Dogs Of War Vu

About This Game

Explore, fight, survive and unravel mysteries in this unique and unforgiving 3D isometric RPG set in an original dark, low fantasy world. Exanima's exceptional attention to detail and realistic simulation of all things aim to provide a deeply immersive and dynamic gameplay experience.

Features include a deep skill based combat system, complex and smart AI, fully interactive environments, an advanced damage model with accurate collisions and locational protection, roguelike elements and an arena mode to hone your combat skills.

"Those who would enter the underworld shall not only forfeit their lives...
...but bring oblivion to all mankind."

(http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/362490/extras/InsFight01.png?t=1463346240)

WARNING: THIS GAME IS ACTUALLY DIFFERENT!
This game features a very deep, truly physics based combat system. This is not just some animation feature, it is a fundamental difference that is central to gameplay. Real momentum, forces and collisions are always at play here, every nuance of your inputs is crucial to the outcome. This will likely be unlike anything you've played before and may take some practice, but can be hugely rewarding and the skill cap is virtually infinite. It is not particularly fast paced or difficult but it does require you to pay attention, it is very tactical and just casually pressing buttons won't get you very far!

Our goal is to create a deep and immersive RPG world based on a more advanced simulation supporting an unprecedented level of dynamic and emergent gameplay. All of the technology we use including the game engine is our own, developed from the ground up to realise this vision.

Exanima is born as a prelude to Sui Generis (SG), our ambitious open world RPG that has been in development for over two years following a successful Kickstarter campaign. Exanima is a smaller yet complete game in its own right, a dungeon crawler that takes place in SG's Underworld some twenty years prior to its events. Both games are being developed in concert, many of SG's more ambitious features will make an appearance in Exanima as development continues.

Exanima provides a reasonably complete and meaningful game experience, but many more features are on their way! We have met our most challenging and significant development goals, now we are ready to bring new features to light and make an even more fun and compelling adventure. Here are some of the planned features, with many already being close to completion:
•   Per session and global character skill progression
•   Large non-linear main game following early content
•   Build and permanently save characters by completing early content
•   New encounters, items and environments
•   Ranged combat and new close quarter manoeuvres
•   Numerous moddable thaumaturgic powers
•   More complete arena game modes featuring outdoor arenas
•   Complex NPC interactions and dialogue
•   Cooperative and competitive LAN multiplayer

(http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/362490/extras/InsHrOg01.png?t=1463346240)

Very nice game and for good price, thanks for the info.

Quote from: Attila on February 10, 2017, 07:06:14 PM
Very nice game and for good price, thanks for the info.

This is the game I have been telling you about. Real physics  8)

Exanima 0.6.5.4f

This hotfix brings a few fixes and improvements, more importantly it introduces extended terrain functionality that is necessary for the upcoming story content. The terrain system changes are things that you should (hopefully) not even notice, they are needed to support larger terrains and greatly reduce video RAM usage.

Changelog from 0.6.4.4d to 0.6.5.4f:

•   Terrain texture streaming system
•   Terrain texture dynamic LoD
•   Fixed weapons jolting when changing grips
•   Improved smoothness of some motions
•   Adjustments to brightness correction for night time matches
•   Improved arena help / tutorial system
•   Various fixes

What's taking so long?

We've been focusing on work and as usual we've neglected to keep you properly updated. I'm going to make an effort now to give you a brief overview of what we've been working on.


As you well know we've been adding content at a slow pace, with only 5 of the total 14 levels/maps released so far. This is not however because just creating more environments is time consuming or difficult, but because we need to progress the game's core features to properly support further content and the story.

When we came to Steam with Exanima we rapidly fell into a cycle of constant refinement in response to feedback. We spent an enormous amount of time reiterating exisiting features and trying to improve what was already there, rather than moving forward with the features that were still missing. This is a cycle we've been determined to break, but it has already left us with a huge amount of work that has yet to be tackled. We also find ourselves wanting to develop a solid and aready sophisticated foundation for new features, immediately building things to higher quality standards, in order to avoid wanting to revisit previous work yet again.

We've taken all the feedback we've received and endeavoured to build new content to new standards. We're trying to break free of the sometimes monotonous environments, to involve the player more directly in the story and do many other things besides. The game has grown greatly in size and scope since the initial Early Access release, involving some very substantial additions and refinements.


The upcoming update features the first part of a large non-linear environment that will make up the rest of the game's content. We're using new environment building features and we're adding a lot more intricate and unique detail. We have improved both visual quality and variety in our level design.

In order to do this we had to make substantial additions to our level building tools, and we've also created some new advanced tools for general asset creation. These tools allow us to make higher quality visuals while hugely boosting our productivity and avoiding many pitfalls that have caused us to waste a lot of time in the past.

With these important additions to what we're able to do, we've also been revisiting the early game content, taking advantage of new environment building features, introducing new unique elements and remastering key assets.


Perhaps the most important addition coming to the game is dialogue and NPC companions. You may now have someone by your side to share in your misery, and perhaps even carry that damned torch. This will introduce important new gameplay dynamics and provide an avenue to better expose the story and your own involvement in it.

While perhaps most of this could have been done with simpler methods, we've tried to build an important foundation for NPC behaviour and dialogue that has many applications within the game, and many more to explore and build upon. This has been the biggest obstacle towards a release as we are attempting something quite ambitious and there was much work to be done spanning AI, dialogue and authoring tools, even a native OO scripting language. In the long term, it is one of our most important goals to create NPCs that have believable dynamic behaviours with meaningfully diverse player interaction.

With this complete overhaul of the AI we're also trying to tackle many other issues and add depth and variety to even the most basic interactions with the denizens of Exanima.


While we're not quite ready to include it just yet, we have also been working on Thaumaturgy. We will be adding up to a final total of 6 forms of thaumaturgy, with many powers and related skills. Mind is the first, as it is central to the plot. It also ties in with a lot of the work we have been doing with AI.


There will of course be many new items and various refinements to the game in general. We are not comfortable with giving you a release date for the update just yet, but we are at the end of a gigantic endeavour and doing our best to piece it all together and wrap it up.


(We generally avoid spoilers and publicly showing things before they are looking their best, but I will try to add some kind of screenshot here soon.)

Net tileset before/after comparison

This shows the current version of Exanima vs. the improved version created using the new dev tools (thanks to Brandrixco for making the comparison).

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/853849837140182140/A770010E0D77694F1C59F248B01E6E3C8EC0F76C/?interpolation=lanczos-none&output-format=jpeg&output-quality=95&fit=inside%7C2048:576&composite-to%3D%2A%2C%2A%7C2048%3A576&background-color=black)

In engine asset tools

Part of our new in engine tools. Thanks to these new tools we're able to create higher quality assets with ease and work much more efficiently as a team.
(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/842591243236412227/4A702801B752D2AF3D36D0B7A9DA0E79CEE71B38/)


Caves

An example of what we're able to do with the new level design features.
(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/842591243236426356/32FFDB3E2285862546234BA0F575CB2CA576B8F4/)


New level design features

Remastered assets and much improved ground detail and variety thanks to the new features.
(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/842591243236434001/5743F51D8ED0CEBF1EDB22816E4C209D8E6C4A54/)

https://youtu.be/ZFxad24pigg






https://youtu.be/oCxDfR9VHgA

Did someone ask for bevors?

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/918040328121448082/E20F9F2585453CD9170403F0DE4B4493BAA5E124/?interpolation=lanczos-none&output-format=jpeg&output-quality=95&fit=inside%7C*%3A0)


More bevor fashion

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/918040328121449913/6429320F851A7534D171974F50BB6C5E87F85307/?interpolation=lanczos-none&output-format=jpeg&output-quality=95&fit=inside%7C*%3A0)

Dev Coffee Diary 26/2/18

Beads of water slick off the cold tunnel walls like golden tree sap, in the light of the torch.

The undead was not moving. Zetheros nudged it's head with his sabaton. Nothing. Motioning a gauntleted hand, his companion followed behind him, carrying the torch.

"Time for breakfast." Zetheros murmured through his gilded visor.

"What do ya' mean? We're gonna eat this poor sod?"

"Gods no, you fool. We have this delicious medley of grains. I call it cereal. And cow's milk, cashews, and powdered coffee. Why do you think I've been hauling this large metal contraption behind me? It's to keep food fresh you idiot. There's half of a deer in there for dinner, too."

"I-I-I I have an... an apple, it's a little bit dried and grubby though... also some hard flat bread... a bit of smoked pork..."

"Hah. You non-thaumaturges."

Zetheros mixes the 'cereal' together with the cashews, then sprinkles coffee into the ceramic bowl he also happened to be carrying.

"Where'd you get that bowl, good ser, and why do you mix coffee with your cereal?"

"What? You don't?"

With that, Zetheros mysteriously uses his body thaumaturgy to eat the breakfast, without ever lifting his visor.

"H-h-how..?"

"By Skallagrim's beard this companion is dull. Pray to our lord Madoc for a smarter one."

"...P-pardon me, ser, but to whom are you speaking to?"

Hey you exanimates!

Are you lost in the darkness, wondering what will this bring? Fear naught, for the weekly update is here!

------------------------- Madoc says ---------------------------

Some pretty significant improvements and fixes in this version, and some important back end additions in the form of the locale system, which is used to track the location of characters and other things in the game world. This is more of an event system and advanced role thing, however not having it implemented was already causing problems even in Exanima's currently simple conditions.

AI fixes and improvements here should make a significant difference to companion gameplay and group encounters

-Improved companion movement AI

-Companion will now break off confrontations to follow the player

-Various AI pathfinding improvements

-Fixed AI often not correctly evaluating some characters in group situations

-New flee mechanics implemented and functional (may need tweaks)

-UI Scaling up to 1440p (4k is coming)

-Cursors now scale with the GUI too

-Fixed NPCs vanishing or cloning on location changes

-Fixed a dialogue related bug causing various issues

-Fixed characters becoming unresponsive

-Fixed characters enganging in overly long staring contests

-Fixed issues with blood sprays

-Various small fixes and improvements


WARNING Due to substantial back end changes affecting game data you may want to back up saves you care about, and also start story mode games from scratch.

Once again this is completely untested, I'll try to hotfix any major issues you might encounter right away.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

This is for the insider companion build which is being playtested, and I'm working on armour as per usual.

That's all for now, have a great week!

-Zetheros

Quick Status Update
Bare Mettle (Exanima)  [developer]   7 Mar


"I've been crunching like crazy since the update has gone into beta, this is the first time I feel like things are calming down a bit, so I thought I'd take a little time to tell you how it's going.

In terms of new features everything's in place and seemingly working well. We've been doing several patches a week since going into beta, sometimes multiple ones in a day, and the beta guys have been doing a great job with testing and reporting issues, thanks!

Going into beta testing, and the generally higher level of activity on discord, brought on a fresh wave of feedback, not only regarding new features, but also pre-existing aspects of the game, and countless issues we weren't aware of. As usual this led us to spend a lot more time polishing and improving things than we thought we would. So, We've also been addressing a lot of quality of life issues and making improvements to many aspects of the game that didn't quite seem up to par anymore.


As you know this update introduces a first NPC companion, a completely new and very complex AI system, and dialogue. After adding the companion in beta we thought we'd be fleshing out their behaviour and dialogue, but inevitably we spent most of our time so far focusing on the core aspects of companion gameplay. As you know, Exanima is a fairly complex game to play, and this is no different for an NPC attempting to be the player's equal.

So, for now, the focus in terms of companions has been on making the little the companion does as good as possible, rather making them do more. However most of the work done in all this time has been geared towards supporting varied and dynamic NPC behaviours. This is something that we definitely want to expose, however we think we can add this gradually now rather than further postpone the update. It is a primarily content driven system, so now we're left with the relatively easy task of taking advantage of it.


There is a tonne of stuff in this update besides this, and right now we're just finalising the newest level for the public release. This new level is visually much more elaborate than previous content, but in terms of fuctionality there's nothing that hasn't already been tested. This is one of two new levels, the other being very different from other content and presenting us with many unique technical challenges, which is already complete and tested. The first 3 levels of the game have also been extensively reworked.


The work done for AI behaviour was by far the biggest development hurdle ahead of us. It is in reality where our most ambitious goals are, but we fell far behind with it as we worked to improve core aspects of the game that were more immediately important to an active playerbase. We've been a bit dismissive of all this, and vaguely hoped to work on it gradually, but in reality this needed a huge cohesive effort to become a reality. Moving forward we only have relatively much smaller things to tackle. In terms of assets we've also very nearly completed everything needed to make Exanima content complete, and we've also greatly expanded and improved our development tools, allowing us to make much better content much faster.


That's already turned out a bit longer than I expected, so I'll stop here for now. To sum up, the update is very close now. I think you'll be very pleased with just how much the game has improved across the board. If there's something you want to know more about please ask, it's not very easy for me to understand what you'd like to know about."

Dev Coffee Diary 19/3/18
Zetheros  has Exanima


More hats:
(https://i.imgur.com/hyckJoD.png)

Hypothetical scenarios #1
(https://i.imgur.com/cVxaajA.png)

The things I do in my free time:
(https://i.imgur.com/LQ5qwAt.png)


Madoc:

"I'm in the middle of some things, so there's a few reported issues related to what I'm working on that I haven't fixed yet (and hopefully I didn't leave anything in a broken state).

-Improved turning behaviour and animation during locomotion

-Improved random item colouring and outfit generation

-Hats...

-Improved and fixed chain coifs*

-New leather cuirass

-New full helm

-Entering the catacombs now creates checkpoints if enabled

-Fixed companion duping and related issues

-Fixed NPCs jumping off heights to attack someone below

-Fixed Sprint to Dash not working correctly

-Fixed NPCs briefly becoming unresponsive after downing an opponent

-Fixed Sir not roaming around as intended

-Fixed crouch preventing some strikes from executing

-Fixed characters sometimes looking at someone other than their combat opponent

-Fixed some rendering issues with parts of the ground

-Fixed text caret missing from 1440p GUIs

-Fixed some memory leaks

-Numerous content fixes and tweaks

*The volume of data required to update all assets that were affected by this change is large and hence some glitches will likely remain until the next full install is released."

Have a great week! :D
-Zeth

Dev Coffee Diary 21/5/2018
Hey Exanimates,

No update yet, and it seems I'm taking a break from armour (the multi-layered armour system is in need of work), and am now working on something that I'm super thrilled to work on, but can't talk about. It's like one of those projects you specifically learn 3d modeling for.

I've heard some really fantastic snippets of WIP music from Bethain, the composer for Exanima, for the upcoming levels, but unfortunately I think it's an insider perk that I'm not allowed to share here...

However, I can share the shields I was working on!

front:
(https://i.imgur.com/iwHO9YS.png)

back:
(https://i.imgur.com/knvRIY0.png)

I saw even more styles of shields at The Royal Armouries, so I can probably use those for reference, if more shields are called for.

Speaking about The Royal Armouries; I've spotted a real-life golem still standing guard at it's post, and that crazy famous Maximilian hat. There's also a really nice place to get shawarma and chips here.

Have a great week!
-Zeth

Dev Coffee Diary 11/6/2018
Hey Exanimates,

Kind of a bit in a hurry, have some IRL stuff going on.

And sorry, not a lot of news - I'll be doing retopology today. Update when??

You guys know the reason why horses aren't in Morrowind right? Because Khaijits find them delicious. This is why we can't have good things.

Have a great week!
-Zeth

Dev Coffee Diary 25/6/18
Hey Exanimates,

Have you ever planned a surprise party for someone, but the surprise party is so awesome and imminent that you want to tell them, but you really shouldn't; otherwise it wouldn't be a surprise party?

Anyway, there's a lot to do; I need to crunch actually, and bank in some work for the week since I'm flying to Turin for the Armeria Reale, then after a few weeks taking a train to Florence for the Museo Stibbert.

This week I'll be working on some simple weapons, and additional stuff that I can't talk about.

See you guys next week!
-Zeth

New Closed Beta Version 0.6.8

Today a new closed beta test version was released that includes the upcoming post portal level. Once this version is finished being tested the update will go live for the public build.


(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/956335063013497542/3869A3DC1F7B480C69065D0CD03C9188DD492EC7/)

Exanima 0.8 Released
Wed, 1 April 2020

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/8614037/a4ac49f9c964e35609745255be7fc61d630c388f.jpg)

EXANIMA 0.8

Exanima 0.8 is out, and it's our biggest update yet. The thaumaturgy system is here, the largest content addition to date, new creatures, new features and many improvements.

Thaumaturgy is the last major system we needed to make Exanima's planned content work and make it feel like a complete game. It's Mind now, Force is next. Mind is by far the most challenging form, and with the gameplay systems, mechanics, UI, controls etc. done adding force will be a blast! :#

We do still have some big items on our roadmap, like multiplayer and to a lesser extent ranged combat, but none of that is needed to finally start making Exanima feel like a complete game with purpose and structure, to take advantage of the foundations we've been building and improving.

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/8614037/eda3bc8c010f35673b221a905c0fe1ab4e27b34b.jpg)

MIND THAUMATURGY

Thaumaturgy is here, and we're starting with Mind. This adds a whole new dynamic to the game, new tactics, strategies and builds. Mind is all about influencing and controlling the actions of others, necromancy and more.

Our concept for thaumaturgy is not just a collection of abilities that do very specific things, but a way of interacting with the world. It encourages creative problem solving, situational use and synergies. You should also pay close attention to the world and its characters, not just what your own abilities do in isolation.

With thaumaturgy also come the Insight and Concentration skills, with 16 techniques in total.

We did run into some last minute issues, so note that one of the core powers and some mods and minor mechanics aren't currently working. We decided to patch those in over the next few days rather than keep you waiting.

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/8614037/27b4978d5eb2dbc02204e0527d7eb3f8dc97a1e7.png)

ANIMATION IMPROVEMENTS

We're not quite done with improving things. Our physics driven character motion has come a long way, it works well and in the hands of a very experienced player it can look very good. It will realistically always feel tricky and look a bit silly for a new player, because you have such direct control over how your character moves.

At this point we only have a few specific things we want to improve. In this update we're introducing a sort of better "AI" control over how tense each virtual muscle should be at any time. This creates generally smoother motion, removes a lot of jittery moments and improves physics interactions with characters. Importantly, it also offers a bit more control over motion using physics. As we've tightened up the animations over time, they lost a bit of their physics feel, and this brings some of that back.

