Whew, what has it only been 3 days? It feels like it’s been 300 years! That… warm sensation… ahem Anyway, we wanted to give folks here on Steam some insight both into what we’re up to and where this grand vessel is headed. So, without further preamble, let’s dive in!

Patch v0.5.1c

We’ve been pushing out small hotfixes every day this week (sometimes multiples in a day!) but today we pushed some of the biggest changes yet.

One of the best parts of Early Access is getting your game into the hands of actual players before every last decision is locked in and more difficult to change. We’ve been playtesting the game throughout development, of course, and when we put out a demo for Steam Next Fest back in June, there was all kinds of great feedback to act upon. Taking GenExile to a live, in-person event here in Vancouver called Game Garden was also a great source of feedback and seeing the game in front of people live (which we hadn’t been able to do up until that point) was a really bright moment for our team. But nothing compares to just getting actual Steam players hands on the game.

One of the biggest things we’ve seen is for some folks there could be more clarity around the behaviour of some structures. This is actually a common issue in many builder-type games, where when a structure is being constructed, other structures nearby in its production chain can’t be fully aware of that new structure until it’s done being built.

This issue exists in nearly all city-builders, it’s just that many other city-builders operate on a “real time with pause” model, so that gap of time between a structure being “unwrapped” and it being fully operational is a split-second and thus unnoticeable. But in a turn-based game, where structures perform their various actions at either the end phase or start phase of a turn, that previously split-second gap becomes, well, however long a turn takes. This produces some weird “one turn off” behaviour where an unsatisfied need on a tile has been addressed by a building that was just completed, but that need won’t “register” as met until the start of the next turn. Which quite reasonably yes, is confusing!

(as an aside, if there would be any interest in hearing more about why we opted for a turn-based vs. real-time with pausing structure, sing out in the comments and we could possibly go into depth on that in the future)

Part of the cause of this is the underlying architecture of GenExile’s game logic is one of traits (a common refrain of our team is, “It’s just traits, all the way down”) and nearly all the game’s logic is evaluating the absence or presence of some given trait + some other conditions. In general, this is an advantageous thing because it allows for all kinds of emergent and unexpected [complementary] behaviours. We don’t need to hand-craft every interaction between two entities on the map. If Tile A has Trait X and Tile B does something different and interesting if Trait X exists within its radius of effect, we don’t need to wire up to Tile B every single individual way that Trait X could have ended up Tile A, we’re able to just have the game care that it is there.

However, the downside of this is there’s no “central intelligence” with knowledge of all of those interactions. Or rather, there wasn’t until now. Patch v 0.5.1c introduces a structure monitor that basically serves as a proverbial production panopticon, able to see exactly what is going on where.

Now, to be clear, this is basically an under-the-hood game logic feature. It’s one we had been working on for a little while, but since it touches so many fundamental parts of the game, it felt a little too risky to push out on Tuesday, but after a heap more testing this week, we feel confident putting it into this update. There won’t be any hugely new player-facing functionality afforded by this (yet!) but what it has already enabled is being able to clean up a ton of those sources of confusion for some players when it comes to structure production chains and need satisfaction, and any other confusions that might still persist even after this update will be much easier to get at as well. And then even heartier updates down the road will be easier to deliver with this little structure monitor sitting there quietly, watching. Always watching.

While that was the biggest single thing internally for us, there are also all kinds of other QoL fixes, bugs squashed, performance refinements and such as well in this update and the details of all that is in the full patch notes at the bottom of this post.

GenExile is Steam Deck Playable

We asked Valve to take Generation Exile for a spin on the Steam Deck and after they looked it over, they determined it was Steam Deck Playable! Specifically the gaps between Playable and Verified they noted were:

• Sometimes shows mouse, keyboard, or non-Steam-Deck controller icons (accurate, we don’t have gamepad glyphs as of yet)

• Entering some text requires manually invoking the on-screen keyboard (accurate, but quite rarely; the only time it’s required is typing your player character’s name during character creation or changing the default name of a new save file)

• Some in-game text is small and may be difficult to read

For that last observation, going in the GenExile Settings menu then to Graphics and adjusting UI Scale and Text Size to their largest values does a pretty good job of being comfortable to read on a Deck. It’s by no means perfect but we find it to be quite playable and we wanted to share that with any other Deck-possessors out there too!

