Nuclear Throne mutants can now battle the final boss and reach the Throne with its addition to the game over the weekend, developer Vlambeer's Rami Ismail announced in a blog post, adding that the game is now 50 percent complete.
"It's a reminder of an exhausting but amazingly rewarding game production," Ismail wrote regarding the post-apocalyptic "roguelike-like" where mutants battle for dominance. "It's the result of the work of six people that have pushed themselves to the absolute limit of their ability, the feedback and enthusiasm of the community and the support of the tens of thousands of gamers that play the game."
The early version of the Throne took up to seven weeks to design, prototype, iterate and develop, where the developers endlessly discussed its lore "and how it would look and work." Jukio Kallio initially created heavy Castlevania boss music for it, but replaced it with "a track that emphasised the impending resolution for our mutants more than the unexpected mortal peril that they find themselves in." While its final boss designs and behaviours went through many iterations with co-founder Jan Willem Nijman until a range of attacks were settled upon.
For the second half of Nuclear Throne's development, Vlambeer will revisit the content already in the game and expand on the title's lore and its world. The game will then undergo a "period of polish and certification" before officially launching on Windows PC, Mac, Linux followed by a release on PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita.
"In terms of reaching release-ready, we're about halfway. Nuclear Throne is starting to reach a state known as feature complete — it's the point that denotes that the systems that power the game are now all in place," Ismail wrote. "You can technically walk around, shoot things, collect ammo, mutate, find crowns, uncover secrets, fight bosses, pick up things, find cursed and golden weapons, play co-op and all the other things that you're used to from Nuclear Throne. The next stage is known as content-complete. That's when all the content — the levels, enemies, weapons, mutations, crowns, secrets and so on — are in the game.
Nuclear Throne is currently available on Steam Early Access or through Humble for $12.99. You can find out more about Vlambeer's approach with performative game development and Early Access on the developer's official blog and in our previous coverage.