We've also improved how characters negotiate uneven ground, stairs etc. Characters are better at remaining balanced under harsh conditions in general, resulting in less tripping and generally more responsive control when in difficulty.

NEW FIRE EFFECT SYSTEM

With new features we're adding to the game we needed a better way to simulate fire that is more versatile, better performing and looks better under different conditions. Currently only some newer assets use this system, but we'll gradually replace most of our fire with it. There's a lot of cool things we'll be able to do with this new fire in future.

NEW CREATURES AND FEATURES

We've taken another step in simulating more than the basic human form and now we're able to add extra body parts, or take them away. No, this doesn't mean we've added dismemberment and quadrupeds (yet), but it is an important step for our character assembly an motion systems. We are going to be doing a bit more with this in the near future.

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/8614037/070f9fc693f791063b105711cf51ad536687b9a3.png)

ENCUMBRANCE REVISITED

This has been on the way for a while. We've been changing encumbrance values on armour to be more realistic and balanced. The largest changes concern full plate armour, but also which areas are encumbered. You should no longer want to wear chain under full plate, and alternatives to the heaviest armours aren't simply worse in every way.

The aim is also to make the upgrade path to the best armour a bit more considered than just always replacing whatever you have with something better. You'll have to consider your armour as a whole a bit more. We've also introduced a set mechanic, whereby pieces of armour that were designed to fit together will encumber you a bit less when combined.


Major changes in Exanima 0.8:

•   Mind Thaumaturgy, with many core powers and various mods
•   2 new skills, Insight and Concentration (16 new techniques)
•   Two new large interconnected areas to explore
•   New encounters
•   Support for new body structures and character types
•   Improved character physics and animation fluidity
•   Improved character balance and negotiation of uneven ground
•   Improved undead animations
•   New fire effects
•   Rebalanced skill progression
•   Many AI social and behavioural improvements
•   Combat AI improvements
•   New AI visibility and detection mechanics
•   New ground rendering features
•   Armour encumbrance value rebalance
•   Armour set bonuses reduce encumbrance of pieces designed to fit
•   Improved clipping with armour for weapons resting on shoulders
•   Item description texts have full formatting
•   Undead no longer take wound damage
•   Improved loading times and initial performance
•   You can now follow characters by clicking on them when spectating in arena
•   Performance improvements
•   Many bug fixes and small improvements

Best,
Bare Mettle

Procedural weapon conditions
Mon 18 May 2020

The same procedurally generated sword in 5 condition levels.

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1004811457517462728/5D2DB3298C5CE06EE26D3BAB1078C293947387B4/)

20 July 2020 Update

Updated Chain Armour
New procedural steel material for items, this time in the lowest condition level.

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1455177151329195298/E3E8548E12494F734C9AE890D26EEF62CAA1D8BE/)



Procedural Steel Damaged

New procedural steel material for items, this time in the lowest condition level.

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1455177151329181558/DE4FC3558C889198D9BAD7DC64C3C4EF6E43CB07/)



New Procedural Steel

This is what a top quality and condition armour looks like with the renderer and procedural material update. Same in game asset as before, same amount of textures at the same resolution, no tricks. The improvements largely come from our new tools and being able to program everything with interactive results for every step.

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1455177151329176292/21F6963DD0A95CCDB7308C6C6AAD7E2BFD92071D/)

Vegetation Rendering
03 Aug 2020

We just put features for vegetation in the new renderer. We're working on lots of vegetation assets, and we've established some good methods for dense vegetation with good performance. It will look even better in a scene using our new GI.

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1458556084364639431/77BC1B933C9575782AA25624DFAC89F6456144F4/)

A Few Swords

Some procedurally generated swords. Still a few tweaks to make and always things to add, but we're got the basics covered.

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1613934103783495795/B20D901200A1C102B8EB38F060E92316385C27F7/)

Body Decomposition Revisited
19 Oct 2020

Some example decomposition levels from the procedural character systems updated for the renderer, and improved morph targets. Bodies and undead look more detailed and realistic, and this is the base from which we can add more serious damage showing subdermal layers, bones and organs.

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1644336516812876871/D62EFB58A437ADD3E9ABC1000F52739A02D5D135/)

New Hair Shading
26 Oct 2020

New renderer needs new hair shading. We had to use a lot of fancy methods to get some dynamic lighting that doesn't just look wrong on hair.

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1671358804988795971/93BFE7E2387494B931FAC23CFC377C266306E72E/)

New Procedural Leather
09 Nov 2020


Still updating and improving some of our procedural materials. this is the latest leather. These materials are applied to all our items automatically, and now also used in other content development, so it pays off to do them well. As seen in the screenshot, the same material can have various levels of quality, wear and different colours. There's also dirt which is not shown here.

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1672486004809735977/A97AE52138A4B08273263887E1FE424FF345D21C/)

New Belts
09 Nov 2020


It was time to update our belts and add some new ones.

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1672486004809741218/05D7857A49EE7C8381B07BEE9180161DA6ABC2D4/)

Update news
10 Jan 2021

Randomised Theme 1

An output from the new item system with a randomised theme.

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1657855029964716313/B107F3F1E2482F7BA6F0C8B71443FB6FC62ADBFC/)



Randomised Theme 2

More examples of randomised themes.
(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1657855029964719793/0B4E51655AA55B6206C7E97E537482F5E7092AAC/)



Condition

The same randomised item in different conditions.
(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1657855029964723495/9AECDEFBBF4B0864299921DF170D8ADEE1B62036/)

Renderer Comparison 1

A screenshot comparing the old renderer to the new taken by one of our testers, Sorbo.

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1746802855092758888/A6A3FC7D20C896E8C58E477C843BE342899279D6/)



Renderer Comparison 2

A screenshot comparing the old renderer to the new taken by one of our testers, Sorbo.

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1746802855092760862/1260655A6FE83864FF41D2DF0249FE56392C3E41/)



Renderer Comparison 3

A screenshot comparing the old renderer to the new taken by one of our testers, Sorbo.

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1746802855092765402/F3B1717B9B41034901365ECBDBA2A9A13F32192F/)

More Remaster
15 Feb 2021

The first post-portal level has had all its texture and material assets completely remastered for the new renderer.

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1750181936822947427/983D4B4007C655B1054595AB881AE90588C667C0/)

New renderer outdoor lighting
19 April 2021

Finally the outdoor lighting, day/night cycle and everything is fully working with the new renderer and GI. Important stuff!

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1745684082460552378/926F47923ECD8924B5B448C09ECDAE561BC4AEEF/)

The bottling
11 Oct 2021


A liquid in glass effect that we implemented for dyes, but also alchemy and other future features. It can do translucent or opaque liquids at various levels and interacts nicely with the physics.

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1729937184837583876/8BCF2900CAEF27A8D9B5FE0DECAB96FBF5AA5AC7/?imw=5000&imh=5000&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false)

Company Emblems
13 DEC 2021

The new company creation screen for arena. A wide selection of backgrounds and designs with colouring provide a lot of choice and variation.

The emblem generation will also be used for designs on procedural shields, banners and tabards in future.

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1816637110761682370/62A73A1400D84F4EC2368C6BC8B84A55BB64F078/?imw=5000&imh=5000&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false)

Exanima 0.8.3
Sun, 19 December 2021

(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/362490/ss_a72030cc5e3d118f0026e2a7e898ba710a274386.1920x1080.jpg)

Procedural weapons, massive update to arena mode, new graphics, new user interface and much more.

The game has undergone extensive changes and received many updates on the beta branch over the past year or so, but it's finally time to bring it all into the main branch again. There's really a lot to cover here even if we just focus on the big stuff, so please bear with us.

ITEMISATION CHANGES

Exanima for all its physics and realistic approach to armour and weapons is still an RPG, itemisation is important, and loot is the carrot in a game with a lot of stick. But the usual approach of ever increasing tiers with unlikely bonuses has no place here. So what can we do to keep us interested in finding new items, to make them feel special and us invested in them?

We have been finding ways to make items as unique and mechanically interesting as possible while remaining grounded in reality. Procedural methods and detailed properties to guide them allow us to do that. This has big gameplay implications, and can also be leveraged in many ways to create a much more realistic and immersive game world.


PROCEDURAL WEAPONS

(https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/8614037/a308759df6746d99bd63bb1caf0832f7ee712213.png)

Every weapon that was previously a fixed item like "the poleaxe" is now being replaced with a "factory" that can generate a certain type of poleaxe. This is a large collection of different hafts, langets, bolts, axe heads, rear spikes, top spikes, guards and queues which can be randomly combined to make a unique poleaxe with unique qualities and features.

This alone can generate sometimes billions of combinations for a single weapon, but that's just the start, there are also variable deformations. The same haft type can vary in length and thickness, spikes can have varying lengths, curves and tapers, an axe head varies in the angle, curvature, width and length of the blade and has different hole patterns cut into it and so on and so forth.

These things give every weapon a unique shape and characteristics. These have important implications with physics, both in terms of collisions and inertia (how the mass is distributed), which is very noticeable. They all handle and behave differently.

That's not all. Each item is made and textured with unique generated materials. Different parts of the same weapon might be made from different metals, woods etc. The quality of those materials also varies, and so does the condition.


All these weapons are generated from the same one handed falchion factory:

(https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/8614037/5d5625861230dc5805ac95d081d997177b52d87a.png)

The end result is that there are practically infinite weapons, each has its own characteristics and varies in quality, condition and appearance. Part of our objective was also to make weapons more realistic, and indeed the new weapons both look and behave much better.

This already makes weapons so much more interesting, but there is a lot we can do now. We are working on giving each weapon different grips and orientations it can be used in, giving more purpose to its unique features and more meaningful variety for weapons in general. We are actually building weapons from individual components now, this is detailed information we can use to improve how they behave too.


ITEM GRADES AND QUALITY

(https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/8614037/a69ce37b717ec9c585cc93bc621a5388862bc575.png)

Much of the new procedural itemisation doesn't only concern weapons, but everything else too. Previously items could vary in colour and had a few fixed modifiers such as "rusted" or "superior". Now all items use procedural materials and factors like quality and and elegance affect the choice between different types of fabrics, leathers, buttons, coatings, paints and finishes. All materials have varying quality with visible differences.

Build and material quality are accompanied by traits, which may be material specific. These are things such as heavy, light, reinforced, hardened etc. which further modifies the item's base properties.

Finally you have a third independent factor, which is condition, adding wear and rust to items and affecting how they perform in various ways. Condition does not degrade over time, however in story there is now a way to improve the condition of items you find. This means that the many old rusted items in the game which were previously all junk, might now be diamonds in the rough, worth taking a closer look at. Items of particularly good quality and having desirable configurations or traits are something you can invest resources in.


NEW RENDERING ENGINE

You're probably wondering, but why? The game looked fine, this was a truly massive undertaking and not something we wanted to be doing at this stage in development. There were various things we had to or wanted to improve, but individually they did not justify making a totally new rendering engine. However, already deep into the work with procedural items, we started running into serious problems we had no control over, and with great reluctance we finally accepted that if we didn't do this and do it now, we'd just be wasting time and energy and the game would have an uncertain future.

We're going to explain the problems we've solved with the new renderer, as well as some important benefits that came with a fresh design and take on every part of rendering.

Compatibility and driver issues
became a serious problem, particularly as we worked on our new procedural systems. Exanima has a unique and unusual rendering engine, and the things we were trying to do just weren't being properly supported by GPUs, and we couldn't expect them to. We really tried to find workarounds, but everything failed and a drastically different approach to rendering was the only fix.

Driver CPU bottlenecks
have always been a problem, but over just two years we'd lost a huge 30% performance to driver updates as they moved away from our less trodden path. With GPUs and monitors advancing very quickly, while CPUs mostly just get more cores, this was becoming a very serious problem. With our new rendering engine we were able to literally triple framerates or even better in the more CPU bound cases.

Our material system
, while competent, was very difficult to use. Artists were faced with choices that required a physics degree and a calculator. Complex materials were also resource intensive. In practice either due to complexity or for the sake of efficiency, things rarely looked as they should. Our new material system is much more streamlined, easy to use and efficient, it removes the uncertainty and makes high quality materials simple and cheap, with lots of support from our tools.

A hard light source limit
was an issue with our old renderer, particularly with multiplayer on the horizon, where we'd have less control over how many lights would be in one place at once. The new renderer is still a forward renderer, but isn't strictly limited in how many lights it can handle.

Global illumination
(GI) or indirect lighting is a fundamental part of rendering. Without it shadows would be black voids rather than just dark. Exanima's dark environments require at least a basic version of this, but our solution wasn't great. It didn't scale well to large open spaces, didn't support much verticality; while indirect light didn't pass through walls, it ignored everything else, even doors, resulting in very flat and weird looking areas of shadow. It also performed very poorly for moving lights, once again an issue for multiplayer and a limitation in general.

This is a notoriously difficult problem to solve. Baked solutions can't deal with dynamic objects and lights and are a huge burden on content creation; ambient occlusion only darkens corners, it doesn't deal with actual light and darkness; other solutions tend to be cumbersome and slow, with extreme hardware requirements.

We were able to come up with our own GI solution which solved all our problems and drastically improved the game's visuals. Our solution is completely real-time dynamic, blindingly fast and works in any situation, whether it's a dark little room or a valley viewed from a tower with the open sky above. It captures even small details adding lots of depth and doesn't care how many objects or lights are dynamic, it just does its job.

Here's what things would look like with no GI at all:

(https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/8614037/2c71e6aec346054fc531008007b3ce213625227d.png)

Read on: https://steamcommunity.com/games/362490/announcements/detail/5612046175808103529

Weapon Component Effects
Mon 21 March 2022

New detailed weapon properties allow us to give each part of a weapon more unique functional roles, diversifying weapons and their behaviour with impacts more. We're also introducing support for some important new combat features and skills.

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1809890338543551533/A98C3E7EBF6A2CDCAB57474F64FD039BE7A5F166/?imw=5000&imh=5000&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false)

Exanima 0.8.4
Sun, 17 July 2022

(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/8614037/c0d69bdf6507bd619de93ca8d0d132903b6871a8.jpg)

Big combat changes, general improvements and some arena goodies.

Since our last update we've made some major improvements to core gameplay systems and many incremental changes and additions based on feedback and our own goals. There's also some nice late content additions for arena. Our next update is entirely story focused, so we wanted to wrap all this other stuff up and get these very important changes out now.

The highlight of this update is the most major changes to combat yet, as well as some smaller, but still very important ones. The combat is faster, more responsive, more solid and realistic, many lingering quirks have been properly addressed. These are transformative changes and we're excited for what it brings to the combat and what it allows us to do going forward as we finalise more skills, itemisation and gameplay features.

We've been through a lot of major development hurdles, making our own engine, tools and complex unique game systems, exploring with players the implications of these fundamentally different approaches and how we can make the most of them. With the game being in uncharted territory it's hard to imagine a time when it won't seem like things should or could be improved, and constant community feedback and requests ensure our to-do list is always growing. The major content goals for the game are now few however, and our road map to 1.0 includes a whole lot of gameplay and quality of life additions, many of which we've now covered here. We will continue to improve the game after full release, but it's good to check some of those boxes.


NEW COMBAT MOVEMENT SYSTEM

Movement and footwork are the foundation of the entire combat and probably the single thing we've iterated the most on. Making the movement physics driven, reactive, somewhat realistic and responsive to the player all at the same time is something we've always battled with, without a clear idea of what might ultimately be possible.

For a while now we've been trying to figure out how to fundamentally change the movement so that it's not limited to a fixed step pattern and returning to stance before moving again. If characters could move freely and without pausing the combat would be much more dynamic, faster paced and responsive. Our plan looked promising, and we decided this was too important and had to be attempted.

These things don't always work out, we've a hit a few dead ends in the past, but this was a huge success on many fronts. You can now change direction, cancel movements or continue moving without waiting for the previous movement to complete and without pausing between steps. There is also more granularity to how far you move based on inputs. In order to support this we had to also work on the dynamic footwork and animation systems, making for better balance, control and cleaner animation under all conditions. These changes combined offer a level of control we previously didn't think we could achieve.

This is a massive change for combat, with huge implications. We have also had to do significant work on the AI to adapt it to this, and tried to make it more engaging and tactical in the process. It will likely take you some time to learn how to make the most of this new movement and everything it allows. As with everything, you do need to work in harmony with the physics and body motions. We've been having a lot of fun testing and polishing these changes with the help of our Discord community, they've been met with very high praise and we're really excited to see the combat evolve in such a big way.


WEAPON AND DAMAGE MECHANICS REWORK

We recently introduced procedural weapons, but this was an important first step of a larger itemisation and weapon mechanics overhaul. In this update we've got a huge rework of how weapons work, the damage system, armour mitigation, how everything interacts with physics and more. We've added a lot of detailed data to weapons to describe their features and how each part of a weapon should behave, there's many new weapon and weapon part classes and subclasses.

This allows a much more detailed model for how weapons behave and supports many new and future features. Weapon are more diverse and balanced with specific advantages and uses, various long standing issues with the damage system were properly solved, there's support for new itemisation features and skills and generally brings important improvements to gameplay and realism.

There was a big focus on more realistic physical behaviour of weapons, but always with the goal of improving gameplay and balance, playing to the specific strengths of different weapons, breathing new life into some underperforming weapons and categories. There have also been improvements to core physics, character animation and attack mechanics to support this. Some weapons can now also be dynamically flipped to strike with the reverse side, something which will be extended to more weapons and different grips over time.

Beyond the immediate improvements, this new platform with very detailed weapon data combined with component wise procedural generation allows us to do much more still going forward. The goals is to give weapons ever more mechanical differences, techniques, motions and gameplay features that distinguish them well beyond what stats can do.


CONTROLLER AND STEAM DECK SUPPORT

Despite the lack of proper support some of you were already using controllers and it's a frequently requested feature. Steam Deck support was also requested and we worked on Proton compatibility, special UI scaling, control schemes and various input and performance optimisations with surprisingly good results.

Exanima is a game that does not naturally lend itself well to controller input, some aspects of interaction by necessity remain cursor based, but we developed dedicated control schemes for all core gameplay and user interface. The game can be played fully on controller and it's quite a fun and different experience.


