Hello Survivors,
Thank you for your patience as we finalized writing this month's dev blog. Over the past 2 months, a lot has happened with the studio which we wanted to include in this blog and we felt it was best to wait until everything was lined up. I (Joshua) also took a much needed vacation to replenish the energy reserves! Don’t worry - the rest of the team was hard at work while I was away and there has been plenty of planning and discussion. Also Karan and WarG have a bunch of art content waiting to be implemented!
First, I'd like to address the concerns of the reduced server populations. We are well aware of this and are planning our journey through Early Access accordingly. We believe this is relatively normal for an Early Access game in the current games market. From our success at launch, we have seen that there is great demand for an action-focused looter shooter - and we’ve also seen the demand for additional content to keep you all engaged. With that in mind, we have now hired an additional developer (Reuben) who will assist with pushing out new content more frequently.
Reuben will start at Spotted Kiwi Interactive on the 1st of August and will be working alongside myself and our artists to implement pending art and create new core gameplay elements. We are also going to be working on migrating the game to the latest Unreal Engine version (4.22), which includes lots of server and client performance improvements.
Secondly, I wanted to address the concerns of content timelines. After many internal discussions we have decided we want to accelerate development to reach a v1.0 release as soon as possible. This will allow us to bring more content out to you in a shorter amount of time.
From the most recent polling carried out by Gary we have established that the currency system will be the next core feature to be implemented into the game - as per our roadmap we are planning to have this implemented in August. You can see all the content we have planned for the game here: https://trello.com/b/yGBsrAZF/xera-survival-public-roadmap.
We’ve also made some internal changes to how we plan to deliver patches and content updates. We will aim to deliver at least one major content update per month, alongside 1-2 hotfix patches to address any bugs or issues.
Thirdly, there is the frequent questioning of when there will be a wipe. We have always said that wipes are inevitable. We believe wipes are the best way to reset the game economy when major changes are implemented. This moves us onto the implementation of seasons.
Given the plan to accelerate development, the seasons system will allow us to have a schedule of wipes to keep the game’s economy fresh as we’re adding new content. It will also give us the opportunity to introduce new skins as well as rotate skins from the previous season. A season will run every 2-3 months and at the start of every season there will be a full wipe. We also plan to allow players to earn seasonal rewards, based on leaderboard position for both XP and Skill Rating. We will have more details coming in the future as we continue to discuss this internally. We would love your feedback on seasons so feel free to tell us what you think!
We have plans to start “Season 1” when the currency system has been implemented. We hope that this system will offer more transparency for the timing of wipes and offer new opportunities to be one of the top players each season.
Tim (Infamy) - Marketing Director
In the first week of June we were all pretty much flat out keeping the plates spinning. Since then I’ve been hard at work on business development – we had a great deal of interest from publishers, other retailers besides Steam and they all need answering. I’ve been building Facebook advertising campaigns which hit alongside Patch 3, with help from Facebook’s marketing team. We’ve now translated the Steam store page into French, German, Russian, Polish, Thai, Spanish, and Simplified Chinese – thanks to community members who have helped proof-read, please let me know if you find any problems.
We have marketing via Facebook planned for all the monthly patches going forward, plus of course to the community, and we have big plans for a massive push around Halloween time, especially in North America. Stay tuned!
We’ve worked hard on modelling now that we have the first cash burn figures (Steam’s reporting is a month in arrears). We answered our main question - can we recruit more staff soon? Reuben will soon be on the team, helping Joshua with programming to speed up the rate we can bring new content and features into the game. We’re in this for the long haul through Early Access, but hey, it will be nice to make the haul a bit shorter by adding resources.
Gary (IcedYoshi) - Community Manager
What an amazing launch it has been. To keep you guys up to speed on what I've been up to the past 2 months, here is a breakdown.
As of June 10th, I was officially hired full time by Spotted Kiwi Interactive, and I have been in my current role since January of this year. Previously I served as a community moderator for the game. What this means to you guys as a community is I am now able to dedicate all of my spare time to the studio and to you, our wonderful community.
On a daily basis, I have a lot on my plate such as monitoring all social media outlets for the studio, monitoring Discord, our forums, reddit, and keeping up with the industry by knowing what's going on with other studios and games being developed. I am also responsible for monitoring support tickets and responding in a timely fashion, as well as all reports that come through our in game reporting system. On top of that, I'm in charge of our QA team and regularly do a lot of internal testing myself.
As you can see there is a lot that I do every day, but I enjoy every single moment of it.
Most recently I have been heavily involved with talking to Joshua about the feedback you have all sent and I want to thank everyone for voicing your opinions on what you would like to see change and be added to the game. Prior to the last content update, I had been leading the charge on the testing of our most recent patch including getting to the bottom of why our new Crashed Helicopter Event caused so many issues and assisting with the rebalancing of several items within the game, and planning out our 3rd event, the Civilian Bunker event. It's been a ton of fun interacting with all of you and I can’t wait to help bring even more content along with the rest of the team in the future!
Thank you to everyone for your continued support!
Jack (Backyback) - Partnerships Coordinator
I have been busy working on keeping all of our amazing Partners and Creators plugged in and enjoying the game, as well as getting new creators on board and helping them create quality content for XERA: Survival.
My day to day activities consist of answering new partner applications, reaching out to content creators currently playing the game, working with current partners and creators to organize events and giveaways, and providing overall support to the community when Gary is getting some much needed rest!
I have also been working with our Partners to create their very own skins in game! These will be rolling out quite soon!
Thank you all for making our dream become a reality!
Karan - Artist
The past 2 months I’ve worked on the XERA research bunker as well as some other assets that have been previewed in our art-wip channel on Discord. Some early progress was shown some time ago but this time it's been populated with lots of props to make it an interesting place to explore with a few surprises in it. I’ve also created some other small buildings that will be used to fill some of the small areas of the map. The next big project has been the motel building, which was shown in the Discord channel. I’ve spent the last few days working on creating new props to fill every room of the building to make it feel what once was a nice place to stay…
Mikhail (Wargr) - Artist
Over the past 2 months I have made a lot of progress designing new skins that will be coming in the future. Of the 100+ different skins that I completed the past 2 months, these are some of my favorites that will be coming in the future!
As always, thank you all for your continued support. We really appreciate those who are sticking around for the journey, and hope if you are sitting on the sidelines that you’ll join us once again when the time is right.
We’re really excited about the expansion of the team and hope that you are ready for all the new content that we have planned.
Cheers,
Spotted Kiwi Interactive
