Nuclear Design Bureau

Big Bomb= Me Like

I think this has strong bones, but it is very rough currently. Main issue I have is the basic editing controls (the main thing you use while playing) are atrocious and extremely clunky. Fullscreen and windowed fullscreen settings don't seem to work for me either. Still worth the low price of entry at the moment though if this piques your interest.

It's definitely early access, there are bugs, and the simulation is slow, but it's doing hydrodynamic math, it was always going to be slow. If you can handle it being slow, then 10000% recommend it. It's everything I could have asked for, and more. It's truly beautiful.

A fun, light-weight sim/game. I honestly am impressed with how compelling the simulation is. I went into the campaign with a generalized understanding of what actually goes on with fission/fusion reactions ... only to realize that I barely had a clue. I genuinely cannot express how satisfying it is to see a design work. 10/10 - It's an absolute blast (yes, I did the thing, no regrets)

This is another game that makes me wish there was a neutral recommendation. There is a lot I like about this game, though I think I have trouble recommending it to people who weren't already excited about the core concept. Granted, it is in early access, and I have faith that it will improve substantially. I think there's enough novel about it that people should give it a try and I hope that the dev will get the resources to make it what I think it has the potential to be, so I'll give it a tentative recommend. The good: it's a really cool and enlightening idea and there's nothing else like it. It has that quality of the old powder simulator flash games but only the most exciting part and dialed up to 11. I really enjoyed it until I got to the Lithium Deuteride and HEU sparkplug, which I could not get to activate after hours of attempts (I think maybe it has to do with the timing of fast neutrons hitting the sparkplug vs the x-rays, but I have no idea). I saw another review with a similar problem. The place where I give the game more grace than a lot of reviews: I suspect that what people are identifying as poor performance is not so much poor framerate as it is different physics operating at very different timescales - propagation of x-rays and neutrons vs propagation of a mundane explosion front are orders of magnitude different in speed. I think the game is running at the speed of the slowest phenomenon. Yes there is a lot of room for performance improvements, but I think slowdowns are inevitable. I think the game needs a more graceful way of doing this; perhaps performing the calculations and saving to file without rendering, then showing the result as more of a recording that can be panned through at the speed of the viewer's choice. This would also make diagnosing a build that doesn't work well much easier. Another thought is perhaps trying to coarse-grain the slowest elements (i.e., instead of waiting for individual neutron emissions and ratcheting down to ns timesteps, calculate a probability distribution for number of neutron events in a 10 ns window and run the calculation accordingly). The place where this game has absolutely no excuse: Every written word in this game needs to be proofread. Much of the tutorial text is confusing or misleading. This just needs a person to spend a day making it legible. Related - the hints that pop up after you fail; you should be able to scroll through those at will. Other things that need work: 1) Whatever kind of finite element simulation is going on is a little janky. Everything sort of puffs up and rounds out once the simulation starts - it's very inconvenient given how gun-type designs require an object to slide seamlessly through a channel. Everything in general is very bouncy and squishy in a manner that makes the core mechanic of the game - timing a compression event perfectly - seem very RNG-based. I'm not sure if this is consistent with what we should expect from shock-loading, but it feels off. 2) The building tools and UI in general are a bit awkward. It's difficult to be precise, which is bad in a game where precision engineering is key. 3) It would be good to have temperature/stress/neutron flux/photon flux overlays for the visualization. This would play well with my previous comment about making the simulation a recording you can seek through rather than a real-time calculation. At the moment, the consoles on the left that show peak quantities over time are of marginal utility when you reached peak fissile density 100 ns ago and can't go back and see what the state of the simulation was then. 4) Better tutorials in general. There's what I guess you could call a difficulty spike, but more accurately a "5 new mechanics were just introduced with barely explanation" spike once the game progresses to thermonuclear. A set of pre-built devices that can be loaded in the sandbox and demonstrate different mechanics wouldn't go amiss.

Simplifies enough to make the game casual while still providing a challenge to maximise effecency and make a big ass boom

Fantastic so far. Needs polish, but I'm already having a lot of fun. Great work!