Cumulative changelog for version 0.8.4:

•   Weapon mechanics and damage system rework
•   New combat movement system
•   Two new arena environments
•   Remastered courtyard arena
•   Nine new armour pieces making two full sets
•   New procedural weapon: glaive
•   Velvet procedural material added
•   Detailed physics data for different parts of weapons
•   Specific behaviour and damage from different parts of weapons
•   Many new weapon and part subcategories with different behaviour
•   Haft types with different behaviour and sounds
•   Reworked weapon damage and armour mitigation mechanics
•   Major slash rework with hewing and cutting damage
•   Some weapons can now be flipped to strike with the reverse
•   Improved thrusting mechanics
•   Improved remise behaviour
•   Core physics engine improvements
•   Animation system improvements
•   AI combat improvements with adaptive behaviours
•   Smart overhead targeting based on cursor relative to opponent
•   Dynamic swing height adjustment, preventing very low or high swings
•   Improved edge alignment control
•   Improved greatsword handling
•   Added fading feature for objects obstructing the camera
•   Improved camera obstacle avoidance behaviour
•   Improved cursor behaviour for look function
•   Smart selection for small objects and inventory icons
•   Steam Deck support, performance, UI and control optimisations
•   Proton and Linux GPU driver compatibility fixes
•   Full controller support via Steam
  o   Dedicated movement and aiming controls
  o   Feathered object and UI cursor interaction
  o   Full menu and UI navigation and interaction
  o   On screen keyboard support
•   Controls to quick cast a selected power
•   The roster can be rearranged via drag and drop
•   The roster is now colour coded
•   Shop items are neatly and persistently arranged
•   Shop items displayed from newest to oldest
•   Shop stock rotation rate increased
•   Arsenal tabs can now be scrolled
•   Arsenal correctly scales to different aspect ratios
•   Brushes can now be used from inside the arsenal
•   Added a confirmation prompt for forfeiting tournaments
•   Performance improvements

Best, Bare Mettle

Procedural Copper Alloys
06 March 2023

Different qualities and conditions of our new procedural material for copper alloys like bronze or brass, finally completing our lineup of dynamic materials. Note that we're just using this armour as a spoiler free object to show the effect, but it will be used for various new remastered items in the coming update.

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/2009206331503236613/0FC1E5BCC13B55E27E5176B00AD8830E7515C0B4/?imw=5000&imh=5000&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false)

Thaumaturgy Domain Wheel
19/06/2023

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/2017097230058666174/90D35F85CFBA94988D9874F99A625F9D474853AE/?imw=5000&imh=5000&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false)

The new UI element which allows selecting thaumaturgy domains and shows your Potential and how much is invested in each domain.

Exanima 0.9
Fri, 13 October 2023

(https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images/8614037/ec106db49b018a1e0db11636264bde27350d33c0.jpg)

Force, story content and many improvements.


EXANIMA 0.9

It's finally here, our biggest and grandest update yet. We go deeper still into the underworld on the heels of a recent disturbance to discover its source. Explore a huge new area to discover its secrets and face formidable foes therein. Unlock new powers as you traverse redesigned locations and seek out hidden places and new and updated items. New gameplay and storytelling mechanics and a slew of improvements provide the best Exanima experience yet.

(https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//8614037/a203677e7ac836be33ecba10fb3e5bcc2f3dd568.jpg)


FORCE THAUMATURGY

The Force thaumaturgy domain is here adding a variety of new powers that change how you approach the game. Force is all about physics which is Exanima's forte and we've worked hard to make this something special not just in terms of physics, but also effects, AI interactions and all those things that give Exanima that extra depth and unique gameplay.

With Force introduced there are now very meaningful build choices. Both domains are accessible, you can specialise in either one or be a hybrid, more skills are implemented and come into play both in terms of requirements and making the most of Force, with the balance of combat and mental skills also being more important than ever.

The thaumaturgy UI has been updated to support all this and other new mechanics. An important mechanic we're introducing is Potential for the scaling of powers, which while still not complete, already provides new story elements and objectives, and will support more build variety and strategic elements. There is also a new Mind power unlocked through the Revelation skill technique.

(https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//8614037/5de3a18f2a091927e77541aff6a7d67f26663530.jpg)


LOTS OF NEW CONTENT

A huge new area is included in this update, the largest one yet, packed with new and unique features and taking advantage of how our engine has evolved to support more complex environments. This is an important area in terms of lore, progressing the story and featuring some special new encounters.

The first 3 levels of the game have received a big overhaul, with lots of unique features, details and many new secrets to find. New items have been introduced as early as the first levels, and many items throughout the game have been completely overhauled and adapted to our procedural system. The procedural systems itself has also been updated and improved, important new materials have been added giving new variety to all items.

(https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//8614037/3e26eb7175b6717c42e6377aefea4c738716d96f.jpg)


NEW 3D DYNAMIC PATHFINDING

We've developed an all new pathfinding system to improve movement, AI, support more complex level design with more verticality and layers and more interactions with the environment. This new system is dynamic and 3D, based on the actual shape of objects, this means for example a table is a completely different obstacle when flipped on its side, or could even be used as ramp. You can walk on any surface and create new paths that even the AI can understand, you can walk over and under things and AI can navigate complex environments with multiple layers.

Player movement in general is also improved, it is more fluid as there are no more artificial obstacles and everything is accurate to the shape of the environment and objects. You will no longer get snagged on corners or stopped in places that you should be able to cross.


IMPROVED OBJECT INTERACTION

There have been some important additions and improvements to how you're able to interact with objects. We know this could feel fiddly and unintuitive, and we've made many improvements to solve these issues.

Objects will no longer snap back to their original position when you try to place them in an invalid position, but rather will move to the last valid position you defined. You can still cancel the movement to snap objects back to their original position by pressing the right mouse button. Placing objects over voids is also much easier, it now always works intuitively without having to target something with the cursor.

There is a new way to move objects triggered by holding Interact when picking them up. This will physically drag the object with the cursor rather than select a new target position. This is useful for making smaller adjustments to an object's position, but importantly can also be used to drag objects with you as you walk using the movement keys. Dragging of bodies and now objects has also been made much more intuitive, accepting position inputs even if they're outside of your interaction range.


ENVIRONMENT IMPACT AND FALL DAMAGE

In a game with as much physics as Exanima, and especially with the introduction of Force, it was important that general impacts could deal damage, not just ones tied to combat actions. This was something we attempted before, but had to abandon because it behaved too unpredictably. This time around we've developed a stable and detailed damage system for general collisions and various core improvements to our physics engine support it well.


NARRATOR AND SCRIPTED EVENTS

A new, but long planned, feature we call the "narrator" is an important new tool in story and gameplay. This is of course text based, it provides information, feedback and special interactions to the player. It comes with various new important scripted events and lore exposition, but we still have many more uses for it in future.


AI SYSTEM UPDATES

Exanima features a unique AI system where characters aren't scripted to do specific things but are driven organically by emotions and other mental states. They can become distracted, curious, agitated, concerned, angry, scared, surprised etc. by varying degrees and can form specific relationships with every other character they encounter. So far this has all been limited to responding to other characters, but now we have rebuilt it on a new framework that allows AI to perceive, understand and engage with anything in their environment, with lots of new tools to guide their decisions and behaviour.

This was important for intelligent interactions with things like Force powers, and we made some core improvements along the way, but it is the foundation for many new AI behaviours that also extend far beyond combat situations. This is a particularly important step for Exanima's 0.95 update, which will focus on more NPCs with more complex behaviours.

There have been various other specific improvements to AI, high level tactics and importantly the ability to use special abilities and powers, which will feature more and more in the game. In general though AI is important to us as we think it's fundamental to a compelling and immersive experience. We will always continue to improve and expand on it.


AND MANY OTHER THINGS

We've hit some major development milestones with this update and as always we've added that extra depth and attention to detail with everything, which is what makes Exanima special. Exanima is built on our own custom engine and we have done much work on physics, AI, graphics and much more to support these new features and to provide an ever improving, more immersive gameplay experience.

We have polished a great many aspects of the game and we have worked hard to build and update systems that may not always add much immediate value, but support the constant evolution of the game and the many features we still want to add. The pieces are coming together and we are focusing more and more on content and features as this platform we've built becomes solid and complete.



Note that due to the very extensive changes, current story saves will be wiped. Arena saves will be converted and should result essentially unchanged.


Changelog for version 0.9:

    Force thaumaturgy, with 11 new powers and more to come

    Huge new area to explore, new lore, encounters and items

    Big overhaul of first 3 levels

    Over 50 new and remastered procedural items

    Multiple thaumaturgy domain mechanics

    New Mind power through revelation mechanic

    New 3D pathfinding system with dynamic paths

        Allows for multiple overlapping layers of depth

        Walk on any surface without artificial obstacles

        Create dynamic paths that even AI can understand

        More fluid and accurate movement

    General impact and fall damage system

    New "Narrator" gives information, feedback and special interactions

    AI can now use powers and special abilities

    Important AI general tactics improvements

    Many AI behavioural improvements

    Improved object interaction

    New drag object interaction mode

    New procedural materials and item features

    Improved item description systems

    Item captions are now coloured to indicate quality

    You can now play dead after recovering from unconsciousness

    Big performance improvements

    Core graphics engine and material improvements

    New "ultra" shading setting with specular GI

    Improved dynamic "death animations"

    Various improvements to footwork and character motion

    Important fundamental physics engine improvements

    Greatly improved loading times

    Greatly improved latency with vsync enabled

    Improved selection and interaction with small objects

    Brushes can now also clean weapons

    Core physics engine improvements

    Huge number of fixes




Best,

Bare Mettle

Coffee Diary - November 2023
Mon, 6 November 2023

(https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/362490/ss_a72030cc5e3d118f0026e2a7e898ba710a274386.jpg)


Hey Exanimates,

Welcome to our first monthly coffee diary. Until now we posted a weekly dev diary on the forums, talking about what we're working on and how development is progressing. We're switching to this monthly format now, and going forward we should be able to make these more interesting and maybe include media when appropriate. Keep in mind that we are always careful with spoilers and we prefer it if you experience things in game, so we can be a little secretive.


We have just released a huge update, so we've been pretty busy just getting feedback, making improvements and fixes. We're still tracking a couple of issues, but the game now seems to be in the best shape it has ever been. This is the time in the cycle when we properly assess our next major development goals and work on things like systems and tools to support our workflow. At this point though our roadmap is mostly things on a small or medium scale, mainly gameplay features and content rather than major engine or tool development.

Our one bigger goal and focus for the next major update is the "role system". We'll likely talk about this more in future diaries, but for now we'll give you a basic introduction. The role system is very broadly what gives characters identities, behaviours, relationships, memories and interactions. Characters might have hundreds or even thousands of active roles, acquiring new ones all the time as they experience things, meet other characters and engage in activities. Roles are often situational, such as "person in shop", through which relational roles like "customer - shopkeep" can be acquired. Any NPC can acquire these roles, they will remember the experience, be able to relate information about it and so on. There's quite a lot more to it, but we won't get into all the details.

It's a powerful system that is mechanically quite simple, but requires us to gradually add more and more roles to make the AI smarter and understand more things. We already have a version of this in the game, but with only a few placeholder roles that rigidly script behaviour, not at all how this is supposed to work. Exanima's AI is so far almost purely driven by emotional states and personality traits. This alone is almost enough to model a wide range of behaviours, but the roles are another layer providing much needed context. Essentially the intelligence to guide the emotions. Roles should not override core emotional responses, but rather just nudge them in the right direction and ultimately be driven by them.

This sort of thing is our true passion, we want to create a believable world, and to us that's all about how it behaves. We originally didn't make our game physics based because we wanted awesome combat, that was really a gigantic detour from our true goal, driven by feedback. The physics is there because we want things to be truly interactive and less artificial, everything should behave in an organic way rather than according to a simple set of rules and predefined actions.


The next big update will include progress on this role system and include new intelligent NPCs and more dialogue, and also a new area to explore, which is very terrain heavy. For some time now we've been wanting to spruce up the visuals of our terrain, and we've already begun work on improving our tools for designing terrain and its surfaces. The ground is visually dominant in Exanima, so this is important. The updated terrain will feature better materials and many remastered assets, but it also solves many difficult problems that our level designers currently have to deal with. You will likely see incremental upgrades to the terrain before the major update, such as improved 3D grass which has been patched in already.

While we're hesitant to promise anything too specific, we are considering one or two smaller updates before the big one. One topic would be fully implementing Potential and other thaumaturgy mechanics, adding some new powers, improving existing ones and also the controls. Another thing that is high on our priority list is mechanics for saving progress in the late game. This will not be simple checkpoints as the game is no longer linear, but rather an optional system you will have to discover and engage with. We have been laying down the pieces for this for a long time, and with its introduction they will finally have a purpose and provide new objectives and interactions within the game.


We hope you found some of this interesting, and please let us know if you like this format (yes we will try to include some images in future). We'll see you here again on the first Monday of the next month.


Thanks!

-The Bare Mettle Team

Coffee Diary - January 2024
Mon, 1 January 2024

(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/362490/ss_d9641461c6d0d3a37da02f0d7ae5911f1eed99d7.jpg)

Last month we mentioned we were migrating our entire engine, game and tools to 64 bit, as we really don't need to support 32 bit anymore and this gives access to practically unlimited ram and many big optimisation opportunities. This was a massive undertaking as our engine uses a lot of very low level (close to the hardware) code and we also took this opportunity to improve and optimise many core systems as we reviewed so much of it.

You may be wondering, the game already runs great, why optimise it further? First off, these are not rendering optimisations, as that's GPU territory, but in terms of everything else, and especially physics, these optimisations are extremely important. Unlike graphics which just runs at different framerates and different settings, physics always works in the same way, and for this to work and be any good in the first place, it must always do exactly the same thing at exactly the same rate. This means better performance isn't a matter of higher framerates and better settings, it's simply a hard limit on what we can do with the game.

Physics in Exanima isn't just for show, every element of gameplay, every interaction, every motion and outcome is a direct result of physics, no exceptions. Character motions are driven by virtual muscles and are made dynamically, even the slightest collision can completely change outcomes, everything has physics, everything is fully persistent. We never use simple shapes like boxes or cylinders for collisions, but always accurate representations, even when objects have complex shapes that are notoriously difficult to simulate.

All of this detailed simulation is expensive, which puts limits on things like how many characters we can have, how many objects, and just generally how detailed and accurate the simulation can be. Greater character density is an important requirement for what we have planned for the game's conclusion, but we also want more physics interactions to add gameplay elements and improve immersion which was the main goal of our fully physics driven approach. This includes things like cloth physics, plant physics, soft bodies, animated tentacles and water to name just a few.

This huge migration is now complete and we've also done lots of low level optimisation and a slew of improvements, especially to our tools. We've been using and testing things for a while now and it's all very solid and very fast. The results have exceeded our expectations, with physics performance being doubled, and collision performance specifically almost tripled with room for further improvement. Collisions are particularly important, because while things like character and other motions are expensive, they have a fixed cost, but collisions keep scaling as more objects are involved and the game doesn't place any restrictions on what you can do.

Most recently we've been working on cloth physics, which is really the technology which drives cloth, hair, vegetation and soft bodies, so this is a big important thing and it accounts for a very big chunk of our performance budget. We also use cloth physics to help generate models for clothing in our tools. We came up with a new method that produces much better results and is much less restrictive in terms of modelling. After some thorough optimisation, it's also up to 10 times faster than what we had before. This is a really impressive result which is great for all the things we plan to do with these features.

These kind of major engine and tool revisions are par for the course after a major update, and often involve many months of work. With this and our terrain system overhaul we're done and already back to focusing on content and gameplay features. The team is busy with major content additions for the next update as well as some nice improvements, as some existing content is gaining new importance with the introduction of new features. We plan to start insider testing of the updated engine and terrain (which affects all content) soon, and we should be following this up with a public update that includes some new features and content updates.

Have a great year!

Bare Mettle

Coffee Diary - February 2024
Wed, 7 February 2024

(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/362490/ss_d9641461c6d0d3a37da02f0d7ae5911f1eed99d7.jpg)

For this month's diary Madoc made a video again.

We mentioned previously how we hoped to use more performance for more and better physics, and this is the result of those efforts. This gets a bit technical, but we think real time physics isn't a very widely understood topic that needs a little explaining.

These are some very significant improvements and additions to the game's physics that support a lot of things in terms of gameplay, world building and our development process. They make the very foundations that drive everything in the game better.

https://youtu.be/R9-ihvHJdJE


Best,

Bare Mettle

Coffee Diary - March 2024
Mon, 4 March 2024

(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/362490/ss_a72030cc5e3d118f0026e2a7e898ba710a274386.jpg)


This has been a month of mostly wrapping things up and getting them ready for a release. There have been a lot of important core improvements that affect the entire game and content, so we want to get the game in testing and updated before moving on to other things. This includes the switch to 64 bit and optimisations to many parts of the engine, the overhauled terrain system and all related assets, improvements our physics engine and important new features, a complete graphical overhaul of the golem area, a huge rework and expansion of the Catacombs map and a few other smaller, but still important improvements. It's a lot.

Most recently we've been working on improvements and additions to our physics engine. These are things we've been wanting to do for some time and are extremely important for the future of the game. The core physics improvements are immediately obvious in gameplay, they make weapon interactions feel and function better in combat, they solve many problems and we're already noticing how they allow us to do more with level design and interaction. Last month we released a video where we showed what was basically a prototype version of new cloth and soft body features. This is something we hope to use extensively for things like clothing, plants, those creepy fleshy growths, sheets of paper and generally the many things that should be soft, flexible, floppy and squishy. This would allow a new level of immersion and interactivity. Dynamic physical interactions are at the core of Exanima's gameplay and immersive world, and this is something we want to extend to every part of it.

The key breakthrough we demonstrated in our video was a performant way to do polygonal collision on deformable bodies. While it's great that we're able to do realistic interactions between cloth and things like weapons, this provides a versatile solution for all sorts of soft bodies beyond cloth, where simpler methods could be considered sufficient. Since the video we've further improved our model, stress testing it and making it very functional and stable under many conditions and applications. We can drape cloth over objects, hold objects in nets and sacks and do all sort of tricky things that require a very stable and accurate model.

Performance is of course a major concern, we identified good, fast methods, but we still had to optimise what we showed then. We knew our prototype implementation could be made roughly 10 times faster, and we joked about making it 20 times faster, but that's what we did. Then we optimised it even more, and made it 40 times faster. This being physics, This being physics, it means a bigger performance budget for more cool things. Another important optimisation was making deformable bodies that aren't currently doing much and actively interacting with anything, or visible, or casting a visible shadow etc., go into an idle state where they cost virtually nothing. This is ultimately what allows us to have a huge number of these complex objects in an environment.

