It's time to speak more and louder about what we do at EXODE!
.. and if you haven't joined our universe yet: know that there is going to be a major event, announced during the weekend and possibly live this Sunday evening (UTC).
Meanwhile, we now begin this series of monthly journals about our development cycle and what we have done every month.
So it won't speak about the DEPOT card normally, except that we did distribute it today, and even if it was made technically in December I can't resist showing it to you all!
About this journal:
Even if it takes a few hours to set it up, we believe it's more fair and more accessible to all other hivers to see what we do, just as it comes, even if we have IRL stuff or things that disturbs our development month.
Just as we shared below that we have >1 million of lines of code in EXODE (excluding comments and blank lines), you have to understand that "we do work on the game". That is the reason why sharing git planning with "little colored dots" when there is a commit is of no use to us: we work a LOT, and there are a lot more stuff here than just pushing a few lines.
But like many games, it is nothing before it is complete, and then becomes a major, ambitious and appreciated game once some dots are connected. This is what we are trying to do. We have a lot of engines ready but want to improve presentation, reception, explanation and gameplay.
Back to the utility of this journal: this way, you are free to take screens bits of this and screens to speak more about us on twitter, hive blogs, leothreads, or all other places you think are of importance.
Put an EXODE dev log in your house, in your phone, in your toilet, we don't care, but speak about us :D
In this journal, we will again speak of one of our initiatives, then get into the summary of our dev log.
Introduction: Time to fight STRONGER for ethics
Our ethical position which we have explained and put forward in a live event in Web3 Berlin in 2023, is now stronger and even more determined.
Formerly we wanted to gather same-minded developers and make a new brand of ethically involved indies with projects which still have a more mature approach to P2E: avoiding activating it at the time when it will sink the economy, avoiding making "another ponzi scheme"...
Yet you notice many of these "already active P2E" games still come out, and threaten their economy (with tokens earned) before even knowing how their development speed can catch up with utility.
( In EXODE, you can take profit at any time, but thanks to the collection aspects ; many packs take value ; even at stable population of players ; and then of course P2E will also become active! )
But back to our attempts:
We also explored solutions, maybe the idea of a HIVE proposal?
to settle a third party website and initiative for it?
to gather like minded indies into a new group of games?
This would be aside from our work at EXODE.
This way we could come forward to other developers to tell them:
"hey, come to HIVE, here we have ethics, because HIVE is also a social network! and here is our ethical games brand!" and see how the approach could help HIVE.
But when testing the waters about that idea, we were told HIVE proposals were tough: getting them voted was tough, that we needed to be some sort of VIP visiting people and witnesses all over.
And we never exactly were good or involved in any capacity in the voting patterns part of HIVE. Being part of a "voting group", mining tokens this way, setting up automatic actions, this was all very different to us from creating real value.
We really are a game designer and developer and think that if the system is done right, then making something good is what we must do, then speaking about it, and then people will notice it and put it forward. And there are some accounts doing just that by the way!!! many thanks!
But to tell you the truth, we were a bit discouraged on the "proposal idea" so we then focused on our work: making EXODE!
But we are not finished: we will definitely have a "round 2" at it.
Because we see projects with weak economies trying their launch again, and we think it's important to share a "no-P2E-when-its-not-ready" approach.
We also think that defending value of player collections is also our responsibility.
No longer should developers abandon their blockchain project after receiving investment.
Or if they do, we should no longer think "oh it's normal, another day in blockchain".
Blockchain is there to last, and players should associate themselves with developers with a vision that lasts, too. Such as a franchise with enough content to aim to last 20 years once released. Oh, and developer "who works on it".
In this November month, we were late on many things: it started right after our end October rush, we had to move to another house during the month, but maybe with this post you will notice we definitely work on it and publish items.
Let's review what November has added to EXODE!
November 6th
Halloween happy gas effects were eventually removed!
Your citizens stopped displaying odd activities and locations.While working on our food models, we shared an important post about "cooking" on our Discord server.
Post summary:
This post shared information about our food immediate roadmap (upgrading data profiles then releasing them to your EXODE manager), the feature of trading food between players, and the fact that EXODE also allows a "lazy play" mode where citizens just pick raw food randomly, and possibly avoid food that has already been noticed as poisoning other citizens the days before.
November 7th
- Shared an important post about "planetary generation" on our Discord server.
Post summary:
This post shared information about food generation models and how your food can be very different than the one of other players, and how complementary the economy is. In addition, the post shared info about how to collect food and how to use it simply (ie. lazy mode) or in more details.
We have designed a circular economy about everything in EXODE, from medicine to ammo to fuel and materials, and food (and the plates, drinks and rations you will design) are also one of the circular economies to test.
