZ-R to manually control my rockets, and now I have a launcher that allows me to fly a little blimp drone around.

Now then, that sort of joints into the other major element of Nowhere, MI in the form of the burden system. Similar to how the player gets surrogates that allow them to double jump, dash and use venge veins, there's also a set of surrogates that have a cost to equip, but allow for more unique gameplay choices. These are called burdens. Burdens tax the user's metabolism, causing their internal temperature to increase the more of them the user has equipped. From a balancing standpoint, this serves as a hard limit on how many burdens you can have at once. From a pure gameplay standpoint, the higher your heat, the greater the enemy threat becomes as you start to attract attention to yourself.

Think of these like how Dishonored handles bonecharms, except way more evil.

Burdens come in four flavors: Common, Heavy, Rare and Ultimate. The costs of these burdens are 10%, 25%, 50%, and 0% of the heat bar respectively.

Common Burdens typically augment small aspects of the game and serve as flat upgrades. This includes a 15% chance to dodge incoming attacks, increased health and defense, the aforementioned Vega GAZ-R which lets you control your missiles, and the ability to run quicker.

Heavy Burdens tend to be more exotic and add some fun modifiers to gameplay. Some examples include summoning pets to help you fight (in this case, a little smiling ball), drastically improving the performance of your jet dash, and changing how some augments behave (such as allowing Rolling Dynamo to turn enemies into tesla coils as well).

Rare Burdens are some of the most powerful upgrades the player can unlock. These include being able to revive when you run out out health and summoning a guardian to fight for you, Having a small orbital familiar that fires beams corresponding to your current weapon's augments and frame, or even launching a vacuum cannon when reloading your gun.

Ultimate Burdens are almost impossible to find and tend to have extremely potent effects. Unlike other burdens, ultimate burdens don't cost heat. They cost other stats. An example of this is a burden that gives you a 90% chance to dodge any incoming damage, but locks you at a single pip of max health. Another is a burden that increasingly gives you defense as you lose health, makes you slower and slower as it goes.

The hope is that with all of these little systems, players can fit into their own fun niche and explore the town of Nowhere while nuking entire rooms because I failed to balance everything correctly.

I hope you folks enjoy the game when it comes out!!

(Background song is "I Got Knocked Out The Same Night England Did" by Bilk)

[feverdreamjohnny]

Nowhere, MI - The Faltering World

If you fall through the level you will end up meeting god!!! Wow!!!

[feverdreamjohnny]

Nowhere, MI - New Cop Art

The cops have arrived to Nowhere... Oh no!

Music is Venus Flytrap by Feng Suave

[feverdreamjohnny]

Nowhere, MI - Jet Jet Mouse

It's him! He's here to improve your jet dash with his words of encouragement.

Music is Bete Noir by On Video

[feverdreamjohnny]

Nowhere, MI - Story Goals

This post talks about my goals with the narrative and the themes I want to go over with Nowhere, MI. There is a major spoiler regarding the second act of the story, but it's been helpfully marked with big spoiler tags so you'll know what to skip if you want to enjoy the game blind.

Why am I writing this? I think it's fun to have little scraps left over so when a game's done you can laugh at how quaint some of the ideas were when they've been run through the wringer to the point that they can no longer be recognized. Consider this a little personal journal.

On a final note, if you do read the spoilers, recognize that what's there probably won't show up in the final game in the way I've talked about it. Nobody can predict the weather. More than a year from now the final ending could be extremely different than what you're going to read.

With that said, let's get cracking.

The main thing I want to focus on is that James' sole objective is JUST to rescue Alex. He initially does "good things" solely because they aid him in getting closer to saving his brother in order to alleviate his own guilt for having driven him away from home. I don't want the game to turn into one of those "okay I want a bottle of milk" to "now we must kill god to save the multiverse!!!" type stories because I despise that format immensely. It's an overplayed narrative arc and it sucks. "Hero from humble beginnings with basic goals having to own up to his legacy as the true hero of fate or whatever" crap. It's abysmal and plays into some kind of weird idea that every person who motivates major events in the history of a narrative is some kind of fated hero/villain who embodies some vague universal concept of good or evil. That idea doesn't really translate to real life, people's motivations are complex and typically don't just converge to "hero of destiny." Not every historically "good" action comes from a place of moral righteousness.