In keeping with Exanima's full interactivity, we also added the ability to move and drag cloth around with the cursor. Besides that consistent immersive feel, this has a number of gameplay implications that we're eager to explore. Another of Exanima's more unique features is perfect persistence of everything, this means that if you leave a piece of cloth draped over something in a particular way and exited your game, it has to be in the same exact position when you return to it.

We've also extended our development tools to support these new features and generally improve our workflow for all physics. We've been constantly making improvements to our tools and also making them more intuitive and user friendly, for eventual modding use and also if and when we expand our team.

There is so much we can do with these new features and we're very excited by the possibilities, but as usual much will be revealed when we add new content and gameplay where you can experience it fully first hand. Everything we listed up top and these core improvements are in the polishing stage now and we hope to begin testing in the next few days and get it all released for everyone soon after.

Best,
Bare Mettle

Coffee Diary - April 2024
Mon, 1 April 2024

(https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/362490/ss_a72030cc5e3d118f0026e2a7e898ba710a274386.jpg)

We've been testing the many changes to the game and our engine with insiders this past month, which especially considering the extent of the changes to engine code, has gone very smoothly. It all seems very stable and we didn't really run into serious issues, though some proved tricky to fix. Insiders are always very thorough and meticulous, uncovering minute flaws and obscure little problems. We've done a few patches already, with many fixes and improvements to things both new and old.

We do still want to try to make a couple of improvements and additions for the full update, but things are in a pretty good place already so we're thinking to update the public test branch within the next few days to get things tested by more players and on more hardware. This basically includes physics engine improvements, some cloth physics, 64 bit, updated terrain system and assets, golems area graphical overhaul, a big expansion of the catacombs and a few other bits and bobs.

The physics are working better than ever, with more improvements we made during testing, and the performance increase is big, giving us a lot of headroom for more upgrades, new features and richer content. We are currently looking into some very interesting further core improvements we might be able to make, but it's a bit uncertain still and we are trying to move on to other things. There have also been general performance improvements, and better loading times too.

One of the features we're actively working on is the late game "save system", which is something that ties into the content and the player needs to discover and interact with, and comes with a few other additions. To support this we need new interaction mechanics, which we're implementing through a "placement zone system" which will support many things, like socketing items into elements of the environment, snapping objects into logical positions (e.g. torch in a holder, bar across a door) and just triggering all sorts of events when a particular thing or type of thing enters or is placed in a specific location. This opens up a bunch of new gameplay elements and interactivity. The concept is fairly simple, but the physics and persistence of the game do introduce a few complications, and we're going for a very versatile system, with core features that can be useful for other things too.

We did the thing again, where we invested in big core technologies and features for the future of the game, but we're wrapping this up now and moving on to gameplay systems and content additions. A lot of what we did here will be invaluable for some future content, and we like to tackle the most difficult problems first. The role system will be our next major focus, but we have a long list of features and additions to suit everyone's taste.

Best,

Bare Mettle

Coffee Diary - May 2024
Mon, 6 May 2024

(https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/362490/ss_d9641461c6d0d3a37da02f0d7ae5911f1eed99d7.jpg)

PHYSICS 2.0

We recently re-wrote a lot of our physics engine and optimised it for 64 bit, in the process we also made big improvements to collisions and some complex interactions. This has been in testing for a while now, and of course everything physics came under a lot of careful scrutiny, every little flaw exposed. Originally we designed our physics engine to tackle specific difficult problems, and we accepted that this came with some limitations and compromises. We should know by now that just won't do.

The level of physics simulation in our characters and combat isn't easy to do, we've improved it a lot over time, but of course it can always be better. We also have a dedicated portion of our playerbase that engages in "grappling", using weapons and shields to trip and throw opponents, pushing the limits of what the simulation can handle.

The collision improvements are big and definitely help, but there's a lot more to it. A quite evident flaw is things separating from each other. This is most obvious when a weapon separates from hands during difficult collisions because it's got nowhere to go. With collisions becoming more solid, this problem became more obvious, and when a weapon is used as a lever to throw an opponent, but it separates from the hands, then the opponent can slip between the weapon and the hands, or the weapon between the opponent's joints and body parts.

Another difficult problem is static friction. This is basically the increased friction between surfaces that are not moving relative to each other, and prevents any movement at all. In many situations correctly eliminating all movement and slow drift or jitter is very difficult and leads to all sort of problems. We had already improved friction, but while this addressed some important cases, others were still not very good, and objects slowly drifting when active remained a problem.

A related issue, but also a separate problem, is vertical stacking. Creating something like a pile of books or plates is a good example of this, which wasn't really possible and particularly erratic when disparate masses are involved.

(https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//8614037/4bc55b47a9d27b11546834560bc1ebeaa6793357.png)

This being a real time sim, we could improve all these issues with just increasing the simulation rate, but it would be very expensive and only an incremental improvement. With the recent upgrades and optimisations, we felt we had the foundations here to make some dramatic changes to how our physics engine works, to address all these issues and generally take our physics to another level. We considered these things already long ago, but it seemed too difficult and expensive, especially with our character physics, and we couldn't see how to do it without losing our engine's "special sauce". With these new foundations and uncompromising attitude we made a new effort and had a breakthrough.

This is a fundamental transformative change to our physics engine. We dramatically improved on all our problem areas. Collisions are even better still, the separating parts problem basically eliminated, friction and stacking vastly improved. We basically went from our physics engine being quite good at specific things to being much better at those and good at everything else too.

Great! But we weren't done yet. With everything being more "solid", the next link in the chain took all the stress and suffered. A character's joints and muscles, when placed under extreme stress, could overextend and dislocate. This was an existing problem, but exacerbated and highlighted by these changes. We also have a problem with weapons being light and nimble in the hands, but artificially heavier in the world, to make impacts feel stronger. This disparity in masses obviously causes some problems, and exerts even more stress on the joints.

To deal with this problem we made new tools that allow us to interactively modify and test joint and muscle configurations on characters. With these tools we were quickly able to improve muscle structure and overcome these issues too, while making characters feel much stronger and more controlled.

All these changes have dramatically improved the feel of combat, it feels tighter, more precise, more real. All hits and exchanges are extremely solid, footwork is more quick and precise and it can all take some serious abuse and still function correctly. It's not just combat that's improved, all physics interactions are much more robust and realistic, making the whole experience better, allowing us to do more with environment design and generally making our lives easier as developers.

We have made a few specific changes on the back of this, mainly to combat mechanics, and we also improved things like object interaction. We're still tweaking things, with so many core changes there need to be some adjustments, but we've set a great baseline already and this is a process that continues as we observe things and receive feedback. This better physics foundation is obviously huge in importance and scope for this game, and supports key mechanical improvements and future additions to combat, and everything else.

SOME GRAPHICS AND CONTENT STUFF TOO

As much as we've done on physics, we have been working on a few other things besides. We've been making more updates to the game's content and we've been improving and adding graphics features to support new content. We've made some general improvements to lighting and post-processing, which particularly benefit outdoor environments, but also make everything a bit brighter and clearer without compromising the mood and darkness.

There's been a bit more in the works here in terms of graphical features and content to support the next major area to be added, which is a bit different from what you've seen so far, but we're not quite ready to show those things just yet.

LIVE ON TEST BRANCH (SAVE WARNING)

This and everything we've discussed in recent diaries is live on the test branch and has already received a few hotfixes. We're still tuning things and ironing out a couple of kinks, but overall things are stable and in good shape and feedback so far has been very positive. You can find changelogs, more information and a place to give feedback on our discord: https://discord.com/invite/Z5aV2bF

Be warned that existing story saves will not work correctly due to the extensive changes to terrain and level assets. Once the update goes live on the main branch, there will be a full save wipe, so any progress you make in the story now will be reset. To access the test branch you need the password: BMXATestB915

Best,

Bare Mettle

Coffee Diary - June 2024
Mon, June 3, 2024

(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/362490/ss_ea82743d746449e6ad3bc34aa0546310acd39727.jpg)

Hey Exanimates,

Since updating the test branch we've been doing a lot of tuning and adjusting things, the extensive changes to the core physics affected a great many things, and while absolutely a huge fundamental improvement, a lot needed to be updated to take advantage of this, or even function properly. We also ran a few experiments, iterating over some core combat and character physics and getting feedback from the community. A lot more has changed for the better thanks to this and core combat is in a really good place, with very positive feedback from players.

This means we needed to do yet more changes and adjustments. Muscle structure and other changes have made characters effectively much stronger and more rigid, less prone to limbs failing, able to apply more leverage and better supporting emergent gameplay, like grappling. The somewhat "floppy" feeling they could have is gone. These changes however really affected all our existing combat motions, and while we did make some adjustments right away, over the last couple of weeks we've been properly updating and redesigning most of the attack motions. We found we now have more control and are able to make the motions more complex, but it also takes a bit more work now to make them look fluid and transition smoothly. There's a lot of these motions, and dynamic components to them, but we're' finally done and we think they look and feel noticeably better. We'll be updating with these very soon.

Footwork is also in a great place right now. However, we do think that where uneven ground, obstacles and vertical movement in general is involved there is still room for improvement. Navigating environments can also feel a bit clunky, and all this seems like something that needs to be addressed to make the gameplay flow and feel better in general. We've been investigating this and we think we have a clear plan to address it, however it will take quite a development effort and for the time being we feel there are other priorities. It is on the horizon.

All in all this has been a huge transformative upgrade to the combat and the physics in general. We'll always be polishing and ironing out the kinks, and there's still some notable combat features to add, but we'll be building on top of a much more solid base.

We've got a bunch of other fixes and tweaks ready to go now and the test branch update is in a good place. We also got controllers working again and Steam Deck too, however there are still issues with the current version of SteamOS and if you want to play this on the Steam Deck you need to be on SteamOS beta preview until they go live with it on the stable branch.

With this chapter closed, it's time to move to other topics. You may have noticed a pattern recently of us working on things for natural environments. We overhauled our terrain system, we dramatically improved our rocks, improved 3D grass, lighting, we extended our generative tools with features for more organic assets and various things besides. This will all be critical when we move on to overworld content, but the reason we're doing it now is because the next area that will be added is The Gardens, and as the name suggests it will feature lots of nature. One difficult problem remains, which is vegetation. Recently we've been working on adding high quality trees and plants to our repertoire, and also on realistic, but performance efficient foliage rendering, which includes some additions to our global illumination and translucency effects.

It took a lot of tinkering to get things looking and working the way we wanted, and we've still got a bunch of assets to get through, but we're off to a very good start. The following screenshots are not from the new gardens area, but they make for a good showcase of the new assets and features.

(https://clan.akamai.steamstatic.com/images//8614037/1f675cbf4f4d66f53cb840414a1da730a8426612.jpg)

(https://clan.akamai.steamstatic.com/images//8614037/96be24f4048bcf91675c68d80557c472145e34f6.jpg)

(https://clan.akamai.steamstatic.com/images//8614037/7eebea3188775dbe33bf1599e61172443d13c670.jpg)


Best,
Bare Mettle

Coffee Diary - July 2024
Mon, 1 July 2024

(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/362490/ss_d9641461c6d0d3a37da02f0d7ae5911f1eed99d7.jpg)

Hey Exanimates,

The last round of changes we discussed in the last coffee diary went live on the test branch shortly after. The new weapon motions and other adjustments were very well received, and we will of course continue to tweak things based on feedback. The new arena with new vegetation features was also included and seems to be working and performing well for everyone. Before we move things to the main branch and do a save wipe we are making some content changes that are required to support upcoming features, so that we won't need to save wipe again when they are introduced.

This major overhaul of our engine, physics and many big core features is finally complete. Some of this such as terrain, vegetation and cloth was in our original immediate plans, but realistically most of it wasn't. These are all hugely important changes though, planned or not, and now that they're done we're finally turning our attention back to the role system.

We briefly introduced the role system topic a few coffee diaries ago, but basically the role system is what drives all "high level" NPC behaviour. We already have a very good and functional system in place for modelling behaviour based on emotions and basic relationships, but with just these things, AI basically behaves like animals. We do already have a version of the role system in place, which is used in a very basic way to give characters dialogue and some basic understanding of others, but as it is this is very static with few placeholder roles, and does almost the opposite of what the role system was designed to do.

What we call a "role" system is very broad in scope. Roles provide different behaviours, decision making that exerts control over raw emotions, they model relationships, carry memories of past events and interactions and generally context for AI to understand and interface with things. They can be very broad like "human", very specific like "Derrin the farmhand" with personal details, or just fleeting contextual things like "pulling lever at friend's request". Relational roles identify others based on experiences with them, context or assumptions, and carry histories between individuals. A character can have many roles active at the same time, and remember them even when they are no longer active.

It's hard to talk about without being vague, but the takeaway is that roles can do a lot of things. It all depends on what roles we design, as part of general AI behaviour, specific events, player interaction and all sorts. Most roles can be circumstantially adopted by any character, and as we expand our library of roles all NPCs will gain more behaviours and awareness. Building this library of roles is one of the key challenges, but it's something we can do incrementally once we've defined a good foundation.

In the past month we've made some important strides in defining what our key role types are, how they interact with each other and the mechanics to support more functional and dynamic roles, control emotions and more. We figured out a lot of important stuff, and are already moving into implementation and optimisation details as far as the most important mechanics go. As we get into a lot of the more practical roles, we do also need to pair them with new AI actions or events that drive behaviour, but we do have a good foundation here for how this works. It's a matter of adding to the range of things that AI can do and understand. Beyond that, the role system itself can be considered complete and becomes mainly content driven. That means we can continue to add new roles and nuanced behaviour without changing how things work.

Our first intermediate goal is a smarter and more aware Derrin. We will use him to aggressively test new role system feature and interactions. The somewhat lofty goal would be to make him feel like a real human companion that is more independent, reacts to things and makes decisions on his own. His relationship with the player should be more nuanced and dynamic, with more things affecting it, but also a better understanding of context and when cooperation is useful even if he doesn't really like it. Basically, we want him to feel smart and alive, not an NPC following scripted behaviours and commands without question. That and emergent outcomes is the purpose of the role system.

The next major update will also feature new NPCs, able to have complex interactions not just with the player, but also with other NPCs. The roles for the most part, as stated previously, are not static things designed to fit one character, but things that can be attached to any character, if circumstances are right. All NPCs have a broad range of behaviours and relationships, and events are mutable and can carry things in new directions.

It's a lot, and we've seen that people tend to either consider too abstract and are somewhat indifferent, or let their imagination run and get very hyped. Whatever your expectations might be, and what we actually accomplish, it will absolutely make for a more immersive and dynamic experience with many new interactions and outcomes. That is the kind of game we're making, and the role system in our eyes is perhaps the most important part of it.

Best,

Bare Mettle

Coffee Diary - August 2024
Mon, 5 August 2024

(https://shared.akamai.steamstatic.com//store_item_assets/steam/apps/362490/ss_d9641461c6d0d3a37da02f0d7ae5911f1eed99d7.jpg)

Hey Exanimates,

Last month we went into some detail about the role system and what our main objectives for it are at this time. While there have been many big improvements and additions, the role system is the key feature of the next update and what supports the story going forward.

Having figured out many of the core role mechanics, we've been now focusing more on low level behaviour stuff, which while perhaps not as impressive in scope, is what you'll notice most during gameplay. This is basically where roles are used to control actions and activities or react to common events, rather than modelling relationships and long term goals.

This includes a lot of mechanics for NPCs to become aware of nearby events and things in the environment, as well as interact with them. NPCs should comment on things that are happening dynamically, notice objects and other things around them and use them. One important practical part of this is finding equipment, being able to determine whether it's useful to them or a party member and call it out or just use it. There's quite a lot of nuance to something like this, as we don't want NPCs to just be instantly aware of everything, objects that are hidden or just hard to spot should be more difficult for them to notice. We also don't want them to be constantly calling out every minor upgrade or greedily taking all the best items for themselves.

In terms of combat there's also going to be a fair bit of role involvement. We want NPCs to engage in different behaviours based on what's happening and also accept commands or requests. This could include helping allies in danger, perhaps gaining courage and rallying for someone they care about, requesting help and things like just commenting on notable combat events. In general we're also trying to make roles an important part of engagement, to build on the more animalistic emotion driven and sometimes selfish behaviour of current NPCs.

These aren't the only things we're working towards, we have quite a few advanced behaviours planned, but this is what we're focusing on right now and the requirements are shared. To support a lot of new behaviours and dynamic roles we're putting a lot of new AI functionality to engage in different actions and properly prioritise them, many mechanics for understanding circumstance, events and objects, put them in context and describe them in dialogue.

Roles aside, we've also been working on the late game "save system", or rather some ways to prevent losing all progress. This is however just one optional aspect of a quite large set of features involving various new mechanics. Supporting these properly and in a way that is future compatible has requirements that mean changing how some things work in a fundamental way.

Our design is such that any seemingly insignificant object or thing can potentially carry a lot of information, is fully persistent and can be understood and remembered by NPCs. Dynamic events and behaviours require and create a lot of dependencies with a scope that's not always predictable. This introduces a lot of difficulties with authoring and maintaining content, particularly in supporting a distributed workflow, or mods and player made content. All these interactions need to work both within that body of content and the game world they belong to.

We have a partial solution to this already, but there's still some very difficult problems that are becoming more relevant as we look into new features and expanding beyond Exanima's current scope. We've known we'd have to tackle these problems for a long time, and it didn't look easy, but now we've finally designed a solution. This will allow us and others to create large chunks of content in a completely independent way while supporting all these features. This content can then be seamlessly introduced into the game without requiring changes to shared resources or even existing saved games. It's a bit difficult to explain exactly how important this is, but it certainly is.

Best,

Bare Mettle

Coffee Diary - September 2024
Mon, 2 September 2024

(https://shared.akamai.steamstatic.com//store_item_assets/steam/apps/362490/ss_ea82743d746449e6ad3bc34aa0546310acd39727.jpg)


Hey Exanimates,

In our last diary we talked about some of our immediate goals for AI and the role system, this is a series of things that provide NPCs with better awareness, more behaviours and interactions. Since then we've been gradually implementing and testing these features, and as we did this we ran into some complex dialogue issues. Right now we're mostly focusing on improving the dialogue system to handle these more complex and frequent interactions.

