Exogate Initiative News

Hi fellow Gaters from all around the world,

First of all, there are so many of you now! Many thanks for following the Exogate Initiative development journey, we can’t express how encouraging it is to read your lovely comments, constructive feedback & suggestions! You can join the community Discord server anytime to ask your questions and follow the news!

Let’s move on to the latest additions!

[h3]Gaters have new faces[/h3]
We received feedback saying that Gaters’ faces lacked life. While we had an artistic direction for the faces, we wanted to try out a new design. It is still in progress but we can already show you what we plan with these new faces!

First off, here’s a short before/after to show you the difference between the old work and the new result.



Side note: We’ve received feedback about these new faces too! They’re not perfect and we’ll continue to improve them in the future!

Then, we added expressions to their faces. They’ll mainly be used during missions so instead of having a neutral face all along, Gaters can express their surprise, excitement, frustration and more according to the situation!



Also, we added facial expressions so they reflect their condition inside the base, here they are:



[h3]Dev stuff[/h3]
Remember the Star Map? This is it now, feel old yet?



The Star Map issue was to try to make it visually interesting, stable despite the procedural generation and easy to navigate. It’s not totally finished yet. Redesigning the Star Map brings up many challenges such as:

• setting clear icons indicating which kind of resource you can earn by exploring an exoplanet
  
• Adding a progression system as Gaters perform missions
  
• defining the difficulty level concept in an understandable way and adding missions in accordance with the difficulty level displayed
  
• having colors adapted to color-blind people
  

The Tech Tree, which allows you to unlock new technologies to upgrade your base and progress in the game, will also be redesigned!

[h3]Cursed bug of the month[/h3]
Lately, we’ve been having some… merging issues? To sum this up, Gaters tend to merge with each other, which is a bit disturbingly cursed… This gives some The Thing vibe, not gonna lie…



Many thanks for reading! If you’re curious about a specific aspect of the game, feel free to use the comments section to write what you’d like to see in the next devlog and we’ll see what we can do!

The Xeno Bits Team


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

Hello Gaters from all around the world,

You missed us! In the last devlog, we focused on the latest designs that we implemented in the game. Today, the spotlight is on a useful piece of equipment for the Gaters!

[h2]Spacesuits[/h2]
When you’re picking an exoplanet to explore on the Star Map, you can often read “no threat detected” and “no equipment requirement.” The other way around will happen: many exoplanets will have threats and they’ll require specific suits and equipment so Gaters can visit them safely.



These suits are crafted by the Engineers, who will bring back material from explorations. When needed, these suits will be available in a room called the Armory.





We have adapted the suit to the Engineer's body morphology and the other classes’ body morphology.

There will be two types of spacesuits: the light spacesuit that we just showed you, and the heavy spacesuit that we’ll fully reveal once ready!



[h2]Dev stuff[/h2]
Gaters gain experience and thus level as they perform missions outside and work inside the base. When a Gater trains themselves in the Training Room, they gain Body strength, Perception and other attributes. Small indicators after a training session have been added so that you can have a better overview of what attribute was improved!



[h2]Cursed bug of the month[/h2]
Oops. Today’s cursed bug is about the Engineer! They are a bit shorter than the other classes, so as you may have guessed, it triggers camera angle issues during Team Contacts. It was unexpected but it will be fixed soon!



In the next devlog, we’ll elaborate a bit more about Gaters' faces! Because yes, the Gaters’ faces will change. In addition, we added some elements to give them more life.

If you have questions or feedback we’re still happy to answer you!

See you next month, explorers!

The Xeno Bits team


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

Hello everyone,

The Xeno Bits team wishes you a successful year! We’d like to use the devlog format to better communicate with you about the development progress of Exogate Initiative and answer your questions if you have any.

We’ve spent the last few months shaping the game. Exogate Initiative has gone through many design prototypes, especially for the props and room objects. However, sometimes, once some designs are in place, others become obsolete.

It’s show-off time! Here is the recent design progress we’ve made:

[h3]The generator[/h3]



Small note: not only the design has changed, but their capacity as well. The higher the level of the generator, the more power it generates. The old designed Generator currently generates 100 power, but we haven’t yet determined how much we’ll buff these new babies.

[h3]The doors[/h3]



[h3]The Star Map[/h3]



Important note: We’re considering implementing these new designs to the demo, we'll add them when we'll be 100% satisfied with the design consistency.

[h2]Knowledge is power[/h2]

A new class has been designed and implemented, which is *drum roll* the Scholar!



Their role is to collect any material related to alien culture and language, such as photos, videos but also artifacts, and study them, categorize them and classify them. They are the researchers of the Initiative and have a dedicated room: the Library!

