Salut! It’s been a bit over a month since we last talked, but we’re here to share with you the latest on Exogate Initiative. First off, there are now seven active people on the team, which includes our core team of full-time developers, our animator, writer, producer, and our new community manager (that’s me!).
Since our devlog there’s been a few key items to share, so let’s dive in:
What’s New
First off, there’s a brand new, state of the art demo for Exogate Initiative available right now on Steam as part of the “Steam Next Fest February 2023 Edition” that you can dive into. As you may remember, our previous demo launched in August of 2022, and since then we’ve been reading all of your feedback reports and working both on our Steam Early Access launch and a revised demo experience, including:
- THE VENDING MACHINE IN THE MESS HALL NO LONGER REQUIRES MANUAL FILLING! --Easily our most requested quality of life change, and you all were right. Now, once your vending machine reports as empty it will send a fresh delivery into your base where a Builder Bot will pick it up and re-fill the machine.
- Gaters are now properly animated thanks to the efforts of our animator, Rémy Caballé.
- New narrated missions, more content, more objectives, and an improved patent system and new revenue gameplay.
- Oh, and how about a complete rework of the med bay? --We mentioned this one during the last update, but it’s now implemented in the demo.
- Please also note that the demo offers a different experience than what you’ll play when the game launches. This includes the order of missions and maybe a surprise at the end. You won’t experience the Exogate exactly the same way anywhere else!
On the other side of development—which we’re a small team, so they’re all technically the same side overlapping like a tired mobius sphere—we have our Closed Beta. In mid-January we invited our community on Discord, Reddit, and Twitter to try out a then latest build of the game, offering feedback on their experiences and reporting any bugs they found. Originally we had planned for and expected about twenty to fifty responses, but by the time we closed our applications we’d gone well over two-hundred applicants, ultimately letting about half of them into the beta.
The support, feedback, and just genuine reactions to Exogate Initiative have been amazing to see, so thank you to everyone who has helped and taken part in this process.
Next Steps
After the end of the Steam Next Fest our sights are firmly set on our Early Access launch. While we can’t get into the specifics of timing, that horizon is approaching fairly quickly. As for what the team is working on, obviously bug fixes and optimization are priorities, but there are plenty of other things being worked on and prepped.
Tim White, our Game Writer and Narrative Designer has been hard at work on missions related to “intelligent beings,” the geological surveys, and a new more epic first mission, which Tim said “might be the coolest thing I've worked on, actually.”
Cursed Bug of the Month
Over the last few updates we’ve included our “favorite” cursed bugs to show you what development looks like, and to maybe make you laugh. As we near Early Access, however, we’ve noticed that the bugs have gotten far less cursed and if we’re being honest, fairly mundane. So, please join us below for some of our favorite cursed bugs of the last couple of months, and then pop over to our Discord and let us know what you think is happening here. 🤔
Well, that’s all from us for now. We hope your 2023 has been bright so far and we look forward to showing you more of Exogate Initiative. If you haven’t yet, go check out our new demo and then stop by our Discord and let us know what you think, or just hang out and discuss some awesome science fiction universes.
We’ll see you on the other side of the Exogate, Gaters!
The Xeno Bits team