James is selfish. That's the main thing I want Nowhere, MI to convey. He's rescuing his brother because he was the one who drove him away, and the guilt of having done the wrong thing is what compels him to try and rescue him. He's not here to save the world or Nowhere itself, he's here to get his brother and go home because he thinks it can redeem the negligence he showed his family during their father's decline.

Concord serves as James' missing conscience. He's optimistic and upbeat, he's sensitive and empathetic, he's everything James fails to be. The reason he exists is to try and help James improve, but the point the game makes is that there isn't just a simple cure for being a bad person. An adventure in a fun and strange town doesn't fix years and years of learned behavior. James is initially so adverse to helping people who don't benefit him that he's willing to abandon Concord in the Nerve Cradle because he doesn't deem him as "useful" enough in the search for his brother. James doesn't want a talking gun so he can play hero, he just wants information towards finding his brother so that he can leave. It's only because Concord might know something about Alex that James considers taking him along.

The adventure that follows is James having to help people through their individual struggles because in return they can help him continue his search for Alex. The process of doing this is the initial breakthrough for helping James grow as a person once the adventure is over, but the adventure itself isn't where James makes a 180 and turns into a beautiful shining hero. He's still just focused on fixing what he did wrong for his own reasons.

This next part is a MAJOR spoiler for the second act of the game, so please skip it if you want to wait for the full game. You'll know when a spoiler's about to happen when you see a block of text between two [!SPOILER!] tags:

[!SPOILER!]

During the end of Act 1, James and Concord find Alex's body. He died in a freak accident while trying to find a cure for their ailing father. What's left of Alex's body is reanimated and feral, and attacks James and Concord using the surrogates Alex found during his own journey to Nowhere. Once it's defeated, bright fragments escape from the body and collect in Concord.

Suddenly, Concord regains his memories and it's revealed that Concord is actually Alex's soul trapped in a gun. The two brothers speak face to face for the first time (well, first time that Alex was whole again after running away from home) and James reveals that their father died while Alex was gone, rendering his entire "journey for the cure" futile. The two resolve that they can at least try and save Alex by finding Nox, a god of entropy who Alex believed had the ability to undo their father's illness.

The adventure does culminate in James having to kill a god of sorts, but it's not some heroic journey to save the world. Nox, who's power results in the miraculous inky rot that allows human souls to possess objects, just wants to be left alone. His powers are volatile and inherently against life itself. Despite being a god of entropy, he's extremely guilty about his past actions in the town and doesn't want to hurt anyone ever again. He's not sealed away because some council of elders dared to stop his horrible reign of terror, he sealed himself away because he's afraid of the nature of his own existence. James undoes Nox's own efforts because he's desperate to save Alex, disregarding the fact that Nox's imprisonment was probably for the best. Nox - being as courteous as he is - hears the brothers out, but declines their request because undoing Alex's transformation into a poltergeist could have unpredictable consequences. He wants the brothers to just seal him back inside the tomb and leave. While Alex is willing to accept this because he understands what's at stake, James is blinded with rage and decides to fight Nox and make him yield.

James doesn't end up killing Nox because he's a hero, James kills him because he's enraged that he's being denied what he believes he and Alex are owed. Despite all of the effort to improve, at the end of the day James is still selfish. In the aftermath when James sacrifices all of his surrogates to revive Alex as a human, Alex doesn't get to confront him about what just happened because James has fallen asleep thanks to Nox's powers draining his body of energy. The final sequence is a montage of Alex dragging James back through all of the levels to the truck, pilfering James' keys from his pocket, and driving them both home.

The point is to have enough of a character arc to feel like James is growing as a person the more he explores Nowhere, but I want to emphasize that at the end of the day, old habits die hard and that a couple days won't be enough to fix years of troubled thinking.

[!SPOILER!]

Anyhow, that's all I have to share for today. I can't predict if Nowhere will live up to the planning document I wrote, but regardless of what comes out of it, just know it comes from the heart.

Thanks for reading.

[feverdreamjohnny]

Hop into James' shoes and find your missing brother in the surreal town of Nowhere, MI! Augment your body in horrifying ways to explore the city! It's a metroid-vania with 100% more monkeys than any other competitor!

I hope you guys enjoy it!!!