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It's update 99.
It's update 99.
Hi there! It's been a long time, and as you all probably noticed, Vlambeer has been in somewhat of a hybernation state. Nuclear Throne took a lot out of us, and when we finally released the current U98 over a year and a half ago, we were all entirely exhausted. Since then, we've slowly been finding our footing again, and now that we're feeling creative again, we decided to return to form with an long-long-long-awaited final major update to Nuclear Throne for PC, Mac, and Linux.
We've hired YellowAfterlife (the creator of the Nuclear Throne Together mod) and worked closely with community members and feedback to create an update 99 that is worthy of the wait. While we want to stress that you shouldn't expect new content for this update, it is nevertheless significant: the game performs significantly better, is easier to mod, and a lot of quality of life and balance fixes have been introduced.
We're excited to have one more update art by the phenomenal Justin Chan, we're excited to see the meta change once more, and we've genuinely missed seeing your responses to our silly development antics. We are eternally thankful for your patience, and your sense of enthusiasm and community for the game.
As such, we're announcing an AMA over on the official Nuclear Throne Reddit for November 6th, and Update 99 will release at some time near the end of the AMA.
Hi there! It's been a long time, and as you all probably noticed, Vlambeer has been in somewhat of a hybernation state. Nuclear Throne took a lot out of us, and when we finally released the current U98 over a year and a half ago, we were all entirely exhausted. Since then, we've slowly been finding our footing again, and now that we're feeling creative again, we decided to return to form with an long-long-long-awaited final major update to Nuclear Throne for PC, Mac, and Linux.
We've hired YellowAfterlife (the creator of the Nuclear Throne Together mod) and worked closely with community members and feedback to create an update 99 that is worthy of the wait. While we want to stress that you shouldn't expect new content for this update, it is nevertheless significant: the game performs significantly better, is easier to mod, and a lot of quality of life and balance fixes have been introduced.
We're excited to have one more update art by the phenomenal Justin Chan, we're excited to see the meta change once more, and we've genuinely missed seeing your responses to our silly development antics. We are eternally thankful for your patience, and your sense of enthusiasm and community for the game.
As such, we're announcing an AMA over on the official Nuclear Throne Reddit for November 6th, and Update 99 will release at some time near the end of the AMA.
It's been a while, but update 98 finally seems ready. While we've done lots of testing on this build over the last few weeks, do note that the changes to this build are 'deep' enough that we can't guarantee it's 100% stable. Over the next few weeks we'll work on update 99, which will fix any issues that come up as 98 rolls out. Most of Update 98 is balancing and fixes to issues introduced in 97, but the biggest change is the re-introduction of the Thronebutt meta-leaderboards. Nuclear Throne now directly interfaces with the site, and that means you can keep track of your Daily and Weekly performance there. Thanks for the patience, and let us know what you think!
It's been a while, but update 98 finally seems ready. While we've done lots of testing on this build over the last few weeks, do note that the changes to this build are 'deep' enough that we can't guarantee it's 100% stable. Over the next few weeks we'll work on update 99, which will fix any issues that come up as 98 rolls out. Most of Update 98 is balancing and fixes to issues introduced in 97, but the biggest change is the re-introduction of the Thronebutt meta-leaderboards. Nuclear Throne now directly interfaces with the site, and that means you can keep track of your Daily and Weekly performance there. Thanks for the patience, and let us know what you think!
First of all, thank you so, so much for your support during the launch of Nuclear Throne. We know things were unexpected, and we wish we would've been capable of communicating a bit more - but such is the nature of surprise announcements. While we're not allowed to go into specifics due to legalities and the like, we can easily say that this was by far the most successful launch in the history of Vlambeer, and such an enormous part of that was all of you on social media. It was also by far the biggest launch we ever did, and that does mean that we're learning as we go. We're super thankful for your patience, and we're going to continue updating the game to address some issues in terms of balance, fix some things that came up before the launch and some new things that came up after it, restore Daily/Weekly functionality, and polish just a tiny bit more. We're going to switch things up a bit now that we've reached home from PSX, release status on the game, and update 97 in our long history of updates. We'll be lowering the frequency of updates and livestreams permanently, although we'll have more information on what happens on our Twitch channel in the future. For this update, we're introducing some balancing tweaks, a lot of crash and hang fixes and introducing Steam Cloud. Update 97 should also address problems with OSX and Linux builds on certain configurations, and if everything went OK, nobody should ever have to touch options.ini again. We also learned to never make the default pause menu option 'Quit to Menu'. Sorry! For next update, we're going to transition the Dailies and Weeklies over to new servers, hopefully restoring those to full function for the first time after the launch. Let us know if you run into any new bugs or problems.
