Hi Gamers!
First dev log :D So what is going to happen during Early Access?
Story
The game, currently, soft ends when you unlock offworld travel. It then just keeps respawning random missions. The story is there on paper but not yet woven into the research tree (the prime thing that drives story progress). This alone is challenging enough because Exo Chumps is not a book but a game, a combat-oriented game. You have to find the right amount of text and decide what and how much to tell from the story.
But you are also often in conflict with game mechanics and balancing. Like for example enemy progression. There is powerful factions. But you cannot just spawn them in the first mission. So you have to modify or add to the story in order to explain that.
Content
Progressing through the story and researching, unlocks new tech and therefore content. You will get new weapons and tech, but also new threats to use these tools against. That means while implementing the story there is automatically new awesome items, levels, objects and missions being added. And choices: invent and produce your own weapons or just steal them from your enemies ;)
Enemy behaviour
Enemy and npc behaviour needs balancing and fine-tuning. It often is a matter of "how does it feel like" rather than testing exact numbers. For instance, an enemy can go right next to a player character and remain invisible. That is if the player character looks "away enough" so that the enemy is technically out of the player's field of view. But, to the Gamer, it might look like a bug and unfair.
Stuff like that YOU feedback ːsteamhappyː
Recent activity
Most work lately went into fixing bugs and implementing the story: extending the research tree, breaking the story up into research topics, refining and adding game mechanics (e.g. research that can disable other research).