Greetings everyone!

We need your feedback! Now that we have announced the new seasons system, we want to hear from you about your ideas on how you would like to see the system implemented. A short survey has been posted at https://forms.gle/Ni3VXWWYxSHyWVhFA to gather community feedback regarding rewards, wipes, etc.. This poll will be open until Friday 8/2/19 11:59PM CST.

Thank you in advance for your suggestions, and we look forward to your feedback.

Hello Survivors,

Thank you for your patience as we finalized writing this month's dev blog. Over the past 2 months, a lot has happened with the studio which we wanted to include in this blog and we felt it was best to wait until everything was lined up. I (Joshua) also took a much needed vacation to replenish the energy reserves! Don’t worry - the rest of the team was hard at work while I was away and there has been plenty of planning and discussion. Also Karan and WarG have a bunch of art content waiting to be implemented!

First, I'd like to address the concerns of the reduced server populations. We are well aware of this and are planning our journey through Early Access accordingly. We believe this is relatively normal for an Early Access game in the current games market. From our success at launch, we have seen that there is great demand for an action-focused looter shooter - and we’ve also seen the demand for additional content to keep you all engaged. With that in mind, we have now hired an additional developer (Reuben) who will assist with pushing out new content more frequently.

Reuben will start at Spotted Kiwi Interactive on the 1st of August and will be working alongside myself and our artists to implement pending art and create new core gameplay elements. We are also going to be working on migrating the game to the latest Unreal Engine version (4.22), which includes lots of server and client performance improvements.

Secondly, I wanted to address the concerns of content timelines. After many internal discussions we have decided we want to accelerate development to reach a v1.0 release as soon as possible. This will allow us to bring more content out to you in a shorter amount of time.

From the most recent polling carried out by Gary we have established that the currency system will be the next core feature to be implemented into the game - as per our roadmap we are planning to have this implemented in August. You can see all the content we have planned for the game here: https://trello.com/b/yGBsrAZF/xera-survival-public-roadmap.

We’ve also made some internal changes to how we plan to deliver patches and content updates. We will aim to deliver at least one major content update per month, alongside 1-2 hotfix patches to address any bugs or issues.

Thirdly, there is the frequent questioning of when there will be a wipe. We have always said that wipes are inevitable. We believe wipes are the best way to reset the game economy when major changes are implemented. This moves us onto the implementation of seasons.

Given the plan to accelerate development, the seasons system will allow us to have a schedule of wipes to keep the game’s economy fresh as we’re adding new content. It will also give us the opportunity to introduce new skins as well as rotate skins from the previous season. A season will run every 2-3 months and at the start of every season there will be a full wipe. We also plan to allow players to earn seasonal rewards, based on leaderboard position for both XP and Skill Rating. We will have more details coming in the future as we continue to discuss this internally. We would love your feedback on seasons so feel free to tell us what you think!

We have plans to start “Season 1” when the currency system has been implemented. We hope that this system will offer more transparency for the timing of wipes and offer new opportunities to be one of the top players each season.


In the first week of June we were all pretty much flat out keeping the plates spinning. Since then I’ve been hard at work on business development – we had a great deal of interest from publishers, other retailers besides Steam and they all need answering. I’ve been building Facebook advertising campaigns which hit alongside Patch 3, with help from Facebook’s marketing team. We’ve now translated the Steam store page into French, German, Russian, Polish, Thai, Spanish, and Simplified Chinese – thanks to community members who have helped proof-read, please let me know if you find any problems.

We have marketing via Facebook planned for all the monthly patches going forward, plus of course to the community, and we have big plans for a massive push around Halloween time, especially in North America. Stay tuned!

We’ve worked hard on modelling now that we have the first cash burn figures (Steam’s reporting is a month in arrears). We answered our main question - can we recruit more staff soon? Reuben will soon be on the team, helping Joshua with programming to speed up the rate we can bring new content and features into the game. We’re in this for the long haul through Early Access, but hey, it will be nice to make the haul a bit shorter by adding resources.


What an amazing launch it has been. To keep you guys up to speed on what I've been up to the past 2 months, here is a breakdown.

As of June 10th, I was officially hired full time by Spotted Kiwi Interactive, and I have been in my current role since January of this year. Previously I served as a community moderator for the game. What this means to you guys as a community is I am now able to dedicate all of my spare time to the studio and to you, our wonderful community.

