So, what can you find in the new version of the game?
There are a lot of changes, and it is much better to see them with your own eyes, especially if you tried the old version to see the difference. I’ll try to mention the most important things. Keep in mind, there are some placeholders and bugs, please report everything whether you have a blocker, low FPS or encountered a visual issue.
At the moment there’s a relatively small location with a complex multilayer design, mostly created with new assets. That’s the place where Jack's adventure begins, and here you can get an idea about the world of K’Tharsis and its harsh laws.
ENGINE
As you may know, our project is developing with our custom built engine called Sahara, and it was significantly improved. Now it supports a great deal of state-of-the-art techniques and effects like SSAO and HDR.
We also added such features as PBR and IBL. They allow us to achieve realistic picture, reflecting light from assets’ surface depending on its material. In order to do that, we had to rework all the existing assets. A huge amount of work which is almost finished with the help of freelancers.
VISUALS
We put a lot of time to create a brand new system for day-night cycle. Now our sky is a bunch of layers where every layer is responsible for certain things (positions of sun and moons, clouds, lighting etc) and takes into account each other’s effects and priorities. Also, we added volumetric fog, and we can change its altitude and density.
With this system we can easily create new weather effects (rain, sandstorm etc) or a certain atmosphere for certain areas.
GAMEPLAY
There’s a basic role-playing system in the game now, and Jack can master lock picking, speechcraft and other valuable skills. Of course, he has to find a teacher and pay for that first. Nothing comes for free. All these skills will affect your quests’ walkthroughs.
Almost every quest in the game is new. We reworked our quest and dialogue systems to improve them. These technologies now support non-linearity and other complex but awesome mechanics we can add to quests.
Also, we created our own cutscene editor. We believe it will help us to improve game’s narrative and emphasize some details important for quests. You can already find the very first testing cutscenes in the build. They are drafts without a sound yet but we will improve it.
We made a brand new AI system and transferred every single NPC to it. This way we can create new behavior patterns now. Also, we improved NPCs’ navigation with navpoints. That’s the very first step to create a full-fledged schedule for NPCs.
Another important change is modular weapons. Every weapon used to be a whole asset, now it is a composite mechanism where every element has its own parameters. This way we can make a proper crafting and customization, giving each NPC a unique weapon which is more suitable to its status. Also, now weapons take into account owner skills when used.
Jack also mastered a few new tricks like climbing and carrying dead bodies or captured NPCs—a really useful thing if you need to hide a body or deliver a criminal alive.
He can also scan objects to learn the world around him, adding notes to his journal, or examine potential enemies. This function is not completed yet and will be significantly improved.
SOUND
We reworked a great deal of old sounds, there are no stock ones now. Also, we've created brand new music tracks for The Edge and are working now on new pieces.
That’s just a small amount of changes from the new build, it is better to learn about the rest in the game. Do not forget to share your feedback with us. It is better to do that in our Discord channel. This will help us to make the game better.
HOW WE WORK ON THE GAME NOW AND WHAT TO EXPECT
As I promised, I’ll try to tell you about our new development principles and answer some important questions you might have.
Why abandon the old version?
Exoplanet development started as a hobby, we put our own money into the development, working on full-time jobs. There were no business plans, no deadlines or any budget, the development was chaotic. And the result of that was the old location with a lot of issues and mistakes (big empty areas, flawed assets, bad level design decisions). Now, with proper planning, we won’t let that happen once again.
What did you change in the development process?
Now we have stable project financing, it allowed us to start real commercial development about a year ago. And we are doing our best to increase our pace.
First of all, we've created a complete storyflow for the game. It was used to plan the amount of content, pipelines and deadlines. In order to match them we started to work full-time and significantly expanded our team, focusing on creating content while outsourcing other tasks.
With pipelines we managed to establish quests production. We are working on new quests and reworking the old ones with new mechanics, and some of them are almost ready. This will allow us to constantly add new content with every update.
Is it a completely new game now?
The principles and pillars are the same. That’s just a brand new location with significant progress compared to the old build.
How come you didn’t post any updates for a long time?
We were really focused on the game, trying to build a team, to plan everything, to establish business processes, there was no time and no spare hands to do that. We understand that this is not how it should be and we’ll do our best to hire someone who can keep you posted about the development. It is better to
join our Discord, though. It was recently updated, and we are going to post unique content there, share regular news about the development, screenshots etc.
I hope this will help you to understand what’s going on with the project. Feel free to ask any questions, I’ll do my best to answer them.
Thank you very much for your patience, we really appreciate your support.
