EXODE received a lot of work and updates since end June!
Let's review some of what happened.
Version E is aiming at its "full version"
As announced in end June, version E aims at being a playable version with most of our collection cards instead of being an experience with starter contents.
Our collection of cards is of about 380+ references.
We extended a lot of what is "our collection" in May and June. So we have been setting up that as game content ever since.
This has put development literally racing with updates in July with fixes to card traits, dynamic upgrades, faction restrictions, equipment of weapons and armor and "faction change equipment and crew", and many updates to our game launcher where you can equip your cards.
I have to admit that almost all our July updates and fixes were about collection and setting up your play deck. It is only since a week or so that we have been heading back into the game code, meaning game UIs and interaction!
However in July our version E, or "E+", also relocated some important code from client to server. This was first planned in anticipation of the colonization step but has been acted sooner, in order to settle our new additions in a proper way for "what's next". This part has gone mostly silent as it goes behind the curtains.
Meanwhile, as many updates were put to our Launcher (the area where you can setup your cards), to further test it we also had some community events:
There was a first and second Planetary Challenge, organized by our community managers @balticbadger and @Khazrakh who acted up as writer. The challenge included colonization events testing your deck performance against risks.
We also added the ability to save your deck on Launcher and submit it to our Challenge, so this was a way to test our deck structure and some our so many cards.
Oh, I hope you are following eXode news, because thats the best way to keep track of what is happening!
Player-made content
There was also a player-made challenge, the Federal Database Challenge organized by @digital-wisdom .
And don't miss on these very interesting tutorials made by @slabakbg , which you can check here on youtube or here on 3speak!
Our focus
So far we can say the focus has been on version E, with 34 days since end June spent on setting it up, but a big part of it on card features and deck management code.
This includes 12 days on version E coding in July (the part you haven't seen yet), +7 in August, vs. 15 days on associated features and game launcher. Some of these days were not full however, considering we had some maintenance and fixes to deploy.
The remaining days (about 15) were spent on... new features! mainly collection features here, and adding maintenance tools to make maintenance faster, and of course, many fixes; and also some game design, art direction, and a lot of community feedback. This part has gone faster with deployment, adding many features into player's hands.
More about our updates
To give insight at these updates here is an excerpt from our development log and just a few pictures at times. Instead of sharing a dozen pages with all details I'll just keep to the main features released. And yes, it's long, even with this:
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July 4th : MASS transactions ; added a purchase cart, transfer cart and sell cart to our collection.
July 8th : ESCORT Opening event ; you can discover content from your Escort packs and also a new card, the "Emergency Orders".
July 8th : TOM ESSENTIALS Opening event ; also added 3 new cards, "Soup and Cook", "Beauty Air" and "Survivor CO5".
July 8th : End of Presale ; STEEM no longer accepted as currency and Glorious 8 removed from shop; since that date eXode is no longer selling contracts and special packs!
Players have been steadily purchasing cards from each other and making profit!
July 8th : Launcher update (for version E) ; you can now add EQUIPMENT to your Origin cards!
July 9th : FACTIONS implemented on our Launcher (for version E), adding also the important concept of Delayed Factions and Foreign Technology when using a foreign ship
July 9th : Ability to EQUIP CREW and VIPs on our Launcher (for version E)
Ready for the next steps?
Because this was only between July 4th and July 9th... 5 days or so!
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July 10th : Deck Integrity update to our Launcher (for version E), with control about duplicate cards
July 10th : VETERANS cards can be used with their limitations implemented.
July 10th : Stranded Trader and Cruise Ship Captain special abilities
July 10th : SAVE DECK feature, which was a big and useful addition, and IMPORT DECK feature also released later that day
July 11th : Large slots addition to Launcher, and a collection of 10+ other fixes.
July 15th : DECK VIEWER feature and DELETE DECK feature.
July 16th : Elite abilities added to Origins and some ships.
After this intense week (7 days), I had to address something "more in volume".
We have many cards being actively traded, that's one good thing, but to play all these cards we also needed to test their attributes. Fortunately this was anticipated and we were able to fix some card issues and thanks to our Deck Expert tool, and also to provide more insight about how our collection worked.