On a daily basis, I have a lot on my plate such as monitoring all social media outlets for the studio, monitoring Discord, our forums, reddit, and keeping up with the industry by knowing what's going on with other studios and games being developed. I am also responsible for monitoring support tickets and responding in a timely fashion, as well as all reports that come through our in game reporting system. On top of that, I'm in charge of our QA team and regularly do a lot of internal testing myself.

As you can see there is a lot that I do every day, but I enjoy every single moment of it.

Most recently I have been heavily involved with talking to Joshua about the feedback you have all sent and I want to thank everyone for voicing your opinions on what you would like to see change and be added to the game. Prior to the last content update, I had been leading the charge on the testing of our most recent patch including getting to the bottom of why our new Crashed Helicopter Event caused so many issues and assisting with the rebalancing of several items within the game, and planning out our 3rd event, the Civilian Bunker event. It's been a ton of fun interacting with all of you and I can’t wait to help bring even more content along with the rest of the team in the future!

Thank you to everyone for your continued support!


I have been busy working on keeping all of our amazing Partners and Creators plugged in and enjoying the game, as well as getting new creators on board and helping them create quality content for XERA: Survival.

My day to day activities consist of answering new partner applications, reaching out to content creators currently playing the game, working with current partners and creators to organize events and giveaways, and providing overall support to the community when Gary is getting some much needed rest!

I have also been working with our Partners to create their very own skins in game! These will be rolling out quite soon!




Thank you all for making our dream become a reality!


The past 2 months I’ve worked on the XERA research bunker as well as some other assets that have been previewed in our art-wip channel on Discord. Some early progress was shown some time ago but this time it's been populated with lots of props to make it an interesting place to explore with a few surprises in it. I’ve also created some other small buildings that will be used to fill some of the small areas of the map. The next big project has been the motel building, which was shown in the Discord channel. I’ve spent the last few days working on creating new props to fill every room of the building to make it feel what once was a nice place to stay…









Over the past 2 months I have made a lot of progress designing new skins that will be coming in the future. Of the 100+ different skins that I completed the past 2 months, these are some of my favorites that will be coming in the future!






As always, thank you all for your continued support. We really appreciate those who are sticking around for the journey, and hope if you are sitting on the sidelines that you’ll join us once again when the time is right.

We’re really excited about the expansion of the team and hope that you are ready for all the new content that we have planned.

Cheers,
Spotted Kiwi Interactive

We hope you all enjoyed our Independence day event!

At 6:00am CST today, we will be briefly taking the servers down. At this time we will deploy a hotfix and will close our Independence Day event. The expected downtime will be up to 30 minutes.

Patch notes

• Removed Independence Day Event

Cheers,
Joshua

At 8:00am CST today, we will be briefly taking the servers down. At this time we will deploy a hotfix and launch our Independence Day event. The expected downtime will be up to 30 minutes.

• You will gain a skin-box for every supply drop opened
  
• You will gain a skin-box for every Civilian Bunker Event activated
  
• "Survivor Box" will now have a 30% chance of giving an Independence Day Weapon skin and a 70% chance of giving a regular skin

• Increased time to open boxes to 6s (was 3)
  
• Improved loot table

• Improved loot table

• Fixed black heavy armour protection (was 18% now 15%)

• Gas usage has been reduced by half

Greetings Survivors!

We have some exciting news! At 3:45AM today, we will be deploying a major content update!
The expected downtime will be less than 1 hour.
Thank you to everyone for your support and we look forward to your feedback on the new content!

• New crashed Helicopter Event
  
• Added Civilian Bunker event

• 5+ players are required on the server to activate the Helicopter Crash event
  
• Helicopter crash event will appear on the map at a random designated location (of 6 spawn points)
  
• Helicopter event will spawn every 45 minutes
  
• Helicopter event will drop 20 salvageable crates giving 15 XP each when opened as well as military grade loot
  
• Helicopter will despawn after 25 minutes of crashing

• 5+ players are required on the server to activate the Civilian Bunker event
  
• Civilian Bunkers will require a "Civilian Bunker Key" to open. These can only be found at the helicopter crash event or within the civilian bunkers themselves.
  
