Exogate Initiative
Exogate Initiative, The Steam NEXT Fest Demo Experience
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
December devlog #7 | Gearing up
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.
What’s new
Heavy suits
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.
Medbay
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.
Game flow reworked, no more generated missions
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 .
Auto-refill
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.
Next steps
Workshop and destinations exploitation
We are now close to completing the workshop room, and with it the exploitation of geological destinations. More on this really soon.
Library and artifacts
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.
Updated demo
An updated demo with far more content will be available in february for the Steam Next festival!
Early access
The early access is still planned for the first half of 2023, we hope to share with you our roadmap soon.
Private beta
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.
Cursed bug of the month
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
June devlog #6 | The invasion has started…
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!
The alien invasion feature
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.
Dev stuff
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.
Cursed bug of the month
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/
Devlog #5 | Community Q&A: 1 Question 1 Exogif
It's now time to reveal the answers!
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Hardest feature to implement?
How many tons of coffee/pizzas for the devs?
The CM's favorite Gater class?
Sneak peek of aliens?
Funniest bug you've seen?
What did the first version of Exogate Initiative look like?
Will there be an option to rename your gaters/characters?
Will there be mod support?
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/
March Devlog #4 | Gaters have new faces!
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!
Gaters have new faces
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:
Dev stuff
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!
Cursed bug of the month
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/
February devlog #3 | Say hi to the spacesuits!
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!
Spacesuits
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!
Dev stuff
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!
Cursed bug of the month
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/
January Devlog #2 | Design reveals & cursed bug of the month
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:
The generator
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.
The doors
The Star Map
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.
Knowledge is power
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!
Bugs and dev stuff
Funny bug of the month
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:
Other implementations
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/
Devlog #1 | 2021 recap: development news
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.
The team
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
The demo
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.
What about Steam?
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.
Time to talk about the full-game progress
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!
The main challenges
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.
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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/