Nitro Gen Omega is Really Worth Your Time If You're Into Turn-Based Mech Combat
I was pretty positive on Nitro Gen Omega in my previous write up and my god I have a feeling I'm gonna be insufferable about this game for a while - the combat is so goddamn crunchy (complimentary) and again I say that if this is the early access first release, I can't wait to see where they go with it.
The recent updates have helped a lot with some of the quality of life stuff and the dev team is actively listening and implementing feedback. We're three updates in and there's a world map now, the skill UI's gotten an overhaul, added the ability to lock in single characters during group generation, several huge bugfixes etc - it's looking good.
The other day I saw some people making fanart of their crew (keep in mind, every character is procedurally generated) and I've been looking for more Blender modelling / rigging practice so thought what the hell and gave it a shot. I went with my current MVP - Kaho, our driver. Her level-up bonuses for driving have made her kind of unstoppable for melee should an enemy mech dare be in the same zone as ours (and my mech's build has move options for several other pilots so they can put us in the right place if needed and let Kaho tear them apart).
Mostly unstoppable in combat but sadly vulnerable to random encounter events I started off making a base mesh of a person with the game's stylistic proportions and then started adding the hair, clothes etc.
The character designs from the game are all pretty uniform in that they almost all share the same body shape; one of my criticisms from last time was about how there's (that I've seen anyway) no fat character types, or more realistically - no characters with any actual bodyfat at all, everyone is a goddamn waif or twink. I noted that this is likely because every character have to use the same animation rig for the art style to work in the animated sequences as it's all done in-engine instead of cutscene, so I understand the work that entails for a small team's early access launch and hope they put in that work in the future. They have the personalities, skin color and clothing / accessories down, it'll be nice to see them expand a bit with taller, shorter, wider, characters, etc.
Anyway, because they all have effectively the same body with different heads / clothes, when I finished up the main mesh and got it rigged I realized I could take the same approach they did and, well...if all we're doing is duplicating a body and replacing specific features, it wasn't that much of a jump to get to here:
So with the whole crew modeled and rigged and thanks to me cultivating my ideal toon shader and using solidify outlines for basically everything I do in blender, it was not that much further of a leap to get to something that was mistaken for an in-game screenshot (huge compliment btw) to the first people I showed it to:
I think my favorite thing is Mika in the back waving "I'm here too" because so far they've never set foot in the mech
All in all it wasn't that long of a project, and it helped me ID some problems I'd had with topology and rigging in the past so hey - win / win.
Again, You can (and should) pick up Nitro Gen Omega in Early Access on Steam.
Thanks for reading! Here's your end-of-post cat photo
Her name is Alphys