The dialogue system is designed to be very dynamic. Rather than well known scripted events and dedicated dialogue modes and moments, communication is something that can happen naturally at any time and during any other activity. There's a lot of factors contributing to when and if certain dialogue is used, not just simple triggers. You can even talk during combat or anything else, and so might NPCs, but only if it's appropriate, with context, urgency, relations and emotional states and all sorts affecting these things. There can even be multiple dialogues running at once between different people, and people can join and leave or interject into conversations. On top of all this, all role interactions are remembered by characters, the status and details of their relationship are being constantly updated by multiple things at once and stored permanently.

All this is to make characters feel alive and intelligent with lots of potential for cool emergent behaviour. That last part is particularly important to us, it shouldn't feel like scripted moments, but things that actually happen organically.

One of the first problems we had to tackle is NPCs dealing with multiple dialogues at once, knowing what to prioritise, when to wait before saying something else and so on. Synchronising the various relation updates from multiple dialogues, activities and events was also a back end issue we had to solve and optimise. Because the system is so open and broad in scope, we need to try to account for every hypothetical scenario, even if rare. We're working on other features too, like NPCs repeating urgent requests and becoming annoyed or concerned if they don't receive a reply, with a reaction that is appropriate to the specific context. In general we've made a bit of a shift in functionality, with less focus on raw scripting of roles and dialogue and more on AI handling common behaviours so that we can support a better emergent style while also removing some of the burden of scripting complex role interactions.

As we tackle and explore these things and develop features we see the potential for many more applications. They are sometimes quite niche, and currently we don't often have the right content to feature a lot of them, but it opens many doors for content to come, giving us more tools to create interesting gameplay elements and situations.


Beyond progress on roles and dialogue, we're working on new content, and a few other things besides. The new area is a pretty big departure from previous content and we've been making many changes and additions to support it. Right now we're also focusing on our vegetation art pipeline to produce many high quality and efficient assets. We're also continuing to improve many assets throughout the game, and we're completely overhauling many older overworld / arena items, improving them dramatically.

Best,

Bare Mettle

Coffee Diary - October 2024
Mon, October 7, 2024

(https://shared.akamai.steamstatic.com//store_item_assets/steam/apps/362490/ss_a72030cc5e3d118f0026e2a7e898ba710a274386.jpg)

Hey Exanimates,

While we're making good progress with new content and a few other things besides, development is still very much focused on AI and the role system. We've been particularly focused on searching and looting behaviour, as it uses many different things that have other applications, the building blocks for being aware of and interacting with the world, and it's a really good case for highly complex role interactions. Importantly, looting is also a really big part of the core gameplay loop, which gives NPCs plenty to do outside of combat and makes them more active participants. We also recognise that searching every container and inspecting every item really becomes one of the more tedious aspects of the game long term.

Companions that can be genuinely useful in searching and looting alleviates a lot of the work from the player and adds a lot of value. If NPCs are also able to equip themselves they become much more self-sufficient and capable, for companions it means it saves the player a lot of micromanaging their equipment and inventories, particularly in the early game where upgrades are frequent and temporary. Another benefit is that companions can help players navigate and learn the complex equipment system, by pointing out useful items and upgrades that the player may have missed or not recognised. There's lots of good practical reasons to flesh out these behaviours, but we think it's also one of the most important steps to making the NPCs feel alive and intelligent, not just as companions, but in general.

Probably reading that you've raised your eyebrows a few times and wondered how it could work and what sort of problems it might cause. Indeed we've been navigating the many difficulties and complexities of all this and there's a lot, more than those that immediately stand out. We've been adding many features and improving a lot of core AI behaviour and interaction to support this and make it feel right.

Companions need to be able to move around somewhat independently now, and promptly understand when it's time to leave to not get separated. They need to see and recognise objects around them, understand what items might be useful, or interesting to the player, even what combinations of items might be useful if worn together, or make matching outfits. NPCs should not easily spot hidden or hard to see objects, remember what they already searched, know when something was discarded, be able to discard items that are no longer useful, not spam the player with insignificant finds and so on. They must also be able to name or describe any object in dialogue, with correct grammar and ideally varied and contextually appropriate dialogue. There's lots of details to consider to make this behaviour seem believable and natural.

We want NPCs to behave much like a human player, show awareness and interact with the world at a very high level. A lot of this comes from dynamic and narrative roles that can be played by anyone, and a lot comes from complex natural behaviour like this. With more AI and role features in place we can keep expanding the AI's capabilities. Our goal is to make them lifelike and create an emergent narrative that feels like it's actually happening, not predefined or scripted. This is often in direct conflict with conventional player-centric design, and we do need to find a delicate balance and make some concessions. It's a difficult and now familiar line we tread, but it's something we really miss in games and we want it.

To completely change the topic, we've also finished our new round of overworld and arena items. We've added new items and plan to better distribute some things across ranks, and we've completely overhauled some older items that weren't up to our current standards, which has been a point of feedback from the community. We've also made some notable improvements to the most prominent procedural materials like metal, leather and cloth. For the time being we are still limiting how many brand new items we add, as we are slowly working towards an overhaul of our characters that will improve the fidelity of all character assets and greatly improve our workflow for them, as well as introduce new features like dynamic cloth to them. When that happens we will add a large number of new clothing items in particular, but that's still some way off.

(https://clan.akamai.steamstatic.com/images//8614037/7d200f3ac80548c26a54cd3034efd6c1e410b899.jpg)

That's all for now. We are always working on a few other things and longer term goals, but we can't cover everything we're doing in our dev diaries. AI and roles are the current focus and a great big complex thing with many facets, we've been laying a lot of foundations which is always a process riddled with difficult problems decisions, but now we're seeing the results and soon we should be able to start testing and polishing the main features.

Best,

Bare Mettle

Coffee Diary - November 2024
Mon, 4 November 2024

(https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com//store_item_assets/steam/apps/362490/ss_d9641461c6d0d3a37da02f0d7ae5911f1eed99d7.jpg)

Hey Exanimates,

Previously we mentioned how we'd been reworking many items, and how in future we want to add many new ones, particularly clothing, and make various improvements along the way. Adding more clothing as we expand on our world and content is important, quality improvements are also nice, but really more of a by-product of other things. The main motivation for "an overhaul of our characters" is that we desperately need to massively streamline and improve our workflow. We already made some important advancements here with our tools, but clothing is especially problematic because there's a huge number of different items of varying shapes that can be worn in any combination. Every combination needs to change the shape of clothing, and so something like a shirt needs to come in thousands of shapes. These are dynamically assembled, but even so we need as many as 500 3D models in very specific configurations. For one shirt. This part is all done by hand, and it can take weeks of confusing and tedious work, testing and adjusting. There are many things that can go wrong and they are slow and difficult to fix. Despite our efforts, we still have various issues like clipping and holes and sometimes have to give armours unflattering shapes in order to make them fit.

This proposed overhaul is something we've been talking about internally for a long time as "human 2.0". It's been kind of a distant dream, something we don't dare tackle until after a 1.0 release. We couldn't even consider such an overhaul unless we could solve the fundamental problem of how much work it takes to make just one item. Meanwhile, this is costing our artists lots of time that should be better spent elsewhere, for results that are still inadequate. Just recently, while trying to figure out how to make some items work, Madoc decided he'd had enough and put the role system temporarily aside to figure out what could be done. Even if we're not doing some big overhaul yet, solving some fundamental issues and streamlining the workflow was just too important.

Many curses and a few keyboards later, we have a new system and tools with lots of automation and a simplified workflow that turn weeks of work for one item into just a few hours. Quality character assets still take time of course, but the tedious, confusing and problem ridden part of it is basically gone. It solves a lot of problems, it's a huge relief to us and brings many benefits already. The way bodies and clothes deform for animation is better, things are far less prone to errors and issues like clipping, artists can focus on the real work, it's intuitive, it can be iterated on quickly, there's a lot of implicit future compatibility in assets and even loading times are improved. To really reap all the benefits we will eventually need to do our big "human 2.0" rework of many assets, but now we've already solved the biggest and most critical problems to support it.

This was a temporary shift in priorities, but a very important step that was well worth the time investment. We won't be adding lots of brand new clothes or generally upgrading characters just yet, but we're ready for it now. In the meantime you can expect some very nice visual upgrades to some of the most commonly seen items in the game. Updating these foundational items is how we solve our armour etc. fitting problems. We've also made more nice improvements to materials and randomisation. Here's some examples of some clothing type items that we're already reworked using the new system:

(https://clan.fastly.steamstatic.com/images//8614037/ae1e910d55abb0cfcd0ff86ee17aee156f965667.jpg)

Despite this detour, we have made progress on AI and role features. Our approach continues to be to focus on the most difficult problems first and solve them well before we do many things with what we have. This will be the focus of initial testing, to properly identify what players notice most and any issues, so we can finalise the systems that will support more roles and interactions. There's practical elements here, and of course expanding AI capabilities has many gameplay implications, but we're mainly focused on immersion and lifelike NPCs. We really don't want any of this to feel like gamey features.

This means we're quite detail orientated, the little things such as how characters move and look around and how they describe what they found, that don't fundamentally change the functionality, but makes all the difference in our eyes. Dialogue in particular, with common and repetitive speech, has been quite difficult. We want to make it varied, flow from previous remarks and responses, while accommodating diverse grammar required by dynamic elements. This creates a large scope problem that needed new approaches. It does need care and effort, or we could break immersion rather than contribute to it. We might not immediately land where we'd like to be, there's always room for more nuance and variation, but the important thing is that we're building it in the right way and not cutting corners early.

It's been a very busy month, working on many different things besides and tying various loose ends. From here we should be able to focus on getting the role functionality ready for a test release, while we continue work on the next major content release.

Best,
Bare Mettle

Coffee Diary - December 2024
Mon, December 2, 2024

(https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com//store_item_assets/steam/apps/362490/ss_a72030cc5e3d118f0026e2a7e898ba710a274386.jpg)

Hey Exanimates,

There's a lot of different things in motion at the moment, but mainly we're trying to get the new AI and role features ready and in a playable state. We're past design and feature additions, so it's mostly technical implementation details now, though lots of things do branch out into new aspects of AI as we broaden what it can do. The most laborious part has been AI understanding what things are and interacting with them, there's a lot of nuance to every decision and doing things that only the player could do before, and do it co-operatively. There's some technical challenges here and things that touch on various core engine functionality, some of which also represent building blocks for eventual multiplayer features and simulating the running of a larger scale world. We're trying to be very thorough and get everything to that point where we can build features in a content driven-way, that is it becomes mostly a matter of designing new role based interactions and dialogue using our tools rather building on engine functionality. To this end, we are also already writing new dialogue and revisiting a lot of the existing dialogue.

We have also been doing more work on the apparel and character model systems. Besides replacing various core apparel items with much better ones, we found that though we tried to make the new system backwards compatible, in some ways it ultimately wasn't. This means there's a few more items we need to at least adapt to the new system, and one more step we need to take now towards our "human 2.0". The issue is with removing parts of character models that are hidden by layers of apparel and clothing above them. The very freeform and layered armour system means there can be 5 or more layers of 3D model stacked on top of each other. With character models being particularly expensive, this is not good for performance, especially as we're working towards increasing character density in both future and current content.

It became obvious pretty quickly that efficiently removing parts of models with all the different layers and shapes, the chain of dependencies between visible parts that need to match, the different "races", and respecting the countless shape variations that need to be applied for layered items, was a very complex problem. Indeed we did have some version of this before which was not efficient and prone to many issues. We're no strangers to complex systems, but the problem isn't just the complexity of it, but also making it easy to work with despite it. This apparel system overhaul was not just about improvements and fixes, but most importantly about greatly streamlining the workflow which was very difficult and confusing. It took some figuring out, but again we managed to come up with something which works very well and simplifies the work even further.

Both the AI and role systems and the apparel updates need to be ready before we can begin playtesting, we're getting through this at a good pace, and fortunately updating apparel is now pretty quick with our new methods, but there is still some work to do. We'll be adding more role interactions throughout testing and once we have a clearer idea of how everything is working and get some feedback we can see what else we might be able to squeeze into the big content update. For now we're keeping our options open while we continue to work on a few different things.

Best,

Bare Mettle

Coffee Diary - January 2025
Mon, 6 January 2025

(https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com//store_item_assets/steam/apps/362490/ss_d9641461c6d0d3a37da02f0d7ae5911f1eed99d7.jpg)

Hey Exanimates,

Since we started working on roles a few months ago we've been focusing on a few specific goals. This is good, because what we've learned in years of theory crafting the system is that it's all too easy to get lost in hypotheticals and go down rabbit holes without really reaching a conclusion. Fundamentally the idea is that we can keep expanding our collection of roles, adding more nuance and situationally appropriate behaviours. Ultimately the complexity lies not in the system, but in the quantity and variety of roles, and when asked "what does the role system do?" the best answer we can give is "depends what you tell it to do". By focusing on few specific problems we can make progress without worrying too much about the endless potential applications. However, this is a critical moment in which we're defining not only a limited set of behaviours, but also the capabilities and details of the system.

We've done a lot in the past few months, much of it was building new AI features and behaviours rather than the roles themselves, but we've defined the mechanics for driving behaviours and activities with roles, how they can influence and exert control over emotions and solved various difficult problems. But the biggest obstacle in the system's design hasn't been how to make it function, but how to make its emergent complexity easy enough to make sense of and navigate for someone designing roles. It's important to understand that roles are not simple triggers and set behaviours, each one introduces possibilities, and many roles exist and are working at the same time. Basically we don't tell NPCs exactly what to do, we merely suggest things that they might want to do, but they are not limited to just a few choices that belong to expected paths.

One particular stumbling block has been "relational roles", which describe what individuals know or assume about each other, what specific relationships they might have, how they might interact under various circumstances and carry a detailed history of their previous interactions. These are usually reciprocal and often asymmetrical or dynamic pairings on both sides, which can explode into a huge number of relationships with varying affinities in both directions. This makes even apparently simple problems immediately confusing, and we've never been happy with this convoluted structure and its unclear implications. It has remained somewhat of an unsolved problem. We've been analysing many practical examples trying to narrow it down to something intuitive that could meet our requirements, and finally we've found something we're happy with.

We've also established some new mechanics for relational interactions, we simplified accessing and using complex role data by moving most of the complexity to the inner workings of our scripting language, which now has more advanced high level features and is supported by better visual tools. This also allows us to use fewer specialised roles and more intricate dynamic decision making. There's a lot of details we've established better, we have clear best practices in place of open ended problems. In finalising some of these details we've also dealt with another troublesome issue, which is that changing roles could cause historical data for them in saved games to not match up. This is inherently less problematic now and with the new tools we can easily track changes in role data allowing them to be patched.

We've completed, finally, the new AI behaviours and core mechanics to drive them. The scope of the roles is for now quite limited, but we're touching on everything the system needs to do. Having now also finalised how the roles themselves function, in a way that goes beyond our immediate requirements, we can now more quickly and confidently develop roles that aren't just placeholders. We're immediately seeing elegant solutions to introducing more complex behaviours and social dynamics for even the most basic and unintelligent encounters in the short term. We already have a very solid foundation for AI which works surprisingly well even without roles, so we're excited to see what we can do with proper roles that actually expand on this rather than hinder and limit it.

As for the clothing and cloth armour updates we've talked about recently, we completed the changes to how character models are generated and also identified and included more optimisations that will allow us to render characters more efficiently. We're very happy with some clever solutions we developed here, the entire system is much more efficient and robust. We're still replacing a couple more items, but the bulk of them is done. The new items look great, a huge upgrade from the items we replaced and with all these replacements, the new items and the material improvements, the overall upgrade to character visuals is huge. We also added a bunch of features and a tool for our new cloth physics system that allows us to use it for creating clothing assets and textures. We're able to change many parameters in real time, interact with the cloth and even dynamically change the structure. Our new cloth is very versatile and performant, we're able to do this with millions of polygons of cloth, tweaking and adjusting things in real time to quickly create some very high quality assets. We've yet to explore everything that we can do with this, but already we've gotten some very useful things out of it.

We think we're very close to being able to begin playtesting, we've been pushing the requirements for the first playtest further and further, but at this point everything looks quite final so there shouldn't be any more unexpected additions or requirements. The play test should be more about fixing issues and adding things rather than an early look at features that are still in development at this point.

Best,

Bare Mettle

Coffee Diary - February 2025
Mon, February 3, 2025

(https://shared.cloudflare.steamstatic.com//store_item_assets/steam/apps/362490/ss_d9641461c6d0d3a37da02f0d7ae5911f1eed99d7.jpg)

Hey Exanimates,

So, roles. We haven't begun testing just yet, though that's not the only thing we've been working on (more on that later). After we'd just figured out a whole bunch of stuff (see last diary) our goal was just to set up the roles that will be used in testing the main, important and difficult things. Of course as we got into the details there was a lot of wondering about how to best approach some of them and lots of interesting ideas coming up. A lot of this is about identifying things that could be considered common behavioural patterns rather than specific to a role we're adding. Sometimes this means making changes to core AI, sometimes it means more systematic role features, or standard roles and mechanics that handle a subset of common behaviours. Doing this alleviates the burden from the role designer, and creates a more robust foundation that supports more emergent elements and basically keeps things running smoothly even when there are no specific roles or cases.

The focus right now has been mainly on social dynamics, introducing the idea of social settings dictating what's considered appropriate at a higher level and also putting a greater emphasis on personality traits. Some of this gets pretty complicated, but basically it's how people modify their core behaviour and disposition depending on who they're interacting with and under what circumstances. In the short term, it's the foundation that drives how intelligent NPC companions behave with the player and how this can change, but implicitly also with and between the less intellectually inclined denizens of Exanima. It's basically ways in which different roles and situationally appropriate behaviours come into play automatically.

A lot of this also relates to aggressive behaviours. A well recognised issue we've been exploring is how AI currently tends to hold a grudge towards one particular opponent and make poor tactical decisions. This is because AI is currently purely emotionally driven, and a big part of what we're doing when adding roles is exerting control over emotions. Emotions are generally a bit too volatile as it is, and we're making adjustments, but roles can provide more context for the need or repercussions of violent behaviour, and once engaged in combat people can then make more logical and informed decisions. Dialogue could also influence this and various emotional responses might be overridden when it's considered important. We're not just trying to define a set of rules to produce a certain outcome, we always ask ourselves what would a real human do, why, and how do we simulate that?

That might sound like a lot to cover, but don't worry, we're still only focusing on some relatively simple immediate goals, but the way we approach them is important in defining how we can continue to build on them and something we take very seriously. Even if we're not doing something right now, we need to think about how what we do later will fit. While they need a lot of careful consideration, these are mostly details and adjustments within a system, and we will continue to make adjustments as we observe it and get feedback from players.

