After quitting my job at a major studio and spending three years developing this indie project — including two major updates in the past six months — our game is finally launching its Early Access (EA) version on Steam on November 20! 🎉
You can now download the demo and add the game to your wishlist on Steam. We’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions — thank you all so much for your support!
XenoHaven Steam Store Page:
In today’s dev log, I want to share more about our team’s indie game development journey.
You can click the link to watch the latest dev log video, or keep reading for the written version below.
Back when the game’s core framework was still taking shape, our team was full of wild ideas — but it was hard to merge all those concepts into one cohesive vision. As the project matured, we realized we needed a unifying world concept to tie everything together.
That’s when we came up with a theme that could justify anything — the alien world.
From there, the story naturally took shape: a human survivor crash-lands on a chaotic alien planet, where invasive extraterrestrial species, unable to return home for unknown reasons, must coexist and take root alongside humankind.
These alien beings became what we now call Demonlings — creatures that players can form contracts with, train, and evolve throughout their journey.
To bring this vision to life, we fully dedicated ourselves to developing the Demonling system.
In the game’s main storyline, we finally explain the origins of the Demonlings, while also designing a comprehensive growth system that integrates genetic engineering, colony management, and more.
I’ve also gone into detail about this system’s design and evolution in our previous dev log video.
As the Demonling system became more refined, a tricky problem emerged — once the Demonlings were fully developed, their stats grew so powerful that the main character’s combat role became almost irrelevant. It felt like the Demonlings could handle everything, leaving the player with little sense of presence or impact.
To solve this, we needed to introduce a gameplay system that would make player combat feel exciting and rewarding again, while also reducing late-game stat inflation.
And that’s how the Dungeon update was born.
During the development of these two major versions, the most challenging problems weren’t actually about new systems or mechanics, but about refining the behavior and animations of the Demonlings and NPCs.
For example, in the early stages, when a Demonling picked up or ate something, all it did was show a progress bar above its head. Now, they finally have unique animations for these actions. The main reason it took so long is that our animation system wasn’t fully built out, which is exactly what we’re focusing on improving right now.
Another challenge is that Demonlings can perform many different tasks, which makes their AI behavior tree quite complex. As a result, they can sometimes get stuck, repeat actions, or fail to complete tasks as expected. While this issue can’t be fixed overnight, we’ll continue to refine and optimize their AI over time.
Recently, besides fixing bugs and optimizing the Demonlings to prepare for the upcoming EA launch, we’ve also started working on post-launch content—a major update tentatively titled “World Variables.”
This update is still in the early development phase, but here’s what you can look forward to: certain villages will now trigger unique world events, and there will be new dungeon bosses for players to challenge.
At the same time, this version will also feature a revamped weapon system, introducing a new weapon modification mechanic that ties into dungeon loot drops—allowing players to craft and customize even more powerful gear.
That’s all for this week’s dev log! 🌍
Our game “Alien Homeland” will officially launch its Early Access version on November 20th!
We’d really appreciate it if you could add the game to your Steam wishlist and support us — it means a lot to our small team.
Thank you all so much, and we’ll see you in the next dev log! 👋
Join in our community to get the latest information!
💬Discord: https://discord.gg/p8jHhK7QH2