Development Blog #4
Greetings Survivors!
We want to thank everyone for the tremendous amount of support and feedback provided during the recent Steam sale! To all of the new players joining us, welcome and we can’t wait to meet each of you in game! Over the sale our servers were filled to capacity and what a wonderful thing it was to see everyone enjoying the game, learning the game for the first time, and giving our team many great suggestions along the way. With the influx of new players, our community has grown to over 73,000 players and it’s an exciting time for sure.
As we continue throughout early access, many people may not have seen the changes that have been made to the development roadmap and we would like to take some time in this development blog to highlight some of the progress that has been made since the last time we posted an update on things. If you haven’t taken time, feel free to visit https://trello.com/b/yGBsrAZF/xera-survival-public-roadmap where we have listed a lot of the plans over the next 6 months.
[h2]Art[/h2]
As a team we’ve been focusing heavily on the art side of the game, throughout season 3 we started the rollout of our weapon animation pass - which has been a big polish added to the game. We’re also working on a lot of assets that will be going into the next map.
As we have shown on our Discord’s #art channel, we are working on new humanoid designs - which will also come with a rework of the AI mechanics. For example the exploding robot will be upgraded to a flame throwing robot - with gas tanks (weak points) which will explode instead. We will also be implementing weak points into the other humanoid designs.
Connor:
Hey Gamers,
I’ve spent the past few months reworking and creating custom weapon animations such as idle, firing, reloads and melee attacks for each weapon we have. We think they add such a massive improvement to the overall feel of the game and I hope you all have been enjoying them. In the future I’d love to do another pass on the animations and bring up the quality to a higher level, but as a character artist primarily I’m pretty proud of the work we have done on them so far! For now, I am working hard to bring a character customization system to you all so you can create your own survivor with a variety of options including changing your clothes and hairstyles, skin color, gender and more to be announced later!
Here’s a little behind the scenes look at my rigging and animation setup in maya:
Here’s some very early WIP character assets that show a tiny preview of what you will be able to customize your character with, and there is a lot more to come!
Work in progress xGen hair and bodies in maya:
Note: Base models will be wearing underwear, no full nudity is planned.Mikhail:
Hello everyone, in the last few months I have been working on the new weapons that were recently added to Season 3, cosmetics for the recent and upcoming events as well as the newly designed humanoids.
Karan:
Hey everyone, this past month I've continued working on the new road system, this time on new street models, different junction types as well as on a big highway system. Also to complement this new road network, I've created new bridges. I've also been working on new base building props, which are mainly going to be part of the resource gathering/processing system.
[h2]New Map Progress (Erekose)[/h2]
Hello everyone! I hope you’ve been enjoying Season 3 and the changes we’ve been making to the current map. I’ve been working hard on researching and developing the brand new map for Season 4. This has been a long and challenging path for me and the team as we figure out our design pipeline and how this new map fits into the direction the game is heading, so we appreciate everyone's patience (It’ll all be worth it, trust me!)
The new map was designed outside of Unreal Engine in a program called World Creator. This allows us to make a larger, more realistic map with multiple biomes. This new map is 8km x 8km (64km squared) and features many interesting areas, from rocky mountains and alpine forests, to deep woods and a mysterious crater. I cannot wait for everyone to explore it! We’re also adding new foliage types to accompany the terrain.
[h2]Base Building[/h2]
We are very excited to begin working on our implementation of Base Building. We’ve always been driven by bringing new ideas to the survival genre, and we believe that our implementation of base building will be refreshing. A combination of modular and prefabricated designs will allow us to keep creative control and balancing aspects over the bases, while giving you the ability to focus on the gameplay elements bases will enable - such as resource generation and manufacturing. We also have considered how safe settlements will play a role alongside bases and the combination of both will be great for a sense of progression.
As mentioned in previous dev blogs, we plan to implement a “capture” period - which means you can essentially raid someone's base and keep the majority of the structure. Doing this will reduce the amount of work required to build a new base from scratch, and allow you to retake your old base once you gather enough fighting power. This will also enable more diverse raids and fights where multiple teams can be attempting to capture a base, and will need to defend it as more teams attempt to take it as well. Winner takes all!
We will have more information to share in future dev blogs in the new year - exciting times ahead!
[h2]Missions[/h2]
The mission system which is planned for Season 3 will provide players with additional goals while adventuring the world. These will have various rewards, including currency, loot, skin crates and experience. We plan to have a set of seasonal missions which will take a bit longer to complete, and daily missions which will be quicker to complete.
[h2]Big Bunker Event[/h2]
The big bunker event will require a combination of gameplay elements to open and get through. We’re working on a Keycard system which will play a big part in the big bunker event. Opening the bunker will require all radio towers to be active and 2 players will be required to swipe a keycard at the same time in order to open the bunker. So there will be some degree of collaboration required to access the bunker.
[h2]Skin Trade Up[/h2]
The skin trade-up system has been something that has been suggested many times. There are a lot of common and rare skins that players have gathered throughout the seasons and some weren’t able to get an Epic or Legendary, so this will help clean up your skin inventory and grant access to some of those skins which were no longer accessible due to seasonal rotations of skins. More information will be available when we get closer to releasing this feature.
[h2]Winter Event 2020[/h2]
It’s that time of year again! Our Winter 2020 event is just around the corner, dates are still being assessed - and will be announced closer to the time. Similar to the previous Winter events there will be Christmas trees placed around the map which will spawn presents. Presents will have a random chance of giving a holiday gear, skin crate, normal loot, military loot and high-tiered loot. There’s also a chance of a grenade spawning - so watch out! Will you be naughty or nice?
Here’s a preview of 2 of the skins made by Mikhail that will be available in the Winter 2020 Skin Crate!
We hope that you have enjoyed reading about all of the exciting things that are coming soon and look forward to reading your feedback. Remember, as a community driven game, we count on everyone for your feedback and suggestions as we expand the content available to all of our players. Feel free to connect with us via our discord at https://discord.gg/xera and let us know your thoughts!
Cheers,
Spotted Kiwi Interactive