To be perfectly honest, we were a bit surprised when the Steam Deck evaluation came back from Valve as positive as it did. But then sure enough, we fired it up on one of our Steam Decks and it turned out to be pretty solid right out of the gate, actually:

We aren’t undertaking the work to get GenExile fully up to Steam Deck Verified quite yet, but we are aiming at that down the road. Needing to maintain both the standard keyboard + mouse UI/UX as well as another one that feels great with just the gamepad-like thumbsticks and buttons would slow down to many other parts of development right now and we are a rather small team (just six people FT plus sound/music assistance), so we want to keep our focus on the highest impact parts of development right now. But several of us have Steam Decks and absolutely love them, so we’re very much looking forward to really making GenExile sing on that platform in the future.

Development Going Forward

To talk more briefly for a moment about our Early Access launch writ large- it would be hard to say that the response so far hasn’t been quite a bit more muted than we were imagining. The folks who have decided to take the plunge seem to be enjoying what they’ve engaged with so far and have already been tremendously helpful in both confirming some things for where we are planning to head next and helped provide some exciting and unexpected discoveries too. We are tremendously grateful for their interest and confidence, and continuing to deliver on that is a charge we genuinely hold sacred and one we will do everything we can to uphold.

And to be clear, the intention here is not at all for this to seem defensive or like GenExile was “owed” or “deserved” any specific kind of response. We felt and still feel we have to earn each and every investment of funds and, maybe even more preciously, time spent engaging with what we have spent a really long time making (depending on how you count it, between 5 and 7 years!).

But the quietness of the reception has come as a bit of a shock. We had well into five figures of wishlists and every time we showed the game to folks, the reaction was quite positive. Our demo was among the top 70 most played of the ~2600 demos in June’s Next Fest. From complete strangers we heard more than once, fully unbidden, “Wow, this seems really polished for an Early Access game.” We sent out preview keys to content creators and press. Like, a lot of them. And even now, our refund rate is, if anything, lower than average for an Early Access game.

Again, this doesn’t mean we were owed anything. Not at all. But these are the indicators that, at least hypothetically, one is supposed to be using to see if you’re tracking toward something that will connect with folks.

And we’re not going to claim GenExile is the greatest game ever made and we were expecting to blast the doors off and move 100k units in less than 24 hours or anything like that. But the gulf between even our most conservative projections - projections based on the most knowledgeable and expert insights re: the PC marketplace - and what the first few days have been has really thrown us for a loop.

We’re still trying to understand exactly why that is. Of course we’ve never going to be able to be completely distanced and objective, but as best we can (and seeking insight from other folks who are even more objective), I think we can say at the very least that GenExile isn’t significantly below average in terms of quality, presentation and depth compared to other Early Access titles we’ve played, both recently and further in the past. We honestly feel like we’ve made something solid and what’s there demonstrates pretty clearly where things are going to be headed. We fully understand that Early Access — and all the unknowns that go along with it — is a bridge too far for some folks. People have been burned by EA games that got dumped and don’t want to burned again. That makes total sense! There’s many a title some of us have held off on until it hit 1.0 and then enjoyed heartily once it did. But the magnitude of hesitation for folks has come as quite a surprise to us.