As we're taking a more and more structured approach to role mechanics and design we also saw a need for the design tools to evolve. We've come up with a new style which is much more intuitive to navigate and work with, giving a quick visual overview and access to all the behaviours and interactions a role provides. Our aim is something that anyone wanting to create story lines or characters can pick up with relative ease.

While we are trying to focus on getting the roles ready, we do also need to keep the content pipeline going in terms of features and development tools. We've been putting a lot of effort into supporting new types of content, scaling up production speed and leaning more heavily into procedural methods. There was recently a big rework of our terrain system, assets and tools, to not only improve visuals, but to more easily produce the bulk of natural environments using procedural methods. At the time there was one feature we wanted to include, but didn't: detail displacement. This creates an illusion of 3D detail on otherwise flat surfaces, something we already use for stone walls and the like, but not terrain which uses dynamically generated unique texturing. If we could make things such as stones, roots and other ground details effectively look 3D, it would save us a whole lot of work and performance inserting actual 3D details, while leveraging our already excellent procedural terrain painting systems and tools. These can also blend things together far better than intersecting 3D models. It would be a perfect fit, and this kind of effect is also very well suited to our isometric style view.

However, while displacement is great, to actually create convincing depth and shape we need another very important visual cue: shadows. Shadows also means light not reaching little places it shouldn't, you might not always be keenly aware of their absence, but something is off and your brain is not convinced. We make heavy use of dynamic shadow casting lights, so some shadow like effect is not enough, we'd need actual shadows from every light source. The shadows also need to look consistent with others, so that it's not obvious which 3D details are "real" or "fake". It sounded difficult and expensive, but extremely desirable, pivotal even, as we develop more detailed natural environments that would otherwise require lots of tricky modelling and level design work and expensive 3D elements, which still wouldn't look as good or allow for finer detail. It was definitely worth trying, and we came up with our own shadowing approach that is well suited to our particular engine and tricky requirements. We even came up with an efficient displacement solution which removes the stretchy artefacts common with these approaches. This was particularly important with our procedurally generated textures which can't be tweaked by hand. This feature is now fully implemented in our terrain, materials and tools and game ready, and the results are quite impressive. There is a performance cost, but it's very fast and more than compensates for not having to add expensive and ugly models and geometry. It's also more easily scalable, for the potato users, you can just turn graphics settings down.

We're only just discovering how powerful this can really be, especially when combined with our procedural ground detail. We've already updated some existing ground and other assets, but we've yet to really take advantage of this. From now on, it will be a critical part of our art pipeline. There are so many great examples of this, but here's a few screenshots just to illustrate the kind of difference this tech can make:

(https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//8614037/774188dc088ecfb6cfd244e3bfaedb372be44176.jpg)

(https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//8614037/0328556f7ee472446a0e4b115294f72f26278eb6.jpg)

(https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//8614037/268aee91467d9603b0707473b9a2c65da2ab48a4.jpg)

While working on these lighting features we couldn't help but take notice of a few other things we'd been hoping to improve, but hadn't managed to yet. When we first implemented our global illumination (GI) system along with the new renderer, we wanted something fully dynamic and blazingly fast. We absolutely nailed it. For those who don't know, dynamic GI systems tend to murder your performance and have their share of problems and limitations. Our GI system certainly has its limits, but much of this is just precision and similar concerns that are performance trade-offs. The most keen-eyed players shared some of our nit-picks, mainly that shadowed areas often look too dark, which doesn't look natural, lacks depth and makes visibility in darker areas uncomfortable. Taking a fresh look at the problem, we found a performant solution to correct these shortcomings. It's quite the improvement, indirect lighting is less harsh, while actually adding more depth and detail to the image. The game's signature darkness is still very much there, but it's more realistic with partial darkness showing something and not being impenetrable, adding more to the atmosphere. Outdoor environments benefited even more, where the odd mix of dark and bright shadows looked very out of place. The lighting is more natural and reflected light more vibrant. One thing led to another, and we then made further improvements, adding more detail to indirect lighting. We also made some quality improvements to our shadows, making for a cleaner image. The overall visual impact is huge, some of the devs considered it the biggest leap in visual quality the game has seen.

Global illumination differences are harder to clearly show in screenshots and we don't have direct comparisons. The aim here is subtle realism, if nothing stands out it means we did well. Capturing the range can be tricky, but the shadows are crisp and contrast sunlight well while still showing lots of lighting detail and depth within them, and things look nicely grounded.

(https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//8614037/e3de35a1d93e56bcd4751064c3924fc7b279d980.jpg)

Even in a dimly lit room, you can still see lots of detail inside the shadows, they don't just swallow up large portions of the screen. It's more realistic and immersive and you can make out quite a bit more of your surroundings even in relative darkness.

(https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//8614037/b27515c63b5b10f2fe024e0458c06afc778427f1.jpg)

Clearly there was some shifting of priorities here, but both in terms of roles, AI and visuals these are very good changes and we've been working very hard to get it all in a complete state right now. We're working on one last piece of fancy new clothing, and we should hopefully be able to wrap up the role stuff up quickly. The role and AI changes are obviously very big and broad, and we definitely expect to be fleshing them out and tuning them over time rather than all in one go.

Best,

Bare Mettle

Coffee Diary - March 2025
Mon, March 3, 2025

(https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com//store_item_assets/steam/apps/362490/ss_ea82743d746449e6ad3bc34aa0546310acd39727.jpg)

Hey Exanimates,

We're now in the last steps of putting together everything we've worked on, seeing how it functions as a whole and building a release. We should begin testing soon, with a hopefully brief period of closed testing before opening it up to everyone in the testing branch, when we're at least clear of any major issues. We still have to add new content and features that are near completion or just don't require much work, but there have been so many major updates and additions to almost every part of the game and engine that we think we should update the main branches. We know our updates cycles are long and our priorities might seem weird, we focus on big complex features that maybe only pay off in the long term over low hanging fruit that add lots of perceived value with relatively little effort. In terms of development goals we're now close to a complete Exanima, but we still have big plans for the future, beyond the 1.0 release, and we're constantly working in the background to make those happen. We're secretive with those plans, we know too well how expectations grow in the community, and how we'll do our best to meet them no matter how wild they become, but let's just say that a finished Exanima is really only the beginning.

Recently we talked about how to better support roles and emergent behaviours we felt we had to make important changes to how emotions, personality traits and relationships drive character decisions. How characters perceive hostility and decide to engage in it or avoid it is a big part of this in Exanima, as encounters aren't simply friend or enemy. This is quite difficult as AI must judge these things based only on what they observe, and companions must also quickly judge the player's intentions and try to match them rather than just act of their own accord. This was previously driven by raw emotional responses, which also drove combat decisions, which could make AI feel quite stupid. Now we have more complex and specialised decision making, which makes it even less suitable for low level combat decisions. Improving this has been on our to-do list for a while, but now it's a requirement and so we expanded our combat tactics AI to make smarter decisions and broader evaluations of everyone involved and nearby. As we want AI companions to feel legitimately smart and useful and plan to increase the density of encounters going forward, this is quite important.

One part of these improvements allows AI to choose to engage in or avoid conflict based on many new factors including what others around them are doing and what their relationships or relevant social dynamics are. Once engaged in combat, AI will prioritise targets based on mostly tactical decisions, with especially smarter AI doing things like rapidly switching between multiple opponents to defend against different attacks or take attacks of opportunity, such as hitting someone in the back to help an ally. We can now easily further expand on this with more factors, such as identifying priority targets who represent a specific threat or helping allies who are in tough or spot or requested help through dialogue. This should all immediately make AI feel much more intelligent in combat situations and it's a solid foundation to build more combat behaviours and advanced tactical and strategic decisions.

We finally completed the updates to our absurdly complex apparel and armour system. It's extremely satisfying to see it work as well as it does now. It was very ambitious when we first designed it, it literally allows wearing any combination of items of any shape, covering any portion of the body, in multiple layers, tucking and tightening things in to fit, and generating procedural materials for the combined result, all this without any restrictions and in an efficient way. This is a lot more complex than modular armour systems typically seen in games, and as our items grew in variety and numbering in the hundreds, it was getting out of hand, often requiring us to make hundreds of meshes for a single piece of clothing that were dynamically combined into even more variations. Even so, we still ran into issues with unique item designs adding new requirements that we weren't able to properly satisfy. It took us years just to gradually piece together various ideas of how the system could be improved to solve more complex cases and without increasing the already excessive overall complexity. We just finished overhauling every part of this system and now we have something that is more powerful, far more intuitive and easy to work with, producing better looking and more optimised results, as well as new tools that make the production of character assets take a small fraction of the work they did before.

There will be one more related update to characters at some point in the future which will also increase their resolution and overall quality, but that will be just a matter of updating assets and not the systems and tools driving it, which are now decisively complete and far better than we ever imagined they could be. When we do that, we will add more items, with a particular focus on clothing.

We already had to rework many character assets for these changes, and this includes about 30 new or completely reworked items, many of which are the most core and common ones, coming in new variants and with new material and colouring systems and some general quality improvements. This adds up to a very significant visual update to characters. Until now we'd been developing the new systems and new assets in parallel, without being able to finalise and test either one until we could put it all together. This is now done, but we did run into some unforeseen problems when finally doing it, which led us to another addition to the system, which solved our remaining problems and actually further streamlined our process while also improving the performance of characters even more.

In the past we've told people to not report issues with worn items clipping, because properly solving those problems would require an overhaul of these systems. Well, that overhaul is done and the time is now, you should report any clipping or similar issues you encounter after this release. Also note that in an effort to preserve arena saves we have tried to patch your existing items into their new versions, but a direct translation may not always possible as there are significant differences.

We wanted to briefly respond to some of the feedback we received on the last diary. It was long and technical and probably hard to follow and we fully expected that some people would question why we were seemingly working on improving graphics, which did indeed happen. It's important to understand what making graphics for a game like Exanima involves. We are an incredibly small team, with literally just 3 people working on all of the game's graphics and environments, but we are committed to a certain level of quality, complexity and consistency. Making high quality art is genuinely hard, this doesn't mean it just takes longer, it also means wasting countless hours simply failing to produce something satisfactory, and having to continuously iterate until it finally looks good and consistent. A lot of this is simply caused by real time rendering limitations, artists spend inordinate amounts of time trying to patch the holes left by those limitations and making things look good despite them. We also take performance very seriously, and these problems are not easily solved without just throwing it away. We talked about features that hugely streamline the process of achieving high quality results, with intuitive methods instead of laborious workarounds, that are performance efficient, highly scalable and leverage procedural methods. That is the point of these efforts. We are far from done with producing original art for our game, and our productivity has always been founded on good tools, procedural methods and dynamic rendering features, we simply do not have the manpower to do it any other way. Anything that changes the way we work and what we produce should be done sooner rather than later.

Best,

Bare Mettle

Coffee Diary - April 2025
Mon, 7 April 2025

Hey Exanimates,

We hoped to have a release ready now, and though we are very close, we moved the goal post a little for a couple of reasons. We also had some key team members who had to deal with some personal life stuff, which put our work a bit out of synch. With the new core role and AI functionality in place, our current goal was to use Derrin, the only intelligent NPC currently in the game, as a test case for these new systems. Our previous placeholder role system was really just used a platform for some quite rigid scripting, dialogue and commands, but now there would be multiple dynamic roles over which the character has agency, working closely with core emotional systems and expressing them, as well as driving conscious decisions on how to act despite of them. The new roles also support more complex behaviours and different activities. All this was ready for a more intelligent, communicative and self-sufficient Derrin. However, as we got into designing Derrin's new roles we soon realised that some of these specific roles would be redundant once we introduced the "Knight" NPC, which we plan to do very soon, and more NPCs later on. When considering a larger party things are a bit different, and it's important to note that unlike games where the player just gives orders to companions, most roles are supposed to be common and interchangeable. Potentially any NPC could be a party leader, or the party could be cooperating without an appointed leader, and no players need be involved. Thinking about how this would be set up led us into some new ideas for role features that better and more easily support group activities and interactions. So we had a little course correction, working on these new features and modelling Derrin's roles based on them, so that we can immediately test a more future proof and relevant version of things.

We also just made some big changes to combat AI and related AI features. These greatly improve tactics in group fights and support strategic behaviours. The AI is very dynamic and unpredictable, so it needs lots of testing and tuning which we've been doing to get a good baseline from which to observe feedback from players. It's very cool to see the AI smartly handle multiple opponents and generally being much more situationally aware. We've been making various other improvements as we noticed things during testing and we want to continue doing so once it's in players' hands, as all things AI and making NPCs feel smart and competent is a big focus at this time.

Finally, we've continued to update character assets and how they function, with yet more improvements or complete redesigns of items that didn't match our current quality standards and more brand new items. At this point there's really not much left to do in terms of clothing and armour, so for items we'll be shifting our efforts towards more weapons, more ornate variants of weapons and a complete overhaul of shields, which will become procedurally generated as weapons already are. We have been doing some other cool things with content and the content pipeline, but as they relate to the big upcoming story additions we can't really talk about them to avoid spoilers. We've also added some new elements to most existing late game areas and new ways to interact with the environment to support important and long awaited new features.

Changing how things work and modifying content is difficult because it essentially breaks the game and also the perfectly persistent saves that include everything down the exact position of every object and NPCs remembering every role interaction they've ever had with anyone they've met. This update is by far the most expansive overhaul of engine functionality and key assets, and it should be the last of its kind. We are trying to get everything to a place where we can add new features and content without constantly worrying about breaking many things and having long development down times. When it comes to key features the scope often exceeds even the 1.0 release, but we have to build things for the future if we want to avoid these situations repeating.

Best,

Bare Mettle

Coffee Diary - May 2025
Mon, 5 May 2025

(https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com//store_item_assets/steam/apps/362490/ss_d9641461c6d0d3a37da02f0d7ae5911f1eed99d7.jpg)

Hey Exanimates,

We finally did it, the new role system is up and running, everything has been switched over to it, content is patched and we added enough backward compatibility to preserve arena saves. At this point we're just testing out the basics and putting a build together for proper testing, which is imminent. Once again the changes are very extensive, the entire platform for AI, behaviour and dialogue is new, with many fundamentally new features.

This is to say the least a huge milestone. The role system is what drives the world as we imagined it and basically the glue that ties together everything we've done. We spent years theory crafting it, trying to understand its possibilities and limitations, and what might be too ambitious and complex to develop and work with. Ultimately we went all in on complexity, including every feature we've considered that seemed useful, but the real challenge was how to design and structure it so that it's intuitive and easy enough to understand and navigate for content designers. The role system is first and foremost a content tool, for telling stories and creating characters and events with complex and dynamic behaviours and interactions. It needs to feel simple and intuitive to use, but as we expand our library of roles the goal is to achieve remarkable emergent behaviour.

As we've been finalising things and making roles on the new system we inevitably found more ways to improve things, sometimes in small ways, sometimes big. We plan to spend a lot of time using these tools, so it's important for us, but we also intend to release them to modders and players so they can create content too. They can be used not only to create characters and stories, but even mechanics. For example, something like the golem guards could be reproduced like this. We put a lot of effort into the tools, making a polished visual interface that is easy to navigate and gives lots of information at a glance. We put particular effort into our custom scripting language. Our goal here is something powerful but without bogging you down with technical details, leveraging specialisation, context and visual tools to remove low level tasks and verbosity. In short this means content designers and writers without technical expertise should find it approachable, and in general a workflow that isn't daunting and tedious.

Initially we'll be mostly testing the core changes to AI and other systems, and during testing we'll be gradually introducing more roles, more elaborate role setups, new interactions, expanding and updating dialogue and so on. Introducing the knight NPC will be next, and this will allow us to test many more features like dialogue between NPCs and multiple people and all sorts of complicated relational dynamics between more than two people. We'll continue to add and develop roles indefinitely, also applying more behaviours to less intelligent NPCs like the undead. A lot of what the role system is designed to do goes far beyond the scope of Exanima, but the more fundamental roles for driving behaviour, relationships and AI in general cover the most difficult and critical functionality and are the basis for the more specialised roles to come.

Meanwhile work continues on new content, including some new encounters, but as always we avoid content spoilers. With the crippling weight of developing the role system lifted we'll be focusing heavily on content for a time. We did also rework a few more pieces of armour and were able to make some smaller improvements to others thanks to the upgraded apparel system. We're also actively working on some very ornate weapon designs and some new weapon types.

Hopefully initial testing will go smoothly and we can open it up to everyone soon. Check out our discord for access to testing builds and all the relevant information.

Best,

Bare Mettle

Coffee Diary - June 2025
Mon, 2 June 2025

Hey Exanimates,

Insider testing has been ongoing for most of the month, which went surprisingly smooth for a first round of testing after so much development down time. We've patched the test build a few times now, but many of the issues being reported were older things we've been catching up on and we've spent most of the time making improvements rather than bug fixing.

We've only added a few fundamental roles and a little dialogue so far to test the core functionality, we did run into some tricky issues, but everything seems to be running smooth now. We should be able to focus on adding more role based behaviours and dialogue now that the foundation is solid. We've been getting a lot of useful feedback and suggestions from testers, and had some in-depth discussions. We're still figuring out what the right balance is for NPCs being talkative and reactive and we'll be experimenting with things over time.

Core AI received a lot of fundamental changes in terms of emotions, personality etc. with the goals of making personality more important, providing some more rational behaviour even without role involvement and supporting better interaction with roles. For now we've mostly been trying to get things balanced out and working again, though during testing we did expand quite a lot on some core behaviours and reactivity and how these work together with various activities. NPCs must now juggle many things, like for example following someone, searching the environment, looting, noticing interesting things, keeping an eye on potential threats and conducting a dialogue all at the same time. Tricky stuff, and no doubt we'll keep tweaking and improving core AI and these sort of things, but we seem to have everything in a pretty good functional spot already.

Looting behaviour was another big focus in testing. Derrin as our test case for these new features, now moves around the environment independently searching objects, containers and bodies, calling out items he thinks the player might find useful and looting and equipping himself independently. There's a lot of nuance to choosing which items are worth taking or holding on to as well as coordinating this more independent behaviour. We've made some pretty big improvements and adjustments during testing, mostly trying to make this as smooth and practical as possible. Making AI as capable of interacting with the world as a player is a big part of our vision, but we do also see this as an important gameplay and quality of life feature. We'll definitely keep expanding on and tweaking this, but it's quite functional already. Testers have noted that seeing Derrin move around and engage and interact with the environment instead of just standing there is very impactful and really brings him to life.