As a reminder, every planet has received a number of procedurally generated elements of meat, fish, fruit, vegetable and cereal called "The Planet Food Table". Every element has a large number of properties and reacts differently to preparation, cooking and maceration. Eating it raw is also possible.
This is in addition to all the hundreds of attributes every planet has in its available wildlife, plantlife, ore and minerals and what we call "biofragments" and "geofragments", all unique to your planet.
November 10th
Update!
Updated engine with a large number of additional data for food and the capacity for every ability to be unknown, discovered, etc.
Some attributes: food aspect, color and color tone, food interaction, olfactive, sourness, saltiness, greasiness, sweetness, ability to be cleaned, sorted, to have rare variants, new attributes of rare variants to discover (can have entirely new attributes), ability to be cooked and new attributes of cooked variants (to discover later), ability to be fermented and new attributes of fermented variants, ...
We hid some of this data to avoid being "overkill" in feature depth. We still were a bit overkill.
New screen added to EXODE Manager: displaying your Food Reserves.
- New inspection screen added to EXODE Manager, which allows to inspect a food item in profusing detail.
November 11th
- Fix day!
- About 8 important global fixes were deployed, to fix display of regional data, seasons, stockpiles, food items, food variants and buttons.
November 13th
Update about food presentation, hiding some attributes and allowing a "view more" button to see the details.
Also shared a longer post about the colonization roadmap.
Post summary:
This post shared the following steps:
(1) displaying planetary data (information on your planet and its dangers)
(2) adding action buttons on citizens to pick their next food and beverage
(3) allowing to make your teams again (create, modify, etc)
(4) allowing to send an away team with its own objectives
(5) making your own food design
(6) equipping your teams with their rations.
(7) reviewing and validating your next day
... after this post, Devlindos had to move between houses and move boxes intensively for 4 days.
November 19th-21th
Post sharing information about what we were working on at the moment, which was confirmed agian the next day on November 20th.
Another post was made on November 21th to give more information:
Post summary:
We wanted to allow players to select colonies, storage and other filters.
To also get into displaying their "exploration data": the regions they know, the seasons, the dangers and what they have discovered about the food table of their planet.
This post shared the following steps:
November 23th
An interesting post where we shared that EXODE has 300k of self-written, self-owned server code (excluding duplicate archives, blank lines, comments). this is in addition to the other work we do (designing, some graphics, etc).
We actually also have 500k of self-written javascript code and about the same volume of other written front files.
This is far from Skyrim level, and volume does not mean much, but still interesting comparing to the regular IT developer which is rumored to write 150 to 200 lines on average on a day.
November 24th
UPDATE! Finally!
A very long dev log sharing a lot of information about new screens deployed the same day:
You can now access your PLANET menu.
You can now see again the DANGERS procedurally generated on your planet.
But also a lot of other screens about regions, seasons, colony overview, etc.
November 26th
UPDATE!
This update added a few more usable screens to create your colony and away team.
November 27-28th
UPDATE!
We posted about onboarding on the 27th, and published the update on 28th.
This update is about onboarding and improving it.
We mentioned two important steps to improve onboarding, one about an explanatory video to add to website, and another about new steps taken once you log in. This update addressed the latter!
Onboarding is extremely important for EXODE as it is always perceived as something too difficult at the moment.
Onboarding process was upgraded with the following:
Thanks to an improvement of EXODE management interface and two of our API engines - the login one and the collection one:
Our API is now able to analyze your origin, starship, starter situation accurately, point to the lack of an opened starter, and also point to the one you should open right now. Then EXODE manager uses this information to just explain you these steps and show you new windows immediately with direct call to action buttons.
The buttons immediately solve the situation (a direct button to open a proposed starter, etc), to simplify everything for the player.
Once with a valid opened starter, player is then pointed to launching an evacuation game, again with a direct button.
November 29th
On that day, we shared a video about our current development on Teams.
We were upgrading the interface in many ways and shared the benefits of the new version.
This work on teams was completed and published on December 5th,
with a complete rework allowing a lot more content and features to teams.
Team Profiles and Specializations were introduced, but also leader roles, member roles, with several classes available for team members.
Players had then an overview of every crew character when inspecting them for a given class, and a "toggle" to activate a detailed information mode.
This will be part of our December journal!
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That's all pilots!
November was a busy month but still vastly hindered by a lot of real life issues: we had more than one week of days taken completely away for IRL imperatives! such as: moving boxes and helping the family around.
Since November 20th we have worked with determination from a new place.
We are now using all that energy agian into EXODE.
We have very strong ambitions for the game and a lot of dedication, and we can't wait to finally have it make the game more complete and more playable. New screens come out nearly every 3 days now or even faster at times.
We know there is a lot to do, we are working on it!