[h2]Bugs and dev stuff[/h2]

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

After watching someone’s gameplay on YouTube, we noticed that there was absolutely terrifying stuff that needed to be tweaked urgently. We had to make sure that the placement of equipment in the rooms didn’t create overflow to avoid cursed and chaotic things like this:



[h3]Other implementations[/h3]

There are other side features that we added and other stuff that is adjusted, such as:

• An “Ask Chat” feature on Twitch in which the streamer creates a poll during Team Contacts – UI not definitive.
  
• The possibility to enable/disable the screenshake for accessibility reasons.
  
• The Tech Tree – the place where you unlock new technologies for your base – is getting redesigned.
  
• Balance work on money and resources earning in general, the way Gater classes coexist within the Initiative and more.
  

Quick insight of the Streamer mode during Team Contacts.

Thank you for reading! We will see you next month for more updated dev news and show-offs about Exogate Initiative! Also, we gladly answer your questions in the comment section or on the community Discord server if you have any!

The Xeno Bits team


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

Hello everyone,

Exogate Initiative continues to move forward. Sharing your passion for science fiction is fantastic. So many people are fascinated by futuristic technologies and how they would serve humanity, and creating a fictional realm about it through Exogate Initiative is a bit like bringing this idea to life.

Since 2021 will be soon behind us, it’s time to talk a bit with you about the progress we’ve made with the game.

[h3]The team[/h3]

3 years ago, Creative Director Maxime Millet started working on his own on Exogate Initiative. He imagined the whole concept with the help of freelancers.

Earlier this year, 3 additional people – employees – joined the project:

• Téo Quitellic, Unity Developer
  
• Aude Legrand, 3D Artist
  
• Chloé Matz, Communication & Community Manager
  

The game has strongly taken shape and gained stability thanks to our team cohesion, which allowed us to release a demo!

From left to right: Maxime, Téo, Aude & Chloé

[h3]The demo[/h3]

First off, we needed to have a clear idea of the content we wanted to add and put forward in the demo while giving the player a glimpse of the scope of the game. We only showed around 5% of the game and tried to make it a smooth and intuitive experience.

Once we were happy with the mechanisms and the design consistency and playtested the demo internally, we were ready to share this experience publicly.



[h3]What about Steam?[/h3]

The Steam page is live since this Summer. At the time, the game was still very early with the graphics and gameplay, but significant progress was already made compared to the first prototype.

The demo is out on Itch.io right now, Steam demo will come later. We proceed this way because before we share it with Steam, which is the place where most potential players gather, we wanted to make sure that our first public version is polished enough. And we found it easier to collect feedback on various aspects of the game on Itch.io.

One of the other reasons is that we are in the middle of discussions that will play an important role in the future of the game and the studio as well – not in a bad way but choices have to be made to guarantee a stable and peaceful development as well as enough resources to keep it working since one of our main objectives is to give a long life to Exogate Initiative.



[h3]Time to talk about the full-game progress[/h3]
The game is big. Once we have implemented something, adjustments are made all the time. For example, the doors’ design has known many changes because of the other room objects aspects around. We regularly test the game to see the changes needed.

The equipment for all the rooms is in progress. We aim for a minimum of 60 objects for a minimum of 9 rooms to build, from advanced research tools such as samples analyzer or alien data storage to objects for relaxing moments like a yoga carpet.

We added 2 other classes to the Initiative: the Medic and the Engineer! They’ll be very helpful with healing people when a mission goes wrong or crafting specific suits for planets with equipment requirements. There are 6 classes in total and we're currently designing a new one right now, do you have an idea of which one it could be?



Regarding the missions, more than a hundred missions will be available in the game, with various encounters and outcomes as well. These interactive missions can be challenging since if you don’t think twice about your decision, it will have consequences on the Gaters’ physical and mental health – e.g. coming back stressed or injured, and you’ll need to fix that once back to the base!



[h3]The main challenges[/h3]
Marketing is always a pain for small teams. Targeting players is not an easy task but we hope sci-fi lovers and base-building & management games players will fall in love with the mechanisms, the references and this narrative touch that'll make some of your sci-fi dreams come true.

Also… We have tons of ideas for the game! We want to keep them organized and focus on all the top-priority implementations. Maybe some of these concept ideas won’t be implemented at all or will come way later, but what we know for certain is that we want to give Exogate Initiative a long life.

_________________________________

We appreciate all the support around the game so far, there’s still plenty to do but your encouragement boosts our motivation to go on the development.

Thank you and stay safe!

The Xeno Bits team




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