Devlog #4 | Gaters have new faces!

Hi fellow Gaters from all around the world,

First of all, there are so many of you now! Many thanks for following the Exogate Initiative development journey, we can’t express how encouraging it is to read your lovely comments, constructive feedback & suggestions! You can join the community Discord server anytime to ask your questions, chat with us and follow the news!

Let’s move on to the latest additions!

Gaters have new faces

We received feedback saying that Gaters’ faces lacked life. While we had an artistic direction for the faces, we wanted to try out a new design. It is still in progress but we can already show you what we plan with these new faces!

First off, here’s a short before/after to show you the difference between the old work and the new result

Side note: We received feedback about these new faces too! They’re not perfect and we’ll continue to improve them in the future!

Then, we added expressions to their faces. They’ll mainly be used during missions so instead of having a neutral face all along the Team Contact, the Gaters can express their surprise, excitement, frustration and more according to the situation!

Also, we added facial expressions so they reflect their condition inside the base, here they are:

Dev stuff

Remember the Star Map? This is it now, feel old yet?

The Star Map issue was to try to make it visually interesting, stable despite the procedural generation and easy to navigate. It’s not totally finished yet. Redesigning the Star Map brings up many challenges such as:

• setting clear icons indicating which kind of resource you can earn by exploring an exoplanet
• adding a progression system as Gaters perform missions
• defining the difficulty level concept in an understandable way and adding missions in accordance with the difficulty level displayed
• having colors adapted to color-blind people

The Tech Tree, which allows you to unlock new technologies to upgrade your base and progress in the game, will also be redesigned!

Cursed bug of the month

Lately, we’ve been having some… merging issues? To sum this up, Gaters tend to merge with each other, which is a bit disturbingly cursed… This gives some The Thing vibe, not gonna lie…

Many thanks for reading! If you’re curious about a specific aspect of the game, feel free to use the comments section to write what you’d like to see in the next devlog and we’ll see what we can do!

The Xeno Bits Team

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