Jun 25, 2020

XERA: Survival - IcedYoshi

Greetings Survivors!

We are happy to announce that Early Access Patch 6.5 is now live. As we mentioned in our June Development Update, there have been several changes made based on community feedback as well as additional content added to the game with this patch.

Developer Note - The additional backpack space and damage reduction provided by armours when damage is taken by ai has not been implemented in this patch. This feature has been pushed back to patch 6.6 and will be the next thing we work on.

As always please feel free to let us know your thoughts on the balance changes and new systems that have been released.

Patch Notes

Repair System

Equipment Repair System implemented via Workbenches located at safe settlements
You can now repair armour & weapons at workbenches
You can now dismantle armour and weapons at workbenches

Vendor

Vendor will now give a discount on bought items depending on your in-game level
Vendor will now give better prices for items depending on your in-game level
Fixed an issue with durability not showing on selling item

Player to Player Trade System

Added ability to trade cash for items
General trade UI improvements

Humanoids

New humanoid textures added to Common Robot
New humanoid textures added to Exploder Robot
New humanoid textures added to Boss Robot

Weapons

New Electric Pipe melee added (19% base damage) - This will have an additional ai stun feature in a future patch

Crafting

Electric Pipe Recipe added

Camp Fire

Camp fires will now show "cooked" status using durability bar
Camp fires will now gradually cook each item individually instead of one at a time
Camp fires will now only burn sticks when they are low
Increased fire crackling sound radius
Disabled shadowing on the fire lighting to help with performance
Changed action from 'SEARCH' to 'USE'
Disabled collision on camp fires
Fixed an issue that allowed stacking of camp fires
Fixed an issue causing camp fires to affect navigation

Vehicles

Fixed an issue that caused blood splat to not show when damaged on a vehicle
Fixed an issue that caused hostile timer to not update when on a vehicle
Fixed an issue that prevented armour from being updated when moved to atv storage
Fixed an issue that allowed moving a backpack to atv storage and going over-weight

Map

Added new town to Redwood Valley - Clifton
Added new area to Redwood Valley - Ridgeway Trailer Park
Added new area to Redwood Valley - Ridgeway Tunnel
Added new safe settlement designs

Drone

Drone system will now check if there is line of sight to spawn location to prevent going through objects/landscape
Fixed an issue with the drone hud not showing after undeploying

General UI polish/improvements
Trade will now cancel the trade if the player is in another window, E.G Global Stash
You can now hide your hud while using a vehicle
Fixed an issue with restoring default settings not applying new settings
Disabling first person crosshair is now functional
Added group markers to map ui
Settings menu will now automatically close when settings is applied

Inventory

Fixed an issue that prevented backpacks from being picked up when at max weight

New Items

The following new items have been added to the game
Weapon Parts - Can be obtained by breaking down weapons at the repair station
Heavy Armour Plate - Can be found at military areas, helicopter crash sites, civilian bunkers, or by breaking down Heavy Plated Armour
Light Armour Plate - Can be found at military areas, helicopter crash sites, civilian bunkers, or by breaking down light plated armours or mtvs
Plastic - Can be found in civilian and industrial areas or by breaking down Civilian NVGs or Football Helmets
Fibre-reinforced plastic - Can be found at military and industrial areas or by breaking down military helmets
Pliers - Can be found in civilian and industrial areas
Sewing Kit - Can be found in civilian areas
Epoxy Resin - Can be found in industrial areas
Weapon Repair Kit - Can be found at military areas.
Screwdriver - Can be found in civilian and industrial areas.

Loot Tables

Added new industrial loot spawn table to warehouse areas
Updated and balanced multiple loot tables
Implemented multiple new items into various loot tables

Jun 18, 2020

Development Update: June 2020

XERA: Survival - IcedYoshi

Greetings Survivors!

Now that it's been a couple of weeks since the last patch, we wanted to give you all a quick update on what's been happening behind the scenes.

As you know one of the things we've promised would be coming soon is the repair system for weapons and armor. We're excited to let you know that we've made a ton of progress and are hoping to push the repair system with patch 6.5. With the release of the repair system, it's important for everyone to understand how it will work. The following are some details on what to expect.

Repair Benches will be located in every safe zone. This will allow for players to repair their items before and after going out in the world.
In order to repair your item, you will need to gather repair materials which can be gathered by breaking down other items. Each item you repair will require a specific recipe of a repair tool (there will be 3 different tools available and these will have a specific purpose for what item they are used to repair), parts (there will be 10 different parts and similar to the repair tool, you will need specific parts for specific items in order to repair them), and currency (this is a service fee charged by the npc for their repair service).
The amount of materials and currency required in order to repair an item will depend on how damaged the item is. For example, if you have a Scar-H that's at 90% durability, it will require significantly fewer repair parts and currency than if you need to repair a Scar-H with 50% durability. By implementing a scale based on the amount of work required to repair items, this will allow players to maintain their higher tier items and give an alternate way for players to recycle their items other than p2p trading and selling items to the vendor.
Requirements for repairing items will scale based on a tier system. For instance, repairing a mp5 at 50% durability would require far less cash and materials than lets say a vss at 70% durability. This should help bring balance to those lower tier items that degrade faster, and allow for players to make a choice on whether they want to break down low tier items to ensure they have the best quality high tier items, or allow them to recycle their extra high tier items, and build up a stash of their lower/mid tier items.