A while back we developed a new pathfinding system for dealing with dynamic paths involving physics objects, multiple layers, vertical clearance and potentially more modes of movement, and we've now made some more improvements. The system is complex and has not been free of some issues since we introduced it. During testing we particularly found it's not great to have smart and talkative NPCs if they then just walk into a pit while carrying all your loot, or get stuck in silly ways. We did a deep dive into the pathfinding system, to make AI take less unnecessary risks, not get stuck and a few other solid improvements. We've identified a few more things we can improve, but already things are in a much better state. Exanima is a complex game at a very fundamental level, and this has obvious advantages, but we're well aware that it can also lead to some tedium and annoyance. Now that we've developed our core tech to this extent, we see ourselves focusing more on making a smoother and more enjoyable experience and quality of life in general.

This update also includes a significant overhaul of our apparel system to solve many issues with clipping and animation and massively streamline our workflow, as well as some performance and other benefits. Just about every item in the game had to be reconfigured for it and often adjusted in some way if not completely reworked. Inevitably there were some things to fix up and here there, but we're all caught on any clipping and similar issues reported so far. Things are looking very good on this front.

There were some notable graphical improvements in this update too, with some new tech for ground displacement, detail shadows, lighting and shadows in general and many asset improvements too. We've had testers often express how impressed they've been with the graphical updates and how good the game looks now. We're always aware of things we can do to make the game look even better, but we try to avoid working on graphics tech as there's so much else to do and we want to keep the game potato friendly. These were relatively low investments and scalable upgrades with a big return and we're very glad we did them.

Finally, as we're very close to public testing we'd like to briefly introduce the role system, what it's supposed to do and what to expect from it, as there are clearly still many misconceptions. This is also important to clarify what we hope to gain from testing and what kind of feedback we'd like to see.

What the role system is not, is a specific set of AI features and capabilities. This is a very important distinction from other AI systems you may be comparing it to. Such a "one and done" system would not be enough to do what we want from it. We're all about delivering that quality hand crafted experience. We do not want dynamic, but ultimately shallow NPCs. The role system is essentially a content tool, a narrative tool. Roles are very broad in their scope, they can provide unique behaviours and dialogue for specific characters, or they can, as the term "role" suggests, be adopted by any character. Characters can have many roles at once and know each other by various roles, these roles change dynamically. Every role provides new interactions, and these can lead to more roles with more interactions and so on. This means that as we build our library of roles, we create more and more emergent behaviours. So in a sense, it is a collection of AI capabilities, one that we can keep expanding on, but above all else it is a dynamic story telling tool.

This means that just because we added the system, you won't suddenly see the undead taking up new professions and starting book clubs. While that is entirely within the realm of the system, our aim for now is to very carefully craft what we would call "foundational roles". These would be the roles describing the most common behaviours, activities and relationships, that other roles can then build on, specialise on, or add to. Our first goal is to make NPC companions that feel as close as possible to human players. This is particularly difficult, it involves some intricate roles and mechanics. We want to gather feedback and ideas and learn everything we can from this particularly complex and important case before designing many more roles.

You should hopefully get an idea of the direction of this with your first experiences of it, but basically keep in mind that our intent for now is to build on these fundamental aspects and make them really good, not to add a bunch of fluff and drown out the essence of it with noise. Ideally your feedback would reflect this, and you will be critical of the foundations before asking about the colour of the wallpaper. Tell us how you wish the AI had reacted during moments of gameplay, without focusing too much on the specifics. Also bear in mind that part of our vision is non player centric design. A player will inevitably do things an NPC will not, but they are just another character with their own set of roles. The AI is incapable of distinguishing between player and non player characters, so think of roles and interactions as always interchangeable.

Since testing began we've mostly been working on things and making some additions that we didn't really expect to, but now we're back on track. We're working on introducing one last role based interaction and reviewing some dialogue now so we expect public testing to begin soon. A big thank you to the testers who have been very thorough and patient and have been giving us great feedback.

Best,
Bare Mettle

Coffee Diary - July 2025
Mon, 7 July 2025

(https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com//store_item_assets/steam/apps/362490/ss_a72030cc5e3d118f0026e2a7e898ba710a274386.jpg)

Hey Exanimates,

Before we get into what we've been working on, let's address what many of you want to know: public testing will begin in a matter of days. We hoped to start some time ago, but we've been making changes to how some important things work, because we saw a better way to tackle some of the more complex role features. We're currently fixing a few things from the last round of insider testing we did a few days ago, and then we'll go to the Steam testing branch.

The past month we moved past testing core role functionality and we've been trying our hand at some actually complex role based behaviours. So far all AI decisions have been driven by an emotion system, with roles only really being able to nudge things in a direction and provide some specific interactions and reactions. That didn't really allow for more rational behaviour, and often creates a harsh disconnect between how a character acts and what interactions they can engage in. We've been working on a much tighter integration between roles and emotions, allowing roles to both influence emotions more directly and to make explicit and considered decisions based on emotions and low level behaviour. You could basically see this as making the difference between a wild animal and a thinking, rational human.

We had developed the core features for this already, but when it came to actually using them we realised there was a better, but fundamentally different approach. This has quite an impact on core AI and places a much bigger emphasis on roles for low level behaviour, so things will need to be tweaked and adjusted over time, but has many advantages. This leads into what we previously discussed as "foundational behaviour roles". They provide the most important emergent behaviours and relationships based on unscripted events and actions. We're again using Derrin as a test case, where he could previously only be provoked into combat without this being reflected in subsequent behaviour or dialogue, he can now respond in various ways, choosing to plead for mercy, run away and try his luck on his own or negotiating a truce with the player. He will respond differently to intimidation or outright hostility, or hold grudges and so on.

A big part of this is also making dialogue more dynamic and situationally appropriate. Where game dialogue is typically something that happens separately from the rest of the game, in Exanima dialogue can be conducted while doing anything else and while everything continues to happen normally. It's entirely possible to attack someone at any point during a friendly conversation for example, or for it to be interrupted, or simply be or become inappropriate in an emerging situation or emotional state. This creates a lot of very difficult problems with many cases that are not easy to predict or account for. As well as building contextual awareness into the dialogue system and dynamic reactions, there is the problem of dialogue being interrupted and resumed naturally, possibly taking a new direction based on what happened.

We've added various new dialogue and re-written most of the existing dialogue. Besides just improving some of the hastily written old stuff, we've tried to make dialogue feel like a natural back and forth between characters, in keeping with its real time aspect. This however means that dialogue branches often and quickly explodes into a large volume even for short conversations. This is made much more complex still by the previously mentioned contextual changes, dynamic elements and resuming interrupted conversations. Our systems and tools were designed for this, but it's our first time navigating these complex cases and we're still figuring out the best ways to author and handle all this as we go.

We've also been making unique events and interactions more generalised and versatile, so that they can work with many roles. This means characters might respond differently to these based on their roles or that characters can easily be substituted for others. One example of how this would be used is for Derrin (and other characters) to appear on playthroughs other than Unknown's, providing an opportunity for different lore exposition and a more meaningful alternate playthrough. On that note, we're also finally working on introducing the proctor uniform and armour set. This is an elaborate and very unique set with eleven pieces that can be combined in different ways.


After a first round of improvements to pathfinding went through testing, we worked on it a fair bit more. We solved some remaining issues and made characters better at navigating complex paths, far less prone to getting stuck and they now try to find a safe and comfortable position to stop in. There's still some pathfinding related improvements and tweaks we'd like to make such as characters moving better in groups, moving out of each other's way and dodging moving objects, but for now the focus was mainly on making companions better at avoiding dangers and sticking with the player. While role testing and general polishing continues, we're still finalising new content, but also working on a few things besides. We're not sure exactly what other features we will include in the main update just yet, but as we've overcome these big development hurdles we're shifting focus to completing and adding new features and smaller content additions. Some of these will come in small updates following the big one.

Best,
Bare Mettle

Coffee Diary - August 2025
Mon, 4 August 2025

(https://shared.akamai.steamstatic.com//store_item_assets/steam/apps/362490/ss_d9641461c6d0d3a37da02f0d7ae5911f1eed99d7.jpg)

Hey Exanimates,

Public testing of role system features has been ongoing, the main focus was how roles can interact with emotional states and dynamic events and behaviours. We encouraged people to try to break Derrin's behaviour by doing unexpected things or manipulating him in various ways with mind powers at any point including during dialogue and seeing if he behaved naturally and dialogue could be resumed with responses appropriate to what transpired and what was said previously. This was a particularly complex role setup to test the limits of the system. People found a couple of isolated issues, but for the most part this has been working well. We've also seen lots of thorough testing of every possible item combination for the new apparel system, which we've been fixing quickly thanks to the new system, and just general bug and issue reporting. We've done a few hotfixes and one big patch to address most of this, with only a couple of rare bugs and mostly minor issues still to resolve. Things are looking pretty good and feedback on all the AI and graphical improvements has been very positive.

The big difficulty we immediately faced was with the AI's emotion system and how they understand and respond to behaviour. Until now we dealt mostly with extreme loyalty, extreme adversity or a sort of chaotic neutrality, but now we are trying to model a much broader and more nuanced spectrum of relationships and behaviours, that are also to be supported by and interact closely with dynamic roles. We intend for this to work in any setting and for any person or group of people where loyalties and intentions are unclear. This could include various civilised settings, like perhaps a town square or a tavern, where there are certain expectations of behaviour even from strangers. NPCs must be able to intelligently read and carefully judge situations and respond accordingly, not simply be provoked to violence indiscriminately. Why is this person acting like this? Who's the target of their behaviour? Why? Whose side am I on? Could they want to harm me or someone I care about? Are they trying to protect us? Should I help them? Should I be concerned, scared, angry? Should I get involved? What would be the consequences?

The new Derrin is a good test case for this, as he can now be quite wary of the player yet still cooperate with them, choose to aid them in combat against targets, while also reserving judgement on those targets and avoiding hostility, being ready should the player seemingly turn on him, and yet forgiving of accidents that could be seen as hostility. On the other hand there are also undead with only perhaps a passing sense of loyalty to each other and who attack recklessly with little regard for who's in their way and will sometimes get angry at each other. This is all a result of constant and careful judgement of actions and balancing of emotions, not a set of simple triggers with set outcomes.

To achieve this we had to make some major revisions to core AI, improve emotional responses and introduce much more sophisticated methods for judging behaviour and intentions over time, particularly in group situations. These are now brand new systems that will need fine tuning, but from the last round of testing we're seeing that we're already very close to a solid baseline for raw core AI. This is all designed to be supported by roles, which can build more complex behaviours, relationships and outcomes, essentially acting as a layer of higher level thinking based on these raw emotions. We've also been revisiting our personality traits, and studying ways in which they can interact more with these systems to produce more varied behaviour at a fundamental level.

As those who have been following us long enough know, dynamic and reactive NPC behaviour has always been critical to our vision and perhaps our most ambitious goal, which like everything else has only grown more ambitious over time. Just like physics, the goal isn't and never was about combat, or about some impressive gameplay moment, but a world that consistently responds plausibly to anything you might do. We design the world, everything in it and how it works to make it feel like a real place, not a game level. We realise this can seem a bit abstract and the path is long and arduous and there are compromises involved, but that's what we're all about. Exanima's currently limited scope may not seem like the best platform for this, but we need the functionality and the tools before we can build the world. There is much to come in Exanima and beyond that will be built on this. There are many years of study, planning and also uncertainty behind this, with problems that only seemed to get more complex the more we tried to tackle them. Finally solving its intricacies and developing it into functionality is a huge accomplishment for us.

We will continue to monitor and patch the test build, with some additions to role interactions here and there, but we will now focus mainly on finalising and polishing the new content for the full update. The main addition will be a large new area, "The Gardens", which is full of new and different content, but we have quite a few things in the works, some of which may come in smaller updates soon after the big one. If you haven't played the test builds, then there are many big improvements, additions and overhauls throughout the game.

We'd also like to remind you that we use Discord to track issues, gather feedback, discuss and provide release notes for patches and hotfixes on the testing branch. If you'd like to contribute to testing and share your thoughts please join our discord server: https://discord.gg/Z5aV2bF

Best,
Bare Mettle

Coffee Diary - September 2025
Mon, 1 September 2025

(https://shared.akamai.steamstatic.com//store_item_assets/steam/apps/362490/ss_ea82743d746449e6ad3bc34aa0546310acd39727.jpg)

Hey Exanimates,

We've pretty much hit pause on roles, AI and this round of testing to focus fully on getting the big content update ready. We released a major patch in testing with some important changes, various additions to the current roles and dialogue, refinements to AI and lots and lots of fixes. As it tends to go with testing periods we fixed a lot of older issues as well as new, there's always a few highly specific and old issues that remain on the backlog for now, but everything seems to be in a really solid state and testers have been very thorough. Thank you.

We made big improvements to core AI and how NPCs perceive and respond to behaviour, following on the tricky issues we discussed last month, but a big change in this patch was to how emotions interact with roles and dialogue. This is a difficult problem because accounting for all the different emotions, how they can change or be meddled with by mind powers at any time, can easily create a disconnect with how characters behave and role based interactions and their effects. There were just too many conditions and outcomes to consider, and odd results can be quite immersion breaking or create problems with role logic. This pushed us to design a better system that could constantly monitor changes in emotions and dispositions to alter outcomes of ongoing role actions and influence, but the real problem was how to design and maintain role behaviours that could account for these complex conditions, especially when the emotion system is being constantly refined. Role design tools that are clever and intuitive to use were a big part of the solution and mitigating the complexity. Ultimately we succeeded in both a much more robust system while also making it easier to design more varied and appropriate responses.

At this point we feel like the role system is well and truly off the ground, and while we will continue to tweak it and add more roles and interactions based on these features, we're now focusing on finalising the new content and some features for the next major release. The new area, The Gardens, is very distinct both in terms of overall design and completely new assets. We're currently mostly polishing up various things to ensure consistent quality and visual harmony, but also animations and behaviours for some new encounters. As usual we're careful with avoiding spoilers when it comes to new content, so we won't give details. A lot has gone into features, tools and art to make all this work for some time now and we're committed to delivering a high quality final product.

While not yet usable by players, we're also introducing a new thaumaturgy domain and have been working on its effects and mechanics. Each domain comes with its unique challenges and this is no exception. The core systems for thaumaturgy and AI using it are now well established and in this case the unique visual effects are the main focus. As is hopefully apparent from the visual effects in the game so far, we're keen on things being more sophisticated and convincing than your typical sprites and particle systems, while also very mindful of the extreme performance impact that complex effects can have. We had very specific visuals in mind for this domain, and some optimistic theories about how they could be accomplished. From a rough, but promising prototype we ran into some tricky problems getting to a polished effect, but we solved them all and it's looking just like we hoped it would.

Best,
Bare Mettle

Coffee Diary - October 2025
Mon, October 6, 2025

(https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com//store_item_assets/steam/apps/362490/ss_d9641461c6d0d3a37da02f0d7ae5911f1eed99d7.jpg)

Hey Exanimates,

It's been a very hectic month working on many different things, but also a nice change of pace from endlessly working on a single huge game or engine system. We're trying to get all the new content ready for release, and there's a lot.

The Gardens is the largest map yet and also the most complex, varied and unique. There's a lot of new nature and other assets and additions to the terrain which we're currently polishing and optimising. With so much work on terrain, we also made some nice improvements to our tools. Good content creation tools are always a big part of our development efforts, we think they are extremely important, we plan to continue making content indefinitely and also releasing the tools to the community. Optimisation has been a particular concern, as vegetation is notoriously expensive because of the complex 3D models with many layers to render. Usually this is featured outdoors where the lighting is simple, but in this case we also have to deal with many local lights and shadows, multiplying the cost. We wanted to maintain good performance without sacrificing the visuals, and while our engine is very well optimised, this is just a much bigger rendering workload than we've ever had it deal with. Making sure all assets are well optimised is part of what we're doing, but we've also been trying to squeeze even more performance out of the rendering engine.

We did a thorough investigation of performance bottlenecks, not really expecting to find much we could do, but when we looked at the results we started having some ideas. When something is already well optimised, even small optimisations can make a relatively large difference. Beyond optimising various special cases, we went looking for approximations. Real time rendering in general is all mathematical approximations of the real world, and often approximate versions of the expensive mathematical functions doing those approximations. Basically there's always some wiggle room in how approximate your approximation of an approximation is. Combinations of these can have a compounding or mitigating effect on each other, one approximation could help correct the error of another, or make it worse. After a bunch of experimenting we came up with various things that could perform much better with minimal detriment, or that might make the lighting look a little bit different, but not objectively worse. This helps us alleviate the expensive nature of the new area, but as a result we have improved performance in general. We can use these on lower settings to boost performance with minimal visual compromise, or even on higher settings for elements where the difference is just not noticeable, such as grass and most vegetation.

Speaking of grass, we've been overhauling our 3D grass and small plants to improve them visually and to support larger and more realistic plants for dense undergrowth more efficiently. As part of the terrain system this level of vegetation is subject to some special optimisations and careful procedural generation that can realistically produce better results than someone placing thousands of little plants by hand, while saving lots of time and rendering performance. This becomes increasingly important when producing and maintaining large natural environments. Being procedural also means we can easily scale back the density of this vegetation for lower end systems if necessary. We've also made other visual improvements in revisiting some of the rendering, an important one being better support for the detail shadowing with lower or disabled supersampling settings. Detailed and immersive visuals with smooth performance are very important to us and we're genuinely excited about how our latest efforts have come together in the new content.

Still on the topic of vegetation, while we don't consider this an urgent feature, we are also working on plant physics. Everything in Exanima interacts with physics, and plants should be no exception. We don't want plants to just wiggle and rustle when touched, but to bend and push back realistically. We considered various approaches here, and as usual performance is a big concern, but also with our very small team we can't be creating detailed physics models of every plant. We're still early in its development, but we've come up with a way of automatically generating accurate simplified physics structures for plants that can be simulated and deform them efficiently. This likely won't be featured in the earliest releases of the Gardens, but we are actively working on it.

