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Stunning Survival Sandbox Game ‘Nimoyd’ Formally Announced with Plans for Future Mobile Release

Nimoyd is not a brand new game just being announced today. Not by a long shot. It actually began life as far back as 2016 as a side-project prototype thing between two friends, designer and programmer Rafael and artist Jeffrey. Their biggest design goal was to solve a problem that plagued other survival sandbox games, namely that the mid-to-late game tends to devolve into a repetitive grind as you’ve basically maximized all the game’s systems and are just going through the motions trying to obtain the best gear. Their solution is a game called Nimoyd and it sees you crash landing on Earth in 2702. What’s going on in the world of 700 years in the future? Well a deadly fungus is growing larger and encompassing more of the planet every day, so you’ll probably need to do something about that, eventually.

Not right now, though. Since you just crash-landed you’ll need to gather up some resources and build the necessities for survival, like a simple shelter, a bed, some food, that sort of thing. From there, as is the case with most crafting survival games, the world is your oyster. Build your house. Heck build a whole city. Or build a fortress and fight off enemy factions. Or join up with friendly factions and fight off alien invaders. Or build a mech and go around wreaking havoc. Or find love, get married, and start a family. And when you die, continue playing the game as your offspring and do it all over again. Nimoyd is about as open-ended as you want it to be.

As you can see, Nimoyd has an incredibly cool look to it. This is accomplished by creating the world itself in a 3D voxel engine but having everything else be made out of 2D pixel art. That’s why at first glance it looks like your average isometric adventure game, but suddenly the world can just rotate around and reveal that all the environments are actually real 3D spaces. This solves a lot of situational problems of the game being entirely flat and in 2D, as it was originally. That’s especially true for the main activities of a sandbox game of this type, like digging and building. It also just looks damn cool. You can read an extensive writeup from designer Rafael Wawer over on Gamasutra on the journey Nimoyd has taken over the years in terms of art style and design changes.

In fact the project really floundered and was almost scrapped altogether multiple times until Rafael came up with the 2D-in-3D idea of the voxel engine around this time in 2018. That was the ultimate “Aha!" moment for the game where everything clicked into place and made sense, and the game really discovered its identity. Since then Rafael and Jeffrey have been toiling away at Nimoyd, and over the summer in 2019 the game officially graduated from side project to full-time endeavor as a team was hired to form Nudge Nudge Games and finally get the game finished after its years-long development. So that is what today is really all about. The fancy official trailer you see above, a brand new shiny Steam page is open, and Nimoyd has a tentative early access release date of spring or summer 2021.

So where does mobile fit in? Well being the type of game that Nimoyd is, Nudge Nudge is really hoping to spend a good year or so in early access and shape the experience around early player feedback, as that is often the best course of action for such an open-ended sandbox game like this. So the “full" release will likely be sometime in 2022, and at that point they’ll be considering ports for consoles and mobile. Yes, it’s a long ways away, but so were things like Terraria, or Stardew Valley, or Forager when they first started out, and even once they were fully released they still continued to grow and expand in a number of ways. So I agree that it’s very important to get the foundation of Nimoyd just right, and that’s what the PC early access will be all about.

If this looks like something you’re interested in then be sure to Wishlist Nimoyd over on Steam to keep up with its progress, and you can find several more videos over on its YouTube channel that showcase the development process and give a greater insight into what the game is all about. Or hit up the game’s website for links to things like Twitter, Facebook, and Discord. I for one think Nimoyd looks incredibly promising and will be following along very closely for however darn long it takes to get a mobile version.