First of all, thank you so, so much for your support during the launch of Nuclear Throne. We know things were unexpected, and we wish we would've been capable of communicating a bit more - but such is the nature of surprise announcements. While we're not allowed to go into specifics due to legalities and the like, we can easily say that this was by far the most successful launch in the history of Vlambeer, and such an enormous part of that was all of you on social media. It was also by far the biggest launch we ever did, and that does mean that we're learning as we go. We're super thankful for your patience, and we're going to continue updating the game to address some issues in terms of balance, fix some things that came up before the launch and some new things that came up after it, restore Daily/Weekly functionality, and polish just a tiny bit more. We're going to switch things up a bit now that we've reached home from PSX, release status on the game, and update 97 in our long history of updates. We'll be lowering the frequency of updates and livestreams permanently, although we'll have more information on what happens on our Twitch channel in the future. For this update, we're introducing some balancing tweaks, a lot of crash and hang fixes and introducing Steam Cloud. Update 97 should also address problems with OSX and Linux builds on certain configurations, and if everything went OK, nobody should ever have to touch options.ini again. We also learned to never make the default pause menu option 'Quit to Menu'. Sorry! For next update, we're going to transition the Dailies and Weeklies over to new servers, hopefully restoring those to full function for the first time after the launch. Let us know if you run into any new bugs or problems.
This update was supposed to go out yesterday, before the PSX announcement, but due to exhaustion I couldn't muster the energy. We're really sorry about that, and we hope 96 fixes most of the major bugs many of you have been running into. Please note that this build was uploaded from the PSX showfloor, and didn't get the normal amount of PC/Mac/Linux testing it would normally get to get it to you as soon as possible after the announcement. If you see any oddities, let us know here on the forums!
We're finally allowed to announce what we've all been so ridiculously busy with - we have just launched Nuclear Throne on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita at the PlayStation Experience in San Francisco. The entire team is here, and we hope to be able to do a livestream somewhere later today, if we can find a place with good internet. Keep track of our Twitter (@Vlambeer) to see if that works out! That means we're also changing the status of Nuclear Throne on Steam to 'released'. As we promised, the game will launch at a pricepoint of $11,99 without any discount or sales, continuing our stance of not discounting the game during Early Access. We also want to emphasize that this release doesn't mean that no more updates will happen. It's a formality we had to get out of the way, and we're aware of the issues and problems on PC. We're working to fix those. Much of the work that we did on the PlayStation version also indirectly benefits the PC version, like performance optimalisations and improved controller support. Sadly, every time we pushed an update for PC, something would've just broken. We're going to solve those issues as soon as we can, and although 96 was supposed to launch this past week, it seems that now PlayStation's pressure is out of the week, early next week is super doable. I've been writing a small press release, but halfway through I realized I wrote it as if I was writing an announcement post to you all. So instead of sending this as a press release, I'm posting it here with some minor tweaks. Today, we're celebrating the launch of Nuclear Throne - a game that has been in Early Access on Steam for the past two and a half years, enjoying 95 weekly updates and two development livestreams a week. It has, to date, sold over 150,000 copies on PC, Mac and Linux. During its development, you've directly helped popularize the idea of livestreaming commercial game development on livestreaming service Twitch (which has since introduced a ‘creative’ subcategory), and Nuclear Throne became the first game ever available for sale through subscription to a channel on the service. During the interviews we've been having for launch, the one thing that kept coming up was how Nuclear Throne is well-regarded for its supportive community, and your constructive, considerate and helpful attitude. Not only did you create a lively forum, you also hosted expanded leaderboards, weekly contests, a fan-Wiki and even weekly update videos for the game. Before the game reached this ‘launch’, Nuclear Throne had a fan-organized world championship and unofficial mods. Without the community, we wouldn’t have been able to make the game into what it is today. We’re also extremely proud of what we’ve achieved with the game itself. Nuclear Throne’s unique blend of fast action and roguelike gameplay has already coined the term ‘Thronelikes’ – games like Enter The Gungeon and Downwell have taken inspiration from the game and made beautiful new games that we love to play. We introduced the idea of ‘Weeklies’, a subversive variant of daily shared challenges that are infinitely replayable for practice during the weekend. Most of all, we’re proud of the gameplay, the world and our mutant heroes and foes: we’ll miss Fish and Crystal and the rest of the mutants. It’s going to be really strange to wrap up on Nuclear Throne. For the past 33 months, every week for the two of us at Vlambeer and the four freelancers we worked with, we’ve had a very consistent schedule. On Monday, we read feedback and made a plan, on Tuesday