Development Update: June 2020

Greetings Survivors!

Now that it's been a couple of weeks since the last patch, we wanted to give you all a quick update on what's been happening behind the scenes.

As you know one of the things we've promised would be coming soon is the repair system for weapons and armor. We're excited to let you know that we've made a ton of progress and are hoping to push the repair system with patch 6.5. With the release of the repair system, it's important for everyone to understand how it will work. The following are some details on what to expect.

• Repair Benches will be located in every safe zone. This will allow for players to repair their items before and after going out in the world.
  
• In order to repair your item, you will need to gather repair materials which can be gathered by breaking down other items. Each item you repair will require a specific recipe of a repair tool (there will be 3 different tools available and these will have a specific purpose for what item they are used to repair), parts (there will be 10 different parts and similar to the repair tool, you will need specific parts for specific items in order to repair them), and currency (this is a service fee charged by the npc for their repair service).
  
• The amount of materials and currency required in order to repair an item will depend on how damaged the item is. For example, if you have a Scar-H that's at 90% durability, it will require significantly fewer repair parts and currency than if you need to repair a Scar-H with 50% durability. By implementing a scale based on the amount of work required to repair items, this will allow players to maintain their higher tier items and give an alternate way for players to recycle their items other than p2p trading and selling items to the vendor.
  
• Requirements for repairing items will scale based on a tier system. For instance, repairing a mp5 at 50% durability would require far less cash and materials than lets say a vss at 70% durability. This should help bring balance to those lower tier items that degrade faster, and allow for players to make a choice on whether they want to break down low tier items to ensure they have the best quality high tier items, or allow them to recycle their extra high tier items, and build up a stash of their lower/mid tier items.
  

We look forward to gathering everyone's feedback on the repair system and being this is the first iteration, we have plans for expanding the system in the future as well as balancing anything that needs to be revisited.

Along with the repair system, we are also excited to announce that we are making more updates to the current map in order to fill the void of running out of places to explore and things to do. With this being said, we are also working on the map for Arm's Race, and will be starting working on the new map in the near future. With the amount of work that's required to be able to bring our plans to life, we are excited to also announce that as of Monday, we have added a new staff member who will be in charge of level design as well as the creation of the new maps, and new poi's on the current map. Please give a warm welcome to Erekose!

"Hello everyone! I'm very excited to be part of the Spotted Kiwi Interactive team and to be working on XERA: Survival. The team has been very welcoming and the community seems to be just as wonderful!"

"A little background on myself: I was first introduced to gaming at a very young age with Diablo and Quake 3. I quickly realised I wanted to work on video games in my early teens. I've been dabbling in indie game development since I left high school but started my professional game dev career in 2019, as a junior level designer for Rocketwerkz in Dunedin. Since leaving Rocketwerkz and coming to Spotted Kiwi Interactive, I've been busy getting to know the team and delving into XERA: Survival. I'm currently working on some changes to the safe zones on the map, making them feel more lived in and expanding them for future updates."

"During my time here I'll be focusing on creating fun and unique maps for the upcoming Arm's Race and Deathmatch game modes. I'll also be working on the new main map in the near future that I hope the community will enjoy looting, fighting and destroying robots in. This map will feature new Points of Interest, new settlements and plenty of awesome locations that will make exploring even more fun and rewarding."

"I'm already deep in work here and I've dedicated myself to bring something different to XERA: Survival that I hope both new and veteran players will all come to love. I can't wait for the players to see all this content we have planned and I'm excited to join you guys in the game soon. Thank you!"

-Erekose

Here's a sneak peak at a few of the new POI as well as a preview of the UI's that have had an additional polish done on them!




One of the challenges we have always had is seeing new bugs pop up after moving releases to the live servers that didn’t appear in a dev environment. Thank you to everyone that has been on top of reporting any bugs you encounter. Because of your reports and feedback, we will also be including several fixes to vehicles, collisions, assets, and much more. These bug fixes will be noted in the patch notes once patch 6.5 goes live.

Another point we would like to discuss with the community revolves around the vendor/currency system. Many people have raised concerns that the vendor is greedy and doesn’t pay enough for items being sold to him. As we have spoken to before, vendor balancing is one of the most difficult things to get right as it can lead to a massive imbalance with people being able to just buy all the high tier loot which causes players to not explore the map and play the game as intended. We have heard your feedback and now that we will be able to implement the repair system, we will be adjusting the buyback values that the vendor pays for items. These values will still scale based on a couple of factors, durability, and if the vendor currently has the item in stock. We have also added a dialog box to the vendor along with an updated UI in order to help new players understand how to get the most from their items when selling them to the vendor.

Finally we are excited to announce that we have 2 new game mechanics that will be coming with patch 6.5!

The first is that peer to peer trading will now allow for players to trade cash for items between each other! Looking to get more value for your item than the greedy Marquet offers? Are you a bit light on cash and want to get a better deal on an item than what is offered at the vendor? This will no longer be a problem as you will now be able to create your own player market by buying and selling items from each other with the peer to peer trading system. This is just the first step towards creating a global market within the game for in game items and we hope to implement an offline marketplace as well similar to an auction house type system in the future.

The last change we would like to announce and are excited about revolves around players running out of backpack space and looking for other uses for their items. We feel like a great way to expand the current player inventory system as well as give more value to gear other than protection would be to have armor items increase your player inventory capacity. With the release of patch 6.5, armor will now add additional inventory weight on your player. We do not intend to do a “pockets” system at this time, and instead wearing armor will simply expand the amount of weight your player is able to carry.

A lot has been happening in the background as you can see and we can’t wait to release patch 6.5. Feel free to leave us your comments, feedback, and questions on what’s coming! Patch 6.5 will be going live next week!

Cheers!
Spotted Kiwi Interactive