It’s totally fine if EA is a bridge too far for you! But when seemingly nearly everyone has that same sentiment, at least for things that aren’t extremely known quantities, then you can’t help but ask, “Well, why even have Early Access then?” Prior to Tuesday anyway, it seemed like there still was something of a critical mass of folks for whom being engaged by what currently exists in an EA title and wanting to jump in to help shape where it finally ends up was a source of excitement. But it seems like it’s really turned into mostly just a cause for worry. Which again, completely makes sense, it’s the degree that’s the case that we’ve been surprised by. We’re very much interested in hearing from folks, so any thoughts you have are more than welcome to sling our way either via the feedback contact on our website or come chat with us over in Discord: https://discord.gg/dKaCuJm3M6.

The good news is, we are still here for Generation Exile and for you. We have a development roadmap that we’re already hard at work on and we’re going to be continuing to share our progress as move further and further ahead.

Obviously, it would be silly to pretend there isn’t a point at which just sheer rationality has to come into play. But we aren’t taking this horse to the glue factory on Monday or anything like that. Not by a long shot. We aren’t some well-monied megacorporation or a fly-by-night shovelware shop that can just shrug and move on to chasing the next trend. We’re six people with families to take care of, rent to pay and groceries to buy. And we’re also six people making a game in a genre that we all love that isn’t about endless rapacious growth and the grim harvest that demands. Because it’s really hard to look outside and not think, “Surely, there has to be a better way to do things than this.” We are doing this because we think it matters. Not in some hollow casuist way, but because we love the ways the games can talk about the world and touch the people who play them. That’s why we’re doing this.

In making a game about sustainability, one thing we’ve learned is change happens when people are not content to simply wait for others make something be different. Change happens when people take steps — no matter how small they may seem — to move the world just one little bit closer to one they’d be happier to live in.

We are tremendously grateful to everyone who has shown interest in what we’re doing, even just reading this post. Everyone who has wishlisted as a “Hmmm, I’ll keep an eye on this” has truly done GenExile a service and we’re tremendously appreciative that you have done so. For anyone who hasn’t, well, our ol’ friend the wishlist button is right here and being able to get in touch with you when we’ve hit some new exciting milestone really does help us a ton:

View game page

As mentioned, we’ve got a Discord you’re more than welcome to hop into and chat with us in! And if you have taken the plunge on GenExile and are feeling positive about what you’ve seen so far, leaving a positive review would genuinely be tremendous. One other thing we’ve seen over the last little bit is there are lots of folks that use that review tally as a hard go/no go eval (which makes sense!).

And if you’re feeling more friction with GenExile than you expected and you’re maybe hovering above that red thumbs down button, reach out to us first if you can. If there are technical issues, things you’re unsure when it comes to certain mechanics, etc - we’ve very happy to chat. Even if the game seemed to you from the outset like something it actually wasn’t, that’s tremendously valuable for us to know so we can better calibrate how we’re communicating about the games to folks. This game won’t be for literally everyone (nothing is!) and so we want to be sure we’re clearly speaking to folks who are on board for this kind of an experience.

So yeah, wow, it’s really been a week for us and it would be challenging to say it hasn’t been without some rough feelings. But there’s been a lot of positivity in interactions we’ve had with folks too. I once heard and now often repeat that all video games hate being made. I think this is absolutely true, and this one perhaps hated it more than many. But after so long a road, we’re used to what it takes to wrench this into existence and we’re just gonna keep wrenchin’.

And once again, we tremendously appreciate you being here with us!

See you among the stars,

Nels & everyone at Sonderlust Studios

Patch v0.5.1c Patch Notes

• Added structure monitor to fix “one off” production need issues

  • Should also eliminate some sources of inaccurate structure status indicators

• Improvements to UI scaling

• Added some missing (or temp) icons

• Resolved some uncommon issues with loading from specific game states

• Improved the sequencing and presentation of some onboarding messages

• Fixed various crashes originating from narrative events

• Clarified some text and decluttered some UI screens

• Fixed bug where habitat capacity wasn’t being “refunded” when a habitat was deconstructed

• Resolved an issue where a structure need would persist even if the structure was deconstructed

• Improved logging for unexpected crashing to make future debugging faster and easier

• Various other bug fixes

• Various performance optimisations, esp. for lower spec hardware