we’d livestream, on Wednesday, we’d work, on Thursday we’d livestream, on Friday we’d wrap up, on Saturday we’d release an update and we’d hotfix the build or sleep on Sunday. We’d absorb the feedback and community enthusiasm and immediately repeat the cycle. We’ve become good friends with many people in the community, and we hope that they’ll stick around for the future. For us, life will feel strangely empty for a while without that constant loop at the top of our mind. It’s a very bittersweet moment, and we hope we’ve done the community proud. They have given us a lot, and we hope we’ve repaid their trust and time and patience. As for what’s next for Vlambeer, it’s hard to tell right this moment. We’re going to support Nuclear Throne for a bit, as we’d like to see how the game performs on PlayStation platforms, and see if there are any outstanding issues on the PC version. We also feel like we should take a break and revisit our earlier projects and see if they require some polish, touchups, updates or re-releases. Nuclear Throne was by far our biggest and most intensive project, but our goal was never to make ‘bigger’ games. Our goal is to make better games. We’ve learned a lot making our first roguelike, the first game we’ve made with the sheer scope and size of Nuclear Throne, and we’re eager to find out how that new knowledge applies to future –probably somewhat smaller- projects for the foreseeable future. As for the team, it’ll eventually be splitting up again. Vlambeer always works with friends and freelancers beyond our two core team members. Paul Veer, the artist who is entirely responsible for the visual style of Nuclear Throne, is going to work on some of his own exciting projects. Joonas Turner, our SFX designer responsible for the explosions and other less important sounds in the game, is already swamped with a dozen new projects. Jukio Kallio, the amazingly talented musician responsible for the soundtrack of Nuclear Throne, will be releasing the Nuclear Throne OST in the nearby future. Finally, promo artist Justin Chan will be continuing studying art. As for me, I’ll be keeping track of Nuclear Throne’s community and working on addressing any issues the influx of new players might bring. For what it’s worth, Vlambeer designer J.W. has already been pitching new game ideas. For now, we’re going to take a nap, and then back to work. We'll chat to you soon.
Nuclear Throne is Now Available on Steam!
Nuclear Throne is a post-apocalyptic roguelike-like top-down shooter. Not 'the final hope of humanity' post-apocalyptic, but 'humanity is extinct and mutants and monsters now roam the world' post-apocalyptic. Fight your way through the wastelands with powerful weaponry, collecting radiation to mutate some new limbs and abilities. All these things and more you could do if only you were good at this game. Can you reach the Nuclear Throne?
It's been a while, and we apologize for that. There was no way we were going to finish this update in a week, so instead we took our time and tackled some long-overdue isues. This update is going to be a rough one, so strap in. We're really getting close to wrapping up, and port of that was rewriting a lot of code from the ground up. We've redone most of the leaderboard, rendering and collision code, changed to a new way of creating the executables that'll perform better on low-to-mid-end computers, and we've added a ton of features.
We've also, very likely, broken the game in dozens of ways. Over the past few weeks, we've worked with many of you in our community to fix as many bugs as possible, but it's time to throw the build out there and get numbers instead of focused feedback.
With this update comes a bunch of new stuff. You can now set your keyboard controls in the options menu (since you've all got a save game, you might want to delete that or bind every control to something), we've added a 'stream key' functionality that is a work-in-progress, and we've finally integrated achievements.
Please, please, please let us know if you run into any problems. We specifically need crash logs and other hanging bugs, but anything you see that looks odd compared to Nuclear Throne as you know it is welcome.
As you all might've noticed, update 95 has been delayed. We apologize for that. We really tried, but at this point most of the team is tired from that enormous sprint we did from update 92-95, and needs a little bit of time in recovery mode. Normally, one of us would pick that up, and work on the game alone for a few days, but that's not really possible anymore. We've reached a point where most of the things we're creating are balancing, polish, and this week mostly integrations into the Steam ecosystem (which some of you noticed) - which just takes a bit more time than we'd want, and is not not something you can just release half-working because we're working with someone else's code. We're aware of some bugs that prevent the ending from triggering, and we hope you know that if we saw a possibility to fix that now, we would've done so already. The code that is in this build is too structural to put out half-finished. It seems an update is a few days out at least, so we might delay #95 or even decide to skip, and give us time to get everything proper hopefully before next weekend. Sorry <3
As you might've noticed, we've been pulling off some huge updates lately. We've been working extremely hard for basically months now, and you can see the results: Nuclear Throne is getting very close to being a finished product. Update 94 is probably the last enormous update, as after this we'll be slowing down, carefully wrapping up the ride and smoothly sailing into release. This means we're close to entering a relatively quiet phase where we spend all the time we need making sure NT doesn't break when you look at it.
