If you’ve been following us then you’ve probably heard the big news – we’re currently working on our third game, NO LOVE LOST, an intergalactic space adventure combining elements of PvPvE and competitive questing! Set out as rival Nectar hunting crews on an alien planet in a game of speed and sabotage to battle it out for a coveted resource.
For more insight on the initial idea, setting, design and mechanics of NO LOVE LOST, we decided to do a little Q&A with James, our Creative Director! Ready? Let’s get into it!
Q: HOW DID YOU CONCEPTUALIZE NO LOVE LOST AND ITS BLEND OF GENRES?
A: We asked ourselves: What if a competitive multiplayer game could be more interesting, asking you to do different types of things other than attack each other? What if it could feel more like an adventure rather than a combat arena?
These questions gave rise to NO LOVE LOST, which takes you on an epic adventure in an alien world. It’s designed to be engaging and fun for a group of friends playing together regardless of their skill level. Although there is PvP, the goal is not to kill one another but to harvest a rare resource called NECTAR from various sources on the surface of a mysterious and dangerous planet called DROSERA. This is where the idea for our unique PvPvE team-based extraction game began.
Q: WHERE DID YOU GET THE NAME NO LOVE LOST?
A: NO LOVE LOST was chosen for its duality: first, no love lost is a phrase defined by two opposing sides who have no feelings between them to lose. Second, you’re likely to be pitted against your friends during sessions, but, even if you’re fighting, you’ll still come out of it (hopefully!) loving each other! With the game’s strong PvP elements, we thought this was a fitting phrase to use as our title!
Q: TELL US A COOL FACT ABOUT DROSERA!
A: The air on the surface of the planet is contaminated by a pollen that is released at night. The pollen enters through your lungs and skin causing spores to grow from within you, consuming you and making you part of the biosphere. This is why you may find corrupted raiders -- lost souls wandering on the surface of the planet and why its oh so important to catch your extraction ship at sundown.
Q: WHY A HOVERBOARD?
A: After playtesting the game regularly, our team kept asking for a sprint button… “I want to go faster, can we add a sprint?” Although this came up several times, I felt like this was the kind of game where you would be running around with the button pressed 99% of the time.
What we really needed was to let players move at higher speeds through the world in order to reach the locations they were trying to get to. This is where the hoverboard came into existence; it was a transportation vehicle which wouldn’t really need custom vehicle physics and would give players the ‘hop on – hop off anywhere any time’ convenience of a sprint button. In a nutshell the hoverboard is our sprint button!
Q: GIVE US A LITTLE RAIDING 101! HOW CAN PLAYERS BECOME THE TOP NECTAR HUNTERS?
A: However tempting it may be to rush towards the enemy raiding team, engaging in PvP skirmishes in the early game (say the first 5 minutes) is not overly fruitful. It’s fun to mess with the opposing team, but there isn’t a massive benefit to eliminating someone who isn’t carrying a lot of nectar.
Given that the goal of the game is to extract with the most nectar (not kills) you are better off focusing on the PvE side of things until you’ve collected a decent amount of nectar and gotten some more powerful gear.
Oh yeah, one more thing: stick together. A lonely raider is a dead raider, that’s what we always say on Drosera.
Q: WHAT’S THE FUTURE LOOK LIKE ON DROSERA?
A: We have some ambitious plans for how to keep the game interesting and fresh moving forward, however without giving away too much let’s just say that Drosera is a largely unexplored planet with wonders still aplenty to discover 😉
We hope that our Q & A answered some of the questions you had about NO LOVE LOST! Got more? Join us on discord and ask a dev – we’re always happy to chat!
Find out more about NO LOVE LOST on our website or check out our Steam page! Have more questions? Hit us up on Discord! Don’t forget to follow NO LOVE LOST on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit and YouTube to stay up to date!