Exogate Initiative News

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:

[h2]What’s New[/h2]

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.

[h2]Next Steps[/h2]

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.”

[h2]Cursed Bug of the Month[/h2]

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

Hello Gaters!

Come on over to the Exogate Iniatitive Steam page to check out our pre-recorded let’s play featuring our latest build. While you’re there, make sure to download and try our completely updated demo, including new features and a completely revamped Medbay, Mess Hall, and more!

If you like what you see, we’d appreciate a wishlist to help more base-building and management fans to see what we’re working on.

Thanks, and all the best,
The Xenobits Team

Hello from the other side of the universe,

Long time no see, I know. If you are not aware of it, we are a very small team, with 4 people at its core, and all our energy is currently dedicated to making the game ready for the early access in a few months. So the development is going very well as you will see below but we lack the time to properly communicate our progress with you guys.

[h2]What’s new[/h2]
[h3]Heavy suits[/h3]
For the most extreme destinations you will now be able to equip your gaters with heavy exploration suits, they probably won’t be able to dance though.


[h3]Medbay[/h3]
The medbay is now complete, and all the injury management with it.
Gaters could sustain one of the 33 currently implemented medical conditions like broken arm, punctured lung or depression. Each will require a specific diagnosis and treatment so you will have to properly setup your medbay so that they can get the care they require and be back on their feet ASAP to return to the other side of the universe.


[h3]Game flow reworked, no more generated missions[/h3]
After countless hours trying to generate exciting missions procedurally we threw in the towel. We weren’t satisfied with what we had and it was quickly becoming boring for the player. The game experience being our top priority, we decided to remove entirely the generated contacts from the game, and modified the exploration gameplay accordingly.
Now the teams will explore each planet on their own, they might contact you occasionally (you will be able to setup the frequency at the start of the game) and offer some interesting narration through our manually crafted contacts .

[h3]Auto-refill[/h3]
As pretty much everyone asked for it: yes, equipment like the meal dispenser will automatically order a refill when they are empty now, and you won’t have to do it manually anymore.

[h2]Next steps[/h2]
[h3]Workshop and destinations exploitation[/h3]
We are now close to completing the workshop room, and with it the exploitation of geological destinations. More on this really soon.

[h3]Library and artifacts[/h3]
You will encounter alien artifacts on dedicated planets and will be able to bring them back in order to display them in a dedicated equipment of the Library room.


[h3]Updated demo[/h3]
An updated demo with far more content will be available in february for the Steam Next festival!

[h3]Early access[/h3]
The early access is still planned for the first half of 2023, we hope to share with you our roadmap soon.

[h3]Private beta [/h3]
In January we will start some closed beta and will need your help to test the game and give us critical feedback, if you are interested, be sure to join our discord. We will communicate more about it here in the coming weeks.

[h2]Cursed bug of the month[/h2]
No, advanced medical treatment is not supposed to make you levitate.



That’s all for today, the team will soon take a well deserved rest for the holiday season. We wish you the best!




The Xeno Bits team

Hello the exocommunity,

You missed us! We were a bit busy between the demo update and the early access version progress. But exciting things are to come and we’ll welcome an animator to our team very soon!

Let’s move on to what we achieved lately!



[h3]The alien invasion feature[/h3]

You asked us a looooot about this feature! It’s still in progress but we start to have a clear idea of how its system will work. We’re facing many challenges, including:

• The trigger of the invasion. It’ll mainly happen when a team of Gaters is outside the Exogate.
  
• Its impact within the base. It's mainly about the threat these alien life forms represent and what kind of damage they’ll make inside the base.
  
• Base attack means defense mechanism. How to repel your enemies, with which weapon and find a way to protect your base more efficiently!
  

They’re coming!!!

The alien design is not definitive but we already like to think that this will spice up the game!

Quick info: the invasion feature won’t appear in the demo update! We rather keep it for the Early Access version.

[h3]Dev stuff[/h3]

There are many points we took and are still taking care of to guarantee that we don't forget anything. This includes:

• Constantly polishing the game, more specifically the rooms and their objects, the Star Map – which is still a delicate point to handle because there are a lot of things to undo, redo and add – and taking into account your feedback from the Itch.io demo regarding more general stuff such as bed attribution, base navigation, UI and more.
  
• Integrating the 6th and last Gater class: the Diplomat! We won’t elaborate more about it right now because it’s at an early stage.
  
• We’re improving balancing since as we add new characters or modify the research monetization system, this creates a gap that we must fill. We have to make sure that all of this doesn’t make the game unplayable. This is a long-run issue that makes us test a lot of things to see how they fit.
  

[h3]Cursed bug of the month[/h3]

Since we talked about invasion earlier, how about a compilation of bugs for this feature? The last one is a masterpiece.



Feel free to join the Discord server of the game to chat with us and to never miss any news about the development of Exogate Initiative!

See you in the next devlog, Gaters!

The Xeno Bits team


https://store.steampowered.com/app/1681060/Exogate_Initiative/

We've asked our community on Exogate Initiative's Discord server to write short questions about the development of the game that we'll answer with a GIF. No extra text, just GIFs.

It's now time to reveal the answers!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[h3]Hardest feature to implement?[/h3]


[h3]How many tons of coffee/pizzas for the devs?[/h3]


[h3]The CM's favorite Gater class?[/h3]


[h3]Sneak peek of aliens?[/h3]


[h3]Funniest bug you've seen?[/h3]


[h3]What did the first version of Exogate Initiative look like?[/h3]


[h3]Will there be an option to rename your gaters/characters?[/h3]


[h3]Will there be mod support?[/h3]


Any other questions related to the development are available on the Steam community hub, you'll find the full topic here!

Thank you to all the cool people who have sent their questions!

Liked this format? Let's chat in the comments section!

See you, Gaters!

The Xeno Bits team


https://store.steampowered.com/app/1681060/Exogate_Initiative/