Another feature needed to be released to gain maturity on our assets is Upgrades. Upgrades gave a way to burn cards to improve other cards, picking a bonus yourself, thus making your upgraded card unique.
Upgrades were a way to anticipate Leveling and to deploy live a layer of code that we wanted to be stable and tested in our data structure before moving further.
It also gave players a first burning mechanic - an important commitment to valuation - and dynamic leveling, so the feature was part of our Manifesto: making something unique and guaranteeing valuation.
So our releases then progressively focused on our Upgrades. It was to be a quick release but to work as planned it also needed a number of market and collection improvements, so we reworked our market code for it.
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July 20th : Mass Contract Opening. A new feature to open all your contracts at once instead of one by one; something much required by some of our players!
July 26th : 61 cards updated.
July 28th : 'TITLES and MEDALS' new feature; displaying achievements on your profile page!
July 30th : ELITE STATS added to all Rekatron cards, adding new special traits.
July 30th : DECK EXPERT updated to display elite and upgrade stats.
August 5th : The UPGRADES feature, a major addition to our collection features is deployed to testroom.
August 8th : Everything pushed Live with:
UPGRADES
LIVE NOTIFICATIONS
More PAGE INTERACTIVITY on your collection page
PERSONAL LOG and MARKET LOG
We ended our collection of updates on August 8th with the major addition of live notifications.
Things are not perfect yet on our collection features. But at that time I felt it was good enough to move on and head back into the game itself.
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And there is more...
This was about new features but all above did not mention days deploying only fixes (at least 6 other days logged about it).
End July I shared expert notes about the way Special Achievement Cards are working, such as our Panther Bike card and Bikers special achievements. And then first information about some new traits, such as the 'Penetrating' trait, and the way it interacts with armor.
As a reminder I am single and main developer for eXode. I also run a Witness server and am also considering running a RPC Node in the next months.
But despite this long list of updates I am not truly satisfied with our speed: I want to turn my focus to the game itself. Fortunately, it's happening now!
So what about our Version E?
On July 12th I shared information about the fact that I was working on our encryption engine.
On July 21st I shared that we had working booster Origins and decks loaded in development version.
On July 24th I shared the full changelog of version E.
Some parts were scheduled for colonization before but became also necessary for EVAC. An initial 5 days planned on encryption actually doubled, and I could not address all of it properly in July, so these 10 days have also been eating up some of August.
The concept of "Game client" may not make sense to some techies reading this as we are actually playable on browser. We do have a convertible EXE version which is automatically encrypted and protected, and a game flow which optimizes network, server and blockchain usage.
As a reminder, blockchain is used to protect asset ownership, and is really good at that. And as a reminder our vision (and even delivery roadmap) includes a Steam version meaning eXode is not just a browser game. But before we can enjoy using again our EXE (which has been demonstrated earlier in April), we prefer to be playable on browser as it's much more "come in / come out" and suitable for testing.
So what's next?
I am still testing the new crew system which should be final this week. The crew system is one of the main additions of the new version E. It is interactive, allowing you to pick bonuses and to review your rolled crew.
You can expect a new post later with our screen!
I have been working on "a lot of fixes and features" and I am sorry if all this clouded game progression for some weeks.
I know "the world awaits us" and by that I mean that only work, progression, delivery, player feedback and a good game can get us there. We'll get there by big leaps forward!
Over the last month, many elements clicked in and some others matured, giving more solid ground to move further. It is extremely important to have this, considering our number of usable fronts (website, collection, market, launcher, deck expert, etc) so as to reduce or eliminate maintenance; and to gain more momentum. This is what happened here.
We are seeing the birth of a new huge sci-fi game. We plan to make the world tremble in favor of Hive gaming. We plan to make people fall off their chair thinking wow what is this game?! Hive, what is that?
We are looking forward to incredible days thanks to what was made before!
Stay tuned for our next posts and releases, and thank you for your support!
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More information about EXODE can also be found on our website, our Discord, or multiple posts such as this one about our epic characters, or this trailer made by a fan, or this review or this one . A summary of latest posts and events is also here.
Also running a witness node:
You can check the post about it here and if you like what this means you can:
See you soon in eXode!