On a totally different topic, we've been trying to finally tackle some important physics related issues that have been discussed recently in the community. This stemmed from a discussion on a functional unstuck feature, but it's relevant to several problems with positioning characters. A case some of you are probably familiar with is finding NPCs in weird spots, stuck inside something or each other, or reacting violently to some unseen force somewhere nearby. This happens for example when characters are repositioned while you're unconscious or away, and if they are colliding with something in the new position all sorts of bad things can happen. Identifying a collision free position for a character to occupy is a difficult problem, but is also needed for a good unstuck feature and for NPCs to move away from other characters or dynamic objects around them. But this alone isn't enough or always possible, we also need to pose characters to avoid near objects and gently nudge them into the space without disturbing objects and causing violent reactions or other issues. Not the most glamorous aspect of development, but these are some of the challenges we face with the game's complex physics and scope.

We have of course also been working hard on the new thaumaturgy domain. We have a few fully functional powers now, we've finalised all sorts of mechanics and visual interactions, done the sound design, figured out some new control and other mechanics for players and also started working on the domain tree images. This one is a bit more fleshed out than Energy, and there's a cool surprise in there. If you're wondering why we'd put effort now into player mechanics and UI, that's because we've decided to introduce the acquisition of powers from others when they are defeated in this update. If you weren't aware, the domains you start with are your "innate" ones and you naturally learn their powers, but when you witness the death of another shaper you might unlock powers that are from their domain, as well as absorb some of their "potential". This can be invested in powers to make them and their domain stronger. We still want to introduce more progression and reward mechanics, and these are some important ones. With the big core engine and game systems developed as they are now, we're finally really switching focus to enriching the gameplay experience, with things that are relatively much easier to develop, but add lots of perceived value.


Best,

Bare Mettle

Coffee Diary - November 2025
Mon, 3 November 2025

(https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com//store_item_assets/steam/apps/362490/ss_d9641461c6d0d3a37da02f0d7ae5911f1eed99d7.jpg)

Hey Exanimates,

At this point we're mainly putting the final layers of polish on the new content. This is mostly material work, to make everything look good and cohesive. Making detailed and realistic materials for modern graphics is very difficult, and making sure all the colours are balanced and that all the materials, the dirt and grime etc. belong together and their environment is like a giant game of whack-a-mole.

Even Madoc who is our main programmer has been mostly helping with getting art finalised. When Madoc gets involved in the art pipeline there's a lot of finding tool based solutions to improve results and avoid lots of brute force work. Why fix a problem once when you can fix it forever? While making the game and our own engine, in total we probably spend more time developing our content and asset creation tools. We have our own unique way of doing everything from physics, animation and AI to rendering, with many unique features; our tools are the backbone that allows us to take advantage of these features, and to develop them in the first place. When there's a major advancement in what we're able to do in the game, it usually has more to do with tools than anything else.

Our tools are extensive and designed around creating instructions for how something is made, so that the process can then be rapidly repeated and iterated on. Adjusting or improving any step of the process is relatively quick and easy, as well as creating more assets using the same or a similar process. We're proud of our tools and they're how our tiny little team is able to consistently produce cohesive, high quality, original art and content. Exanima has grown to be quite a large game, but mainly it has an enormous amount of carefully crafted stuff in it. Our most recent addition to the team, a second programmer (Jimmini), has been almost entirely dedicated to expanding our tools and content creation pipeline. These range from improving on what we can do with engine features to brand new tools which will play a major role in how we make content going forward. Some will be used for the content in the Exanima 1.0 release, but we are gearing up for what comes after.

We typically avoid showing any new content before release, but we'll make a small exception with screenshots of one asset to illustrate our art pipeline. Beyond some low poly modelling work, this was created entirely within our tools and uses our newest features, also in terms of rendering. Everything down to the brickwork and roof tiles is created entirely from scratch, giving us complete artistic control. This asset is part of a highly modular "kitbash", meaning we carefully make many individual elements (e.g. the segments of an arch) which combined in many ways and with some tricks can a large number of different assets, that still look well integrated and varied, while using fewer resources. We aim for a certain level of quality and immersive visuals that contribute to the game's atmosphere, while using approaches that are very performance friendly to keep everything running well, even on low end hardware.

(https://clan.fastly.steamstatic.com/images//8614037/2f711a5bac08b6d931e42b7477d638eb602456ce.png)

(https://clan.fastly.steamstatic.com/images//8614037/e5a2fd05408daccfd71d68f439a26d37da8b7813.png)

And here is a detail of the roof tiles which shows the kind of thing we're able to generate using procedural methods in our tools.

(https://clan.fastly.steamstatic.com/images//8614037/b48354a7237582f95caed60c8f444008abbef78d.png)

In our last diary we mentioned we were overhauling our 3D grass. The main goal was for the grass system to support not just grass but also small plants and dense undergrowth, as this would be more scalable and efficient in terms of performance and especially in terms of level design. We've made a large number of all new grasses, plants and flowers, more detailed and much higher quality than our previous assets. To make convincing 3D plants we also had to use more advanced rendering methods and there were a number of difficult problems to solve with this. We're using dense grass in environments with lots of lights and high contrast lighting, making grass not look flat or polygonal while preserving lighting detail is difficult, and performance is a concern when so much of the screen is covered in layers of grass being lit by many lights. Indeed our previous grass was heavily reliant on shadows for any depth, which are not always possible. Another common and difficult 3D graphics problem is blending, the grass in our game is small therefore thin, and we really wanted to avoid the pixelated or fuzzy look this often produces, so we needed some clever solutions.

It took a lot of fixing, tweaking and adjusting to finally get everything working and looking how we wanted, and once again adding some features to our asset creation tools was critical to getting it right. We solved all the problems we mentioned and developed some fancy custom shading that is also highly optimised. It looks great even on lower settings and blends perfectly with the ground and all its variation.

Here is an example of dense undergrowth to fill in more vegetation heavy areas. We can now quickly paint this in with a brush and it will dynamically adapt to changes in the terrain as it is edited or modified.

(https://clan.fastly.steamstatic.com/images//8614037/9d9d6369c9d596b458470bbb202b54bab14c95fc.jpg)

Here is a large amount of grass showing the variation and how it adapts and blends with the ground.

(https://clan.fastly.steamstatic.com/images//8614037/c7a4dfed2780755404cf28945fef12681adef62c.jpg)

While the ground is not intended for such close-up viewing, this zoomed in shot shows the lighting detail, including specularity and translucency. It looks convincingly 3D even under high contrast lighting:

(https://clan.fastly.steamstatic.com/images//8614037/d8bd0e84a502fe428e9a4228b13c7a757fe3dd51.jpg)

As well as a new NPC thaumaturge, in this update we're adding four new non-human encounters. The most we've added at once until now was two, and adding new creature types requires a lot of rigging, animation work, careful tweaking of physics, combat AI, sound design etc. So far we've been developing the features to support each new creature and its unique physical and other behaviours as needed and the result is a lot of custom hard coded rules and systems. With four new character types added now and more on the way, this is becoming cumbersome, but importantly this hard coded system has been a big problem for modders who like to add as many modified versions of them as possible. Modders have been very limited in this regard and when we add new creatures it takes away valuable slots they rely on and undoes their work. They've asked, and we promised modders a better system some time ago, so we decided it was finally time to add it.

We developed a proper "race" system which allows adding virtually unlimited character types featuring a massive number of properties and parameters for their appearance, physical properties, animation behaviour, AI, sound and voice effects, stats, locational resistances, equipment use, blood effects and generally how they interact with every game system. On the back of this we've made various improvements to some of the underlying mechanics and tools. We're now able to make adjustments to physics and animation in real-time to immediately see the effects in game, which really improves our workflow.

The biggest change we made though is to how character motions are managed. The new system can create custom motion sets on the fly based on race parameters, equipment, skills and combat styles and effects like special properties on items, powers etc. Motion sets are mixed and matched dynamically allowing all these conditions to provide highly specific overrides while also finding appropriate fallbacks if a motion for specific combinations is not provided, which is also great for modders. We've been wanting this sort of functionality for a long time, but understanding all the requirements and mechanics for a data driven system was a difficult problem. This is also the perfect foundation for changing motions for different weapon grips and even layering motions to support things like performing actions while running or dynamically changing stances.

In general we've been trying to work more closely with modders recently and we've been putting a lot of work into developing polished, user-friendly visual interfaces for all our tools as well as versatile systems to eventually pass on to them. We hope to begin releasing some of these soon and we're quite excited to see what the modding community comes up with. Already with these new systems we expect there's a whole lot they'll be able to do. We're a little restricted with the relatively serious and realistic tone of the game, but modders can be more daring and tend to push at the limits of what our game can do.

We do mention our tools from time to time, but only briefly and usually without specifics. We realise it's not what many gamers get excited about, you just want more content nao, and the amount of effort we put into the back end or seemingly small additions to the game might seem insane, but while Exanima might now be close to its 1.0 release, we're only just getting started and there is so much more we plan to do with these systems and tools. We're in it for the long haul, and to create something special. We know the long development cycles can be frustrating, but we're still here, as dedicated as ever and we will continue to deliver more and better game. The 1.0 release is ultimately an arbitrary milestone.


Best,
Bare Mettle

Coffee Diary - December 2025
Mon, 1 December 2025

(https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com//store_item_assets/steam/apps/362490/ss_ea82743d746449e6ad3bc34aa0546310acd39727.jpg)

Hey Exanimates,

We're very close to beginning closed testing of the full 0.9.5 update. This will be mainly for the new area, encounter types, new items and thaumaturgy.

While there have been some engine changes such as rendering optimisations and the new grass and race systems, it's mostly content and the big changes were already thoroughly tested in the testing branch. We don't expect this to last long or involve difficult technical issues. Originally we hoped to begin testing a bit sooner, but of course we ended up making a few more improvements and additions.

The new race system we discussed in the last diary is up and running, and while switching everything over to it we improved many things. We won't repeat all things it was designed to support and how it improves our creature and animation workflow, but we immediately saw benefits and took advantage of some of the new features. In configuring animations with the new tools and making new animations for the new encounters we ended up improving many of the older animations too, sometimes because of what the new tools allowed, and sometimes because we noticed some weren't working very well. The walk and run cycles is something that we improved on particularly, but while updating those we had some issues with characters losing balance, which led to a long investigation which finally ended in improving how characters balance during locomotion. This means there's now a lot less falling over or stumbling for no good reason while walking and running.

In animating the new creatures (and some new armour) we ran into another production bottleneck that has been a particular annoyance throughout development: skinning. Skinning is a term for how characters and whatever they're wearing deform as they move. We use a peculiar system of our own design which is optimised for our extremely modular and dynamic armour system and also to give us very fine-grained control over the behaviour of things like the articulation in armour. Designing these deformations however is a very lengthy and tedious process, made much more tedious by our reliance on 3rd party modelling programs for most of the work and basically not really being able to see what we're doing. We recently overhauled our apparel system, and a big part of this was a new skinning solution for clothing specifically which is almost completely automatic and give much better results, but for articulation of armour and whole new creatures this doesn't work. Faced with this big skinning workload, Madoc again decided it was time to improve and invest in our tools, so we can now design the deformations and even skeletal structure of creatures directly in our engine with much better tools designed for this purpose, and interactive results. These tools represent a big step for a lot more than just skinning though, as they are essentially the foundation of our in-house modelling tools, which will solve other problems and importantly allow us to better use a lot of other engine specific features. This includes some big new environment design features we've been working on. It's too much to get into right now, but we'll probably do a showcase of these later on as they're a pretty big deal.

The game has a lot of unique features and a unique engine and this means a lot of unique problems to solve and just difficult technical development. It is what it is, we're not just developing the game, but the entire platform it is developed on at the same time. We're moving in a different direction to everyone else so we have to figure out a lot of stuff that no one else has tried to figure out yet. Sometimes we have to make a difficult choice between the quickest way to do something now and the best way to do it now and in the future too. We made the wrong choice many times early in development, and doing things better, not quicker is a lesson we wished we would have learned earlier and that would have saved us a lot of time. We don't want to make that mistake again.

Anyway, no more developing new tools and systems before the update is out, we promise! At this point we're really just wrapping things up and at most we'll be touching up the content while testing is ongoing.


Best,

Bare Mettle

Coffee Diary - January 2026
Mon, January 5, 2026


Hey Exanimates,

We're working as hard as we can to get everything ready for the 0.9.5 update, but one of the new creatures we're introducing has proven a lot more problematic than we expected. This creature is larger and more oddly proportioned than anything we've done before, and this has caused a lot of problems with our physics driven character motion. Character physics have been our biggest development challenge, it took us literally years of experimenting, iterating and refining them before we got them to a point where most players were happy with how characters move and respond to inputs.

This is immeasurably more complex than just an animation problem. Our character's movements are driven exclusively by physical forces and virtual muscles, they physically interact with everything, they must promptly react to inputs and move in any direction while also turning, performing actions, negotiating uneven ground, reacting to collisions and forces and trying to stay balanced, all at the same time. And that's just the basics, with many more specific and difficult problems we had to tackle. It's not just an animation or physics problem, the meat of it is how characters reactively decide when and how to move each part of their body, how much force to exert with each muscle in every moment to produce slick, smooth and plausibly human-like movement while also feeling very responsive to control. Humans are able to do this thanks to millions of years of evolution and a lifetime of practice in the real world. A program that can replicate much of this in a fast real time sim is no small feat. We started with something very clumsy, and while we hoped to improve it, we believed that players would be more forgiving of some of the clumsiness for everything that such a dynamic system has to offer. We know now that's not how things go. There's always room to improve many things, but after all this work the core physics that are the foundation of gameplay are undeniably in a good place and far better than we ever imagined they could be.

Unfortunately, this new creature threw a huge spanner in the works of all this fine tuning we've done over the years. We've been focusing on teaching humans to move, and so far we've gotten away with just some broad adjustments for other humanoid characters. The odd proportions and even just the distribution of mass on this new creature really did not work well at all, and this was kind of terrifying as it's a very delicately balanced system that at this point feels more like magic than science. Any small change could throw everything out of whack, and we couldn't even be sure if getting this creature working is possible. Humans after all are real, bio-mechanically sound creatures, this is something less anatomically plausible.

The new creature could barely even stand, it wasn't able to move its limbs properly and dashing and running around was far beyond its capabilities. We weren't just going to give up and cut it though, we had to try. We still want to add many more creatures, our plans include that creature types are very local and vary as we expand the world. We're even considering adding procedural elements to creatures as well, building on our already very modular and morphable character system. So we began the difficult and scary process of trying to understand all the reasons why it failed to move properly and do something about it.

Our first problem was with basic muscle function, and this at least was relatively simple to solve. Instead of scaling all muscles while assuming human proportions we now measure parts of the body and scale each muscle accordingly. This worked well and it's fully automatic, adapting to any change in body structure for any individual character, which is great. Our next problem was definitely on the scary side: footwork. All the fast and completely dynamic work of movement and staying balanced in combat while performing actions. This was the magic sauce that we were so scared of spoiling, something we arrived at through years of trial and error, sometimes working on a promising idea for months only to discard it when we just couldn't get it to work, and sometimes discovering improvements more by accident than intent. Our new creature wasn't impressed, and so we warily tried to unravel the magic and figure out exactly why some things that worked so well didn't here. Eventually we transformed enough of the magic into exact math that took the specific proportions of the body into account and got things working well without breaking anything. Again we had something that should just work better than ever with any creature. Big sigh of relief.

Our final problem was with walking and running, which has proven much more difficult than we anticipated. We'd recently made some improvements for other creatures and thought this would be easy, but no matter what we do the new creature keeps falling, stumbling, dragging their feet and so on. Walking and running is the most artificial part of our character physics, unlike the entirely physics driven and dynamic combat movement where motions are generated on the fly, this is based on motions that are designed by hand to look natural, with some invisible forces and essentially hacks to help the character stay upright and moving. This seems like a simpler system, but it must still interact with physics and have dynamic behaviours, and the simplified part is where things went wrong. It's just too rigidly coded to our current animations, so the new creature with its weird long legs and animations just can't move effectively or stay balanced.

We tried to just make adjustments, but nothing worked and it became clear the only solution was a more complete simulation, and this means a significant overhaul that we're still in the process of. We're now analysing the specific hand made animations as they apply to the character, comparing animation inputs to what's actually happening in the physics to make dynamic adjustments, predicting exactly where and when the feet should land and how high above the ground they should be as they move, how much each leg should push the character off the ground and propel them forward at any moment among other things. The creature now moves well on flat ground at least, and things are generally improved for everyone, the motions look more grounded and physical. We're still working on balancing on uneven ground, but we've done a lot of the big difficult stuff so hopefully we can fix the last few issues quickly. We do expect to see more general improvements, and as we keep adding more verticality to the world and more creatures these are important. Some of the things we developed here are also interesting for features we hope to add in future, such as more contextual movement and traversal animations and things like quick recoveries for losing balance or falling in different ways.

Rewinding a little, before we could even test the new creature in game, we've been using our new in-house tools for rigging and skinning. You never know what's missing, needs fixing or improving until you use something, so there was a lot of that. While the tools are fairly specific for now, they're part of new tool systems we plan to use for many things yet and there was quite a lot of engine level support to getting the entire workflow in a good solid state. We also realised that there was one important step still missing from our character production process, which is modelling additional collision mesh for parts of the character such as the joints. Our tools aren't quite yet equipped for this kind of modelling, but we did one better and can now just generate this entirely automatically. At this point we can take our character artist's raw 3D models and create textures and materials, rig them, skin them, animate them, give them properties and behaviours and add them as fully functional in game characters without ever touching a 3rd party program or a line of code. We don't expect you to understand just how much of a difficult and confusing process this previously was, but this is a pretty big deal.

We have also been working on some improvements to our procedural item and material systems, some of these were urgent, but we've also got other things still in progress and can probably wait until after the update. We're working on some improvements to how materials and parts of objects blend together, adding more advanced effects to character materials and also expanding the procedural materials to work not only as part of our procedural item system, but as a general engine feature. This means we can give any object dynamic procedural materials, we can use them while authoring items which is great for our new tools and we can "break" the procedural item rules as needed. If for example an armour had a lot of additional elements that don't fit in our character layouts, we could add "modules" with custom layouts. We already made our weapon layouts more versatile and added some new features for compound elements to support some new weapons. Speaking of which, we're adding a first batch of the new ornate procedural weapons that we've teased a few times on our discord. These will be rare loot, and once we have more types we will probably also add them as alternative tournament rewards. Here's a few examples of some in game generated outputs:

Have a great new year,

Bare Mettle

(https://clan.fastly.steamstatic.com/images//8614037/0665101dc66488d488e7d41332bf516067d8f0f8.png)