28/11/22
Yep, you guessed it, we're still not done with pathfinding. We've actually got the new pathfinder integrated into the game, it's dynamically creating multilayered 3D maps, efficiently applying dynamic updates that can create new paths, bridge layers and all that. At this point we're working on the AI side of things, the new pathfinding is more complex and requires more AI logic, and here we also need to strike a balance between what's possible and what we're actually willing to do, at least for now. We've already gone well past what were our pathfinding requirements for this update and all in with many improvements that were more of a wishlist.
This and other AI work has at least for now taken precedence over a number of things we've been thinking of including in this update. These mostly fall into the category of relatively small, but important things. We've been laying foundations and refining core gameplay, building content based on lore and the game world and pretty much ignoring other gameplay features and considerations unless they happen to interact closely with some of these things. For some time now though this has been quite a big focus for us internally, finding ways to take advantage of these foundations and adding features to make the gameplay experience more diverse and rewarding.
Gameplay features in the context of Exanima are not easy to develop. We're subject to a lot of restrictions from lore and world design, the physics based gameplay and generally avoiding things that feel gamey. Sometimes we like to take elements of games and reimagine them in a way that is realistic and logical, which can be interesting, but is limited and often requires a much bigger effort than just adding some numbers and inexplicable "magic". Procedural weapons and everything that came with it (and still to come) is a good example of this, we couldn't just add ever increasing stats and unrealistic abilities, so we made generated weapons with diverse physical features, mechanics and realistic qualities.
We do have a big list of things we want to add to the game still, and fortunately these don't tend to require the kind of effort to implement that something like procedural weapons did, but they can still be complex to design. Many are indeed just small features and additions, or just using what we have to create more unique and memorable moments in the game. We don't tend to talk about these because we're not sure when they will make an appearance or if they'll even make the cut, but we do think that these smaller additions will collectively have a very big impact on the whole game. These last couple of updates before the game is "finished" is when we want to finally focus more on the gameplay side of things. Looking beyond Exanima, we do also have some quite large gameplay systems that we can see making an appearance in updates to Exanima beyond version 1.0.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
