Hi everyone, before we move on, please let me extend my sincere thanks to our Fig backers for supporting our campaign. The level of engagement and the positive feedback we have received along the way has been higher than we could ever have hoped for. To see so many people excited to play our game is a truly humbling experience, so thank you all for your generosity.

Now that the campaign has been funded, development is underway. In order to ensure success, I am taking a phased approach to the development of the game using my background as an IT project manager to structure the full development cycle, along with our major areas of focus (each being a milestone).

At the moment, its pretty high level, but this will get far more detailed over the coming month as we dig deep into each area and system. As an example, here are the areas of focus we are looking into, along with our initial proposed dates.

Of course, these dates are subject to change, but this is the current plan we are working towards, and assuming all goes well with no major issues, that should be attainable.

We are now already into the first phase of planning. Rose and I are working to refine the story and map it into the layout of the ship. This stage is probably the most crucial of the entire development process, as this dictates how the game will ultimately play. We are physically mapping out every area in the ship, and then overlaying on top of that the players journey, taking into account the following:

		
			Major plot points
Side quests
Secrets
Collectables, schematics and crafting components
Bosses, sub bosses and scripted events
Puzzles and areas of interest
		
	

This will allow us to ensure that your journey through the ship is paced in a logical and meaningful way, giving you clear direction on what you should be doing, but enough freedom to enjoy exploring and discovering.

One of the major design challenges is to ensure that we minimise unnecessary backtracking. I believe that all games should never make the player endlessly track through empty areas that you have already cleared for no reason other than to falsely extend the game. Good level design should be able to offer a well paced experience by itself.

Alexey is now hard at work designing the enemies for the engineering section. All the enemies we had in the prototype were placeholder spider/bug things and were there purely as a test, and to ensure that we didn’t use the actual enemies for two reasons (we want to show them when they are complete, and to avoid spoilers). Alexey sent over the first draft and they are truly creepy, and the animations are looking highly realistic even at this early stage. Designing enemies for top down games is a challenge, as conveying motion and detail when you have no 3D perspective is very difficult, but Alexey’s talent in this area is shining through. I cannot wait to showcase them to you when we have them animated and setup with AI in game.

On the audio side, Alex is now working on creating the sound effects for the new enemies. Alex has a hard task of creating sounds that really draw you in and immerse you in the dark, creepy corridors of the Carpathian. We want you to hear things that make you think twice about going down that corridor, or hearing noises behind doors and wondering if you are prepared to open it, not knowing what lies behind. Audio design is key to making this game really stand out, so its an area that we are putting a huge amount of time and detail into. Expect more on this in future updates.

Moving forward, updates on here and the Fig campaign page will be made when we have hit some form of milestone, or have important news to pass on. If you would like to be directly involved with us as we develop, I will be posting lots of smaller updates on a regular basis in our Discord Channel so please drop in and say hi :) We welcome feedback, ideas, concerns… anything! So please do join and get involved :)

As a final note, those of you who backed on Fig at a tier that gave you a copy of our local multiplayer game Jump Gunners I will be sending you a steam key once the campaign funds have all been received and finalised with Fig, and I expect that to be in a few weeks. I am also very excited that after such great reception at GDC and EGX this year with Microsoft, Jump Gunners is releasing on Xbox One this month! Not only is this a huge a milestone for the studio as our first console release, but also that I know exactly what to build in from the ground up to fully support the console integration of Xenosis.

So, thanks again for your ongoing support, if you have any questions or comments, please just reach out :)

Kind Regards,

James Stone
Game Designer & Developer