Nova Drift

Nova Drift is a “Roguelite” space shooter that melds a classic arcade experience with modern action-RPG elements. Your ship rapidly evolves as you defeat enemies, allowing you to shape its abilities and weaponry to your desires in a matter of minutes. Unlike many ARPGs which can absorb hundreds of hours of time, Nova Drift allows you to take a ship build from inception to execution in a single game session.

Features

• Create a unique build every run. Games are quick, allowing for rapid experimentation, iteration, and advancement.
• Cunning and creativity are rewarded as you chain upgrade modules for powerful synergies.
• Access over 120 modular upgrades as you progress and expand your arsenal.
• Build to play how you want. Snipe, command a drone army, discharge your shields, charge up, burn enemies with your thrusters, or smash right through them… there’s a way to make it work.
• Unlock various challenge modes, providing greater risk and rewards. The stakes are high, as death is permanent!
• Every game is randomly generated, keeping the fight intense and unpredictable. Fight through the campaign or play endlessly…

Nova Drift is a living game. Frequent updates will continue to expand the depth and content of the game world.

Planned updates soon after Early Access launch:

• Body Gear: Viper | Weapon Gear: Dart | Weapon Gear: Thermal Lance | Super Mod: Barrage
• Weapon Mutations: each weapon type will have 1-2 variations
• New Challenge Mode: Wild Metamorphosis – extremely rare mods that have a variety of powerful and/or bizarre effect

Ship Evolutions

Mods & Gear can be unlocked, upgraded and combined to make unexpected and powerful combinations:

Example Build #1: Seeking Cluster Grenade

Grenade + Body: Assault + High Explosive + Splinter Shot + Heat Seeking + Charged Shot

This build focuses on creating as many grenade splinters as possible using the Grenadeweapon and sends them tearing toward targets using the Heat Seeking mod. The overlapping blasts from the initial explosion add up to a huge amount of damage at the epicenter, while the seeking clusters handle crowd control.

Example Build #2: Celestial Shield-Bomber

Hullbreaker + Amp Shield + Volatile Shields + Flash Shielding + Emergency Systems + Celestial Lance

This build takes advantage of the Hullbreaker’s speed and resilience to crash damage to slam directly into enemies. The fragile Amp Shield is used not for defense, but to augment Hullbreaker’s strongest aspects, gaining increased speed and force. The shield will break on impact, but we can capitalize on that using the Volatile Shields mod, which detonates the shield when it goes down, blasting all nearby enemies. Flash Shielding gets it running again quickly while Emergency Systems grant a moment of damage immunity, making charge attacks safer. Finally, Celestial Lance is used to deal burning damage to everything around the ship at high velocities!

Nova Drift is developed by Jeffrey Nielson of Chimeric, a 1-man development team, featuring music and audio by Miles Tilmann of Pixeljam.