We look forward to gathering everyone's feedback on the repair system and being this is the first iteration, we have plans for expanding the system in the future as well as balancing anything that needs to be revisited.

Along with the repair system, we are also excited to announce that we are making more updates to the current map in order to fill the void of running out of places to explore and things to do. With this being said, we are also working on the map for Arm's Race, and will be starting working on the new map in the near future. With the amount of work that's required to be able to bring our plans to life, we are excited to also announce that as of Monday, we have added a new staff member who will be in charge of level design as well as the creation of the new maps, and new poi's on the current map. Please give a warm welcome to Erekose!

"Hello everyone! I'm very excited to be part of the Spotted Kiwi Interactive team and to be working on XERA: Survival. The team has been very welcoming and the community seems to be just as wonderful!"

"A little background on myself: I was first introduced to gaming at a very young age with Diablo and Quake 3. I quickly realised I wanted to work on video games in my early teens. I've been dabbling in indie game development since I left high school but started my professional game dev career in 2019, as a junior level designer for Rocketwerkz in Dunedin. Since leaving Rocketwerkz and coming to Spotted Kiwi Interactive, I've been busy getting to know the team and delving into XERA: Survival. I'm currently working on some changes to the safe zones on the map, making them feel more lived in and expanding them for future updates."

"During my time here I'll be focusing on creating fun and unique maps for the upcoming Arm's Race and Deathmatch game modes. I'll also be working on the new main map in the near future that I hope the community will enjoy looting, fighting and destroying robots in. This map will feature new Points of Interest, new settlements and plenty of awesome locations that will make exploring even more fun and rewarding."

"I'm already deep in work here and I've dedicated myself to bring something different to XERA: Survival that I hope both new and veteran players will all come to love. I can't wait for the players to see all this content we have planned and I'm excited to join you guys in the game soon. Thank you!"

-Erekose

Here's a sneak peak at a few of the new POI as well as a preview of the UI's that have had an additional polish done on them!

One of the challenges we have always had is seeing new bugs pop up after moving releases to the live servers that didn’t appear in a dev environment. Thank you to everyone that has been on top of reporting any bugs you encounter. Because of your reports and feedback, we will also be including several fixes to vehicles, collisions, assets, and much more. These bug fixes will be noted in the patch notes once patch 6.5 goes live.

Another point we would like to discuss with the community revolves around the vendor/currency system. Many people have raised concerns that the vendor is greedy and doesn’t pay enough for items being sold to him. As we have spoken to before, vendor balancing is one of the most difficult things to get right as it can lead to a massive imbalance with people being able to just buy all the high tier loot which causes players to not explore the map and play the game as intended. We have heard your feedback and now that we will be able to implement the repair system, we will be adjusting the buyback values that the vendor pays for items. These values will still scale based on a couple of factors, durability, and if the vendor currently has the item in stock. We have also added a dialog box to the vendor along with an updated UI in order to help new players understand how to get the most from their items when selling them to the vendor.

Finally we are excited to announce that we have 2 new game mechanics that will be coming with patch 6.5!

The first is that peer to peer trading will now allow for players to trade cash for items between each other! Looking to get more value for your item than the greedy Marquet offers? Are you a bit light on cash and want to get a better deal on an item than what is offered at the vendor? This will no longer be a problem as you will now be able to create your own player market by buying and selling items from each other with the peer to peer trading system. This is just the first step towards creating a global market within the game for in game items and we hope to implement an offline marketplace as well similar to an auction house type system in the future.

The last change we would like to announce and are excited about revolves around players running out of backpack space and looking for other uses for their items. We feel like a great way to expand the current player inventory system as well as give more value to gear other than protection would be to have armor items increase your player inventory capacity. With the release of patch 6.5, armor will now add additional inventory weight on your player. We do not intend to do a “pockets” system at this time, and instead wearing armor will simply expand the amount of weight your player is able to carry.

A lot has been happening in the background as you can see and we can’t wait to release patch 6.5. Feel free to leave us your comments, feedback, and questions on what’s coming! Patch 6.5 will be going live next week!

Cheers!
Spotted Kiwi Interactive

May 23, 2020

Welcome to XERA: Survival Season 2! Patch Notes - Early Access Patch #6

XERA: Survival - IcedYoshi

Season 2 Introduction

Greetings survivors and welcome to Season 2! We are excited to give everyone a fresh start in the game this season along with releasing a ton of new content for you guys. Over the past several months our team has been working day and night behind the scenes to improve the overall player experience. Our QA team as well as our volunteer playtesting group have put a lot of time into making sure that the new season is well balanced and feels rewarding. To those who helped with the testing of the patch, