Project Nomads

… is a third person cross genre game that takes place in a fantastic world of huge, floating islands that drift slowly through the haze of the clouds. The player controls a Nomad - a human able to fly, mastering the art of magic and the relics of a lost technology. With his arcane powers and glittering, magical artifacts, he can build factories, powerplants and defense facilities on these massive platforms.

Armies of flying machines, biplanes and zeppelins produced by the factories are controlled to gain the upper hand in the battle for rare resources and valuable artifacts. The floating islands are used like battleships to explore the unknown realms in the clouds. Flying around with your hero in a fantastic and breathtaking world in the clouds offers a new level of immersion.

Facts

Developed from 1999-2002
We worked in close collaboration with Hahn Film - the company of the Radon Labs Co-Founder and business angel Gerd Hahn
With “Project Nomads” we intented to further develop the Action Strategy genre and to adress and fix some of the weaknesses “Urban Assault” had: characters, story and we wanted to get rid of the 2D strategy UI. Also we wanted to build a true multiplatform game - aiming for gamepad control and targeted for the Xbox 1. During the development process we struggled with many aspects - organisational and concept wise - so the game at the end was not nearly close to what we had in mind.
Despite the high expectations and rewards like “ECTS Best PC Game of the Show 2001” - the game received mediocre ratings and the sales were way below the expectations. But still - due to distribution via magazine cover CDs - the game gained massive reach and some popularity within a certain generation.
An Xbox1 version was in preparation but canceled during development. A port to Mac exists.
Originally the game´s title was intented to be “NOMADS”. But the publisher´s contract templates used a field “PROJECT”. Some marketing employee at the publisher now just copied “PROJECT: NOMADS” and used this in the marketing process. When we noticed the mistake - already all marketing materials were produced, so we had to stick with this title.
…

Nebula

We developed our own inhouse engine “Nebula” to realize the worlds in the clouds
“Nebula” was open source and used by dozens of game development studios and indie teams as well as special effects companies worldwide early 2000s
RadonLabs used “Nebula” for all developments - more than 20 years later “Nebula v3” is 2021 still in use for “Drakensang Online” at Chinese YOUZU INTERACTIVE

Links

// TODO: More videos, artwork, press articles and fotos from the team will be added // TODO: Add screenshots, early tools of NEBULA