Hey Exanimates, Exanima 0.9.5.1 is currently in public testing. This version introduces the late game save system, an alternative "cheat death" mechanic, a new minion, a new way to traverse late game content and various new features and mechanics to support all this and more. These features have been a long time in the making and various things that have been in the game for as long finally hav…
Hey Exanimates, So the update is finally out, that was quick right? Right. It's been great seeing many people get back into the game and all the positive feedback. We've been busy patching and hotfixing, some things we'd hoped we'd fixed actually weren't and going from a few testers to so many players uncovered various things that flew under the radar or are specific to some system configuratio…
Before we get into everything that's in this update, we need to address the elephant in the room. Most of you don't closely follow the game's development, and this was to say the least an unusually long time between updates. Exanima is an unusual game, filled with features you won't see elsewhere, probably because no other developer is stupid enough to attempt them, let alone all of them at onc…
Hey Exanimates, The complete update is currently in testing and at this point we're just looking for issues that need to be urgently fixed before release and tuning various things. The latest test includes the changes we discussed in the last diary, many improvements and additions to the Gardens including a sub-level, the new shaper and their thaumaturgy domain, another new creature, new items…
Hey Exanimates, It has been a very busy month indeed. Our next test run will basically be a release candidate that includes pretty much everything. Testing so far has gone pretty smoothly, so hopefully the trend will continue, though there are some pretty big changes and additions. Besides some more content and polish for the Gardens, a lot of focus has been on overall polish and making sure th…
Hey Exanimates, We've finally started insider testing of the update! We've done one patch and we've got another big patch on the way. The testing release already feels very solid, with only a couple of very specific issues that we want to do some more targeted testing on. The new map is massive, varied and looks very different from anything so far. We've been trying some more complex things wit…
Hey Exanimates, We quickly recorded a video at the last minute to showcase some of the improvements discussed in this diary, but read on for a more in depth and accurate explanation. We last talked about some difficulties we encountered with physics for a new creature, and how despite our efforts to get it working with some incremental improvements and adjustments, it became clear that some asp…
Hey Exanimates, We're working as hard as we can to get everything ready for the 0.9.5 update, but one of the new creatures we're introducing has proven a lot more problematic than we expected. This creature is larger and more oddly proportioned than anything we've done before, and this has caused a lot of problems with our physics driven character motion. Character physics have been our biggest…
Hey Exanimates, We're very close to beginning closed testing of the full 0.9.5 update. This will be mainly for the new area, encounter types, new items and thaumaturgy. While there have been some engine changes such as rendering optimisations and the new grass and race systems, it's mostly content and the big changes were already thoroughly tested in the testing branch. We don't expect this to…
Hey Exanimates, At this point we're mainly putting the final layers of polish on the new content. This is mostly material work, to make everything look good and cohesive. Making detailed and realistic materials for modern graphics is very difficult, and making sure all the colours are balanced and that all the materials, the dirt and grime etc. belong together and their environment is like a gi…
Hey Exanimates, It's been a very hectic month working on many different things, but also a nice change of pace from endlessly working on a single huge game or engine system. We're trying to get all the new content ready for release, and there's a lot. The Gardens is the largest map yet and also the most complex, varied and unique. There's a lot of new nature and other assets and additions to th…
Hey Exanimates, We've pretty much hit pause on roles, AI and this round of testing to focus fully on getting the big content update ready. We released a major patch in testing with some important changes, various additions to the current roles and dialogue, refinements to AI and lots and lots of fixes. As it tends to go with testing periods we fixed a lot of older issues as well as new, there's…
Hey Exanimates, Public testing of role system features has been ongoing, the main focus was how roles can interact with emotional states and dynamic events and behaviours. We encouraged people to try to break Derrin's behaviour by doing unexpected things or manipulating him in various ways with mind powers at any point including during dialogue and seeing if he behaved naturally and dialogue co…
Hey Exanimates, Before we get into what we've been working on, let's address what many of you want to know: public testing will begin in a matter of days. We hoped to start some time ago, but we've been making changes to how some important things work, because we saw a better way to tackle some of the more complex role features. We're currently fixing a few things from the last round of insider…