• Civilian Bunkers will will only activate on 5+ player servers
  
• Civilian Bunkers will be "enabled" every 30-45 minutes
  
• Civilian Bunkers will "disable" if not opened within 30 minutes
  
• Civilian Bunkers will go on cooldown for 30 minutes after being opened
  
• Civilian Bunkers will close after players leave the area
  
• Civilian Bunkers will spawn 25 items inside when opened
  
• Civilian Bunkers will spawn a wave of 30 Humanoid Robots (5% chance of exploders)
  
• Only one Civilian Bunker can be Active / Enabled at a time

• Removed "Very Common" (G-17) drops from 5 player + airdrops
  
• Modified various drop tables to include new M16 Weapon and MTV Armour

• You can now exit a vehicle while in water
  
• Improved system that find an exit location for vehicles, this should help with instances of getting stuck
  
• Vehicles will now use Fuel when driving
  
• Vehicles can now be repaired by hitting it with a crowbar (5% repair per hit)
  
• Implemented a fix that may fix losing gear if disconnecting while on an ATV

• Reduced Heavy Vest protection to 15% (was 18%)
  
• Reduced Light Plated Armour protection to 10% (was 12%)
  
• Implemented MTV - Protects 13%

• Reworked C4 compound area
  
• Added rocks around all compounds / Heli crash zones
  
• Fixed an issue with Police building collision
  
• Fixed an issue with cabin building collision

• Added new M16 Assault Rifle
  
• Reduced damage of AR-15 to 11% was 13%
  
• Reduced damage of AK-47 to 13.5% was 14%
  
• Reduced damage of MP5 to 10% (was 10.5%)
  
• Increased recoil of AR-15

• Added footstep sounds to crouching (at a 30% volume)

• Fixed an issue causing group icons to not fade when zooming after respawning

• Right clicking Gasoline near a vehicle will now show "Refill" option (Within 4m radius)

• New "Gasoline" item (Restores 35% fuel)
  
• New M16 Assault Rifle
  
• New MTV Armour Item
  
• New Civilian Bunker Key

• Added new hint for Helicopter Event
  
• Added new hint for Compound Event
  
• Added new hint for Bunker Event

• Added timed Gasoline spawns at gas stations

Hello Survivors!

Thank you for all of the feedback over the past week. We have made some recent updates that will be deployed with this hotfix. The downtime will be between 30 minutes to 1 hour.

The following is a list of patch notes from this update.

Added recoil recovery (reset) system
Adjusted default recoil for all weapons (slightly more recoil than before)
Adjusted recoil for AK-47
Adjusted recoil for Scar-L
Adjusted recoil for Scar-h
Adjusted recoil for MP5
Adjusted recoil for G36
Adjusted recoil for Honey Badger

Fixed an issue causing group tags to not update when using the drone
You can no longer accept group invites while in an ATV or a Drone
Group icons (including death icon) will now fade when aiming in

Added button to mute/unmute players in-game (right click in player list)

Added new 'SMG' fall-off to MP5, UMP-9 and Honey Badger

Removed Double XP
Removed Double Skinbox

We hope you will enjoy these changes and please continue to send us feedback! If you haven't already, please be sure to also leave us a review with your feedback as this will help us with future content and adjustments as we continue development.

Cheers!

After gathering feedback from the community, and discussing things internally, we have made the decision to no longer allow Re-Shade to be used in game.

This was something the team discussed at length last night and we feel this is the best move as it gives an unfair advantage when removing/changing fog.

This drastically changes the competitive dynamic of the game by allowing players to reduce the fog visibility by using the 3rd party software. If you have previously used the software, EAC will request that you remove it before you are allowed to connect to the servers.

We appreciate your feedback and look forward to bringing our next hotfix very soon.

Hello survivors!

We hope you all enjoyed the double event, this has now come to an end.

I've also made some adjustments to fall-off and recoil this hotfix.

Adjusted recoil for AK47
Adjusted recoil for G36
Adjusted recoil for Honey Badger

Added new 'SMG' fall-off to MP5, UMP-9 and Honey Badger

Removed Double XP
Removed Double Skinbox

Cheers,
Joshua

Hello Survivors!

We're happy to announce a double XP and double level-up crate event!

Until June 12th you will receive double experience and two level-up crates on each level.

Event Ends: 12:00AM 12 June (CST)

We hope you have a fun time with this event, and wish you luck unboxing your survivor crates!

Cheers,
Joshua

Hello Survivors!

We appreciate all your feedback on the new recoil system. I've made some tweaks that will hopefully make it more enjoyable until we create unique patterns for each weapon.

The recoil is still very experimental, so please keep the feedback coming.

Adjusted recoil so it's less for tap-firing and slower build-up for spraying
Unique recoils for each weapon will be added in future patches

Fixed some issues with trees clipping into tents at compound events
Fixed trees clipping into some bunkers

Bullet tracers will now only show for other players (This will become an option in the future)
Fixed some issues causing bullet tracers to go through objects

Cheers,
Joshua