Development Update

Hi everyone, I know it’s been a little while since an official update, so I wanted to let you know what we have all been working on.

The last month has been a little crazy with the release of Jump Gunners on Xbox, and the move into full production with Xenosis. The Xbox launch was a great success, but also highlighted a lot of things that need to be changed on Xenosis in order to be ready to release on console platforms, and it’s great that we have this knowledge early on to avoid issues later. These are all behind the scenes code challenges (achievements, save data, input & user management), but now that we have experience taking a product to console, we are fully prepared to make sure that we avoid common development pitfalls and ensure that Xenosis will be just as awesome on next gen consoles as it will be on PC.

As for Xenosis itself, well I am currently in the process of overhauling AI and pathfinding systems, and developing a common approach to creating enemies within the game. This is really important, as having a common design framework ensures that we can create a diverse set of unique enemies, that can be adapted and updated throughout development, without any significant rework of them individually. The existing code was not efficient or scalable, so doing this now will pay dividends in time saved further down the line.

Rose is currently working away on story and the player journey. We will be reaching out to those of you who backed the crew and boss tiers soon, more on that later in the update. The story itself is coming together nicely now, as we work to really flesh out the main enemy protagonist’s backstory, their motivations and ultimately the events that led to the failure of the mission. We are trying to avoid typical Sci-fi cliches, which is hard when so many stories have been told that pull inspiration from one another, but we believe we have a unique take on tales typical to the genre, and we cant wait to share more details with you on this!

Alexey has been designing the art for the crew members and the first real enemy of the game, and to say its creepy is an understatement! Alex is working with voice artists to create some truly harrowing sounds for this new monster, and its already shaping up to fit (and enhance) the atmosphere of the game. We will be using this in conjunction with the new enemy design system that I am working on, and I will share details of this once I have it in engine and running. I am really very happy with the direction on this, and I think you will be too!

The current project plan is reflecting the work needed for the next three months, with major milestones for development being planned out now. I am happy with the current progress, but I should be able to give more accurate development timescales once we have the base planning work compete, and some of the major production milestones done. Then I can assess our actual progress against planned progress and be able to reflect and adapt to any major deviation.

As a final note, I am aware that you probably want to see stuff! The team and I really want to show off what we are making with you all, we are all super proud of it! But I just need to figure out how best to balance reveals with spoilers, so for the moment, please bear with me while I figure this one out… things are coming, I promise!

Tier Rewards

For those of you that backed at the Crew or Boss tiers, we will be sending out information and questionnaires to you in the coming weeks. Rose and I are working on the best way to integrate you into the game, so keep an eye out for emails from us soon.

Now that the Jump Gunners launch is live and the Fig campaign complete, keys will be going out either later today or tomorrow for those of you that got a copy as part of your rewards. Please keep an eye out in your spam filters, the email will come from [email protected] and can be picked up as spam for the Key & Links.

Thank you all once again for supporting us in developing Xenosis, and if there is anything you want to ask or discuss, just reach out in the comments or join the team in Discord.

Kind Regards,
James Stone.
Game Designer & Developer