Hey Exanimates, Insider testing has been ongoing for most of the month, which went surprisingly smooth for a first round of testing after so much development down time. We've patched the test build a few times now, but many of the issues being reported were older things we've been catching up on and we've spent most of the time making improvements rather than bug fixing. We've only added a few…
Hey Exanimates, We finally did it, the new role system is up and running, everything has been switched over to it, content is patched and we added enough backward compatibility to preserve arena saves. At this point we're just testing out the basics and putting a build together for proper testing, which is imminent. Once again the changes are very extensive, the entire platform for AI, behaviou…
Hey Exanimates, We hoped to have a release ready now, and though we are very close, we moved the goal post a little for a couple of reasons. We also had some key team members who had to deal with some personal life stuff, which put our work a bit out of synch. With the new core role and AI functionality in place, our current goal was to use Derrin, the only intelligent NPC currently in the game…
Hey Exanimates, We're now in the last steps of putting together everything we've worked on, seeing how it functions as a whole and building a release. We should begin testing soon, with a hopefully brief period of closed testing before opening it up to everyone in the testing branch, when we're at least clear of any major issues. We still have to add new content and features that are near compl…
Hey Exanimates, So, roles. We haven't begun testing just yet, though that's not the only thing we've been working on (more on that later). After we'd just figured out a whole bunch of stuff (see last diary) our goal was just to set up the roles that will be used in testing the main, important and difficult things. Of course as we got into the details there was a lot of wondering about how to be…
Hey Exanimates, Since we started working on roles a few months ago we've been focusing on a few specific goals. This is good, because what we've learned in years of theory crafting the system is that it's all too easy to get lost in hypotheticals and go down rabbit holes without really reaching a conclusion. Fundamentally the idea is that we can keep expanding our collection of roles, adding mo…
Hey Exanimates, There's a lot of different things in motion at the moment, but mainly we're trying to get the new AI and role features ready and in a playable state. We're past design and feature additions, so it's mostly technical implementation details now, though lots of things do branch out into new aspects of AI as we broaden what it can do. The most laborious part has been AI understandin…
Hey Exanimates, Previously we mentioned how we'd been reworking many items, and how in future we want to add many new ones, particularly clothing, and make various improvements along the way. Adding more clothing as we expand on our world and content is important, quality improvements are also nice, but really more of a by-product of other things. The main motivation for "an overhaul of our cha…
Hey Exanimates, While we're making good progress with new content and a few other things besides, development is still very much focused on AI and the role system. We've been particularly focused on searching and looting behaviour, as it uses many different things that have other applications, the building blocks for being aware of and interacting with the world, and it's a really good case for…
Hey Exanimates, In our last diary we talked about some of our immediate goals for AI and the role system, this is a series of things that provide NPCs with better awareness, more behaviours and interactions. Since then we've been gradually implementing and testing these features, and as we did this we ran into some complex dialogue issues. Right now we're mostly focusing on improving the dialog…
Hey Exanimates, Last month we went into some detail about the role system and what our main objectives for it are at this time. While there have been many big improvements and additions, the role system is the key feature of the next update and what supports the story going forward. Having figured out many of the core role mechanics, we've been now focusing more on low level behaviour stuff, wh…
Hey Exanimates, The last round of changes we discussed in the last coffee diary went live on the test branch shortly after. The new weapon motions and other adjustments were very well received, and we will of course continue to tweak things based on feedback. The new arena with new vegetation features was also included and seems to be working and performing well for everyone. Before we move thi…
Hey Exanimates, Since updating the test branch we've been doing a lot of tuning and adjusting things, the extensive changes to the core physics affected a great many things, and while absolutely a huge fundamental improvement, a lot needed to be updated to take advantage of this, or even function properly. We also ran a few experiments, iterating over some core combat and character physics and…
PHYSICS 2.0 We recently re-wrote a lot of our physics engine and optimised it for 64 bit, in the process we also made big improvements to collisions and some complex interactions. This has been in testing for a while now, and of course everything physics came under a lot of careful scrutiny, every little flaw exposed. Originally we designed our physics engine to tackle specific difficult proble…
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Announcements are the developer’s own posts to the game’s Steam news feed: updates and their patch notes, in-game events, releases and sales. The important ones are marked on the players chart.