Good day, community!
After lots of behind-the-scenes work, we’re excited to share our very first technical devlog, along with a look at the progress we’ve made this September on the alpha build of the game.
ALPHA Update Patch Notes | September 2025
This update brings broad polish across visuals, audio, gameplay, quality-of-life improvements, and key fixes. It’s not perfect yet, but we’re happy with the progress and excited about what’s ahead.
As for multiplayer, it's still internal only for now while we continue refining and fixing!
🎯 Missions & Objectives
Objective 2.0 (WIP): Overload, Destroy, and Steal are rebuilt with new art, interactions, and tighter world integration. Rescue and Kill also received less-obvious improvements. Ongoing effort.
Mission rules: self-revive from incapacitation, limited lives, proper fail state, and a post-mission stats screen.
Map rotation: weighted random selection to surface fresher content while keeping variety.,
Resistance layout: mission board flows easier → harder (A: Res 1, B: Res 2–3, C: Res 4, D: Res 5–6) to guide newer players.
🤖 AI, Spawning, Companions
Spawning rework: validates path length to players, prefers flanking lanes some of the time, handles verticality better, and avoids already-cleared paths to keep pressure relevant without raising counts.
Auto-relevancy: far-behind enemies can safely “respawn” near active play to maintain pacing and performance.
Companion overhaul: calmer movement, better firing positions, less idle noise when threat-free, and reworked auto-respawn if they drift too far.
Suppression changes: companion AI utilize less indirect fire as to not excessively add chaos, and how enemies react to player suppressive fire was tuned to be more reactive.
Drone deployable shows correct friend/foe tint when placed by enemies.
🔫 Weapons & Gear
Weapon color selection added with tuned color sets. More refinement coming.
Magazine ammo counters now functional on supported weapons.
Railgun: new holo-sight for precision; damage aligned with the new health model.
Machine Gun & Beam Rifle: new WIP models in-game for iteration (not textured yet).
Materialize effect when grabbing weapons or items for a crisper handoff.
Railgun damage application corrected to match the new health model.
⚙️ Core Systems
Character damage rework: simplified layered model (shield, armor, flesh) replaces limb-based health for clearer time-to-kill and easier balancing.
Drone handling: flight behavior tightened.
Heavy unit: hitbox corrected to eliminate ghost shots.
🎨 Levels & Art
ShipAlpha: extensive layout growth with new side areas and flow fixes. Some new combat spaces will be used more as objectives expand.
LD02: targeted level-art improvements.
Lobby: UV and widget proxy fixes, signage tweaks, and a lighting pass to unify the palette.
Respawn pod: upgraded art for clarity and cohesion.
🧑🎨 Characters & World
Civilians: visual updates and masked variants to ease uncanny valley; further texture iteration queued.
🎧Audio & Music
Combat mix pass: clearer threat readability in firefights; safeguards to reduce rare shot cutouts; trimmed flybys and impacts; distance scaling reduces companion dominance; camera-shake tuned.
Score & radio: curated mission music and lobby tracks; radio volume behavior cleaned up.
🧰 Options & UX
Abort Mission and Quit Game added to Options.
Smooth-turn slider range recalibrated; slider audio fixed.
Hand smoothing toggle now applies correctly.
Bullet-time defaults to disabled, but can be enabled in Debug, and had its time dilation adjusted.
Locator destination reliability improved.
🖥️ PCVR Presentation
Independent color-space calibration for the game view and spectator camera for better visuals in headset while enabling high quality footage capture.
👾 Tweaks
Player grab sphere reduced to ease foregrip and charging-handle conflicts.
Thanks for checking out today's devlog. Don’t forget to wishlist Exoshock so you won’t miss any future updates!
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