Projects

Game Concept

Project: Nomads is a relaxed game about building spaceships and exploring planets. Design, customize and fly your own ship creations! Journey through a peaceful, colorful galaxy full of discoveries, exotic loot and a personal mystery leading you from planet to planet. Enjoy a cozy bite-sized exploration sandbox at your pace and most importantly: keep building spaceships!

Gameplay

The main gameplay loop will be creating spaceships and exploring planets to find new blueprints, resources and collectibles to then build better, more specialized and more beautiful spaceships. Players will be able to fly and swap between any ships they create with accessible, comfortable controls and user interface (preferably with a gamepad on the couch or anywhere with their hendheld console). Spaceship design will be closer to a character/car customization system than a grid- or stat-based system. By focussing on different customization slots like hull shapes, colors, patterns, trails and various vfx (and encouraging players to try out new things on each planet) the game will focus less on reading and comparing stats and offer more freedom for bold choices.

The stay on each planet will be short, to give players the opportunity to explore just one and call it a night – or journey on and go for another and try out new ship creations with their latest unlocks! Each planet will be a fresh start to try new ship designs and a bite-sized exploration experience that is tied together by an overarching narrative and an engaging continuous metagame progression.

Setting and Feel

Project: Nomads is set in a peaceful galaxy where it is okay to just wind down for a bit or get into the zone exploring, looting and progressing steadily. The game will have a pleasant mix of nostalgic retro aestetics and stylized atmospheric environments, supported by a minimalist relaxing ambience and music. The goal is to make the game as accessible as possible and to allow anyone to play at their own pace. The mysterious narrative will keep players exploring to find out more, while engaging in many wholesome and surprising interactions on the way. The game will not be about warring factions, profit or survival. This game is about creativity, working together and finding our own way that lies between our past and our future.

Development Strategy and Roadmap

The game is currently built by a single developer using Unreal Engine 5™, but will eventually be supported by experienced freelancers for specialized tasks depending on funding availability. The project plan is to build the core gameplay first and get it into the hands of players as soon as possible to get feedback. Please reach out via mail if you’re interested to test the game early or want to support the project in other ways.

While the first version of the game will realistically be super focussed (meaning not a ton of content, offering a first taste of the gameplay and maybe not having the most polished art), it is designed to be scalable alongside a growing community, adding more ship customization, more environments, a long-term metagame, more narrative, more accessibility options and platforms at later stages of development. The most important fact is that the game can only grow with your support. So thank you in advance for reading this and helping to get the word out!

The project is currently still in early development, with playtests and the release of a Steam Demo planned for 2026/2027. Keep tuned for a newsletter, social media channels, a possible crowdfunding campaign, game footage and an official Discord server for updates! Please reach out if any of these interest you!

Community

The community will be a key part in the development of this title as it will be built with creators in mind. Whether players want to engage with a community or play on their own, sharing positive visions of the future and working together with others is now more important than ever. The hope is to offer a mezmerizing creative sandbox exploration game that people will want to watch, play and talk about, as each of your experiences will be as unique as the person in front of the screen.

Hiring

Pixel Coast Games is not hiring at the moment. No development team increase or internships are currently planned and depend on further funding – Although everyone who reaches out is appreciated! You are welcome to connect on LinkedIn or write a friendly mail in order to keep in touch! There will be opportunities for community leaders and content creators coming soon!