We'll jump right in with what most excites us: Weeklies.
Weeklies run every weekend from the first minute of Saturday until the last minute of Sunday UTC, and are basically seeded runs with a set loadout. Your character, crown, and starting weapon are all fixed, and you won't find a single Crown Vault in your runs. The thing is, you can play a weekly as much as you want until the time runs out. You can try optimizing your route, mutation picks, and strategies, but also master some of the quirks specific levels throw at you. Every weekend will bring a new Weekly, and a new weekly leaderboard to conquer.
Besides that, there's just too much to list here. The first weekly should've started right about 40 minutes ago. Go have some fun!
Features
You know what that is? That's Rogue's voice. Congratulations everybody! Not only does every Nuclear Throne character now have a voice, but this game has now officially been in Early Access for two years, and we've also just reached the final balance and polishing phase! This week was spent just cranking out details and polish, and finally implementing long awaited content! Either way, it's probably safe to say this is the biggest update we've ever done.
This might be the slowest hotfix we've ever made.
Oh yeah, another huge exciting update. After last week's implementation of an ending, and the resulting outcry and problems, we've decided there was only one way to go: add even more endings! You can now stop your game at two points, sit down, and reflect on your achievements. For that, we've implemented the first rough version of our credits scene, with a (we think) amazing song by Jukio that'll hit you right in the feels.
Either way, don't worry: we spent a lot of time fixing bugs and tweaking the generators we added last week. In general a more smooth experience should be in front of you when you start playing. Other than all that, we've continued the art and sound overhauling of the game, spicing it up and generally continuing our race towards a finished game!
Ah, one more thing. All the B-skins are now in the game. And they have unlock conditions. Good luck.
Whoa, the end? Is this really it? After years of updates, Nuclear Throne has come to an end?
Well, no, not just quite yet. While we are absolutely getting really close now, there are still a few updates coming before we wrap up Nuclear Throne. J.W. just wanted to sound dramatic.
We did actually start implementing an ending. Go find the Nuclear Throne, and see for yourself! This also means entering a loop has gotten a bit more complicated. As always, big updates like this might roughen things up a lot, but we're super excited to have reached this point. Once these things are smoothed out, we can really move on to actually polishing everything and wrapping up the game!
With this update also comes our sincere apologies for the massive disaster that was last week's update. It's always a bit of a mess overhauling core systems, but we didn't quite anticipate the level of carnage the update would bring. We hope this update fixes most of those issues, although some bugs and crashes might remain. Just let us know in the forums - while we might not respond to everything always, we do actually read everything.
As you might notice, polish and balancing have already taken a bit of priority this update, and that'll only increase in the next few weeks as we gear up for 1.0. There's loads of things this week, so just dive into the detailed changelog and enjoy the hard work we've brought you!
This was a scary week of development. In order to fix co-op, we had to break a very essential part of the game, and piece it back together bit by bit, making sure no random errors popped up at essential moments. Long story short: we think we've succeeded, and co-op is back!
We've also done some proper balancing, fixed some nasty bugs, tweaked last week's new looping system, and generally cleaned up the code a bit. We've got about one big thing left to implement before we can move on to very focussed balancing of the game! Either way, all the big fixes and code reworks might cause some error messages. Please keep an eye out and let us know when things go wrong!
Wallpaper version: Here.
Big, experimental changes incoming! We've finally started moving loops away from "random chaos, good luck", and are heading towards a more curated approach. Loops now simply have different, harder enemy spawns, yet still a good load of messiness to them. We hope this poses more interesting, specific challenges while also upping the difficulty more consistently. We've also worked a lot on the two bosses that needed it most: the Technomancer and Throne II. We're super curious to find out what y'all think about these changes, and how far, or not far, loops will take everyone now!
We've also upgraded Steroids' B-skin, done a whole load of balancing, and toned down the universally beloved and critically acclaimed Van Spawns a tiny bit. You'll get about 300 more milliseconds to respond to them, and they'll try to no longer ram right into each other on spawn.
Either way, we think it's loads of good stuff. Please dive in and send us all the feedback you've got!
For the last 88 (!!!) updates our double digit updates have been huge, but you can tell we're moving towards completing this game - there's mostly little things left, and we can't do 'big things' without getting all of those 'little things' our of the way. In other words, it was fixing, tweaking, balancing, and the introduction of a new elite enemy. Enjoy!
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