Oh no I'm Nitro Gen Omega posting again
The character creator update is live and it rules
I know, I know, I write about this game a lot but I really enjoy its mech combat and want the game to succeed during early access. It's a small team making something cool and word of mouth is how this shit survives.
Quick recap if you haven't read the other posts or watched the quick gameplay explainer; Nitro Gen Omega is a turn-based, open world mech combat game where you roll 4 randomly generated characters and then go off into a relatively large open world in an airship to fight off evil AI robots with your mech; each of your 4 characters controlling a portion of said mech and combat playing out in turn-based planning phases followed by an absolutely gorgeous fully animated cut-scene of the decisions you made. You balance the combat missions with day to day life on the airship and the relationships between your crew. I've seen the "it's like directing your own shōnen mech anime" levied and that's pretty accurate. The Italian dev team calls it "Spaghetti Anime".
At launch of the game's early access, you were at the mercy of the character generator with an all-or-nothing reroll system if you didn't happen to like the results. A week or so in they added the ability to lock individual characters before re-rolling and that was nice - but some people asked for more and boy, they fucken delivered.
This week they've put their internal character editor up on a beta branch of the game on steam (anyone who owns the game can use it) and it just rules. It's like a 3D anime picrew where you select body shape, outfits, color palettes etc. When you first open it, it randomly generates a person for you:
Then you can pop into the Appearance and Palette tabs to make whatever adjustments you want.
You can rotate the character and zoom in on the face to make sure the changes you made to eyes and minute details match what you want (especially since you'll be seeing these faces close-up in combat a lot)
Tried to make what an anime-inspired younger me would look like; my hair isn't nearly this big anymore and I'm rarely cleanshaven but I did my best with the options provided. The green chucks and black skinny jeans I think are the important part.
One of the concerns I had throughout the earlier impressions of the game was the lack of bodily diversity among characters and while there's still plenty of ways to go, there actually is some variation now; the biggest isn't very big but it's definitely better than "everyone looks like me when I broke my jaw and had a liquid-only diet for six months between surgeries"
Anyway once you have a character ready to go, you save it (doesn't seem to be a limit of how many you can make so far) and then on the new crew screen at the start of the game where you'd get your randomly generated ones, you pull up your character list and select one to replace the rando.
You can also do weird shit like this apparently.
Only real downsides so far:
- The gender binary of it; your characters are either male or female (though there is inclusive options like binders as shirts so it feels weird to be limited like that)
- You can't add these characters to an existing savegame in progress; the people you make here have to be pulled into a new run. (As far as I understand, they're exploring adding characters you make in the creator to be added to the 'Fools Inn' at towns where you can hire new pilots)
- There's no way currently to control what type of portrait they get (see the 4 Grungler screenshot above - it was random) but that's also being looked at according to the devs.
- There are some limitations on the clothing and accessories; for example, certain shirts or pants may require a specific body shape and revert you to the medium slider vs large or small - but if you switch to a different shirt your previous shape selection comes back. Other examples include hats being limited to specific hair styles, lots of small things like that.
Here's hoping they work some of that out because it's so much fun to play with this by itself, but then getting to see the characters you make in action is even cooler.
Nitro Gen Omega is available on Steam in Early Access. Once in your library, selecting the permanent-beta option in the Beta Participation section of the game's properties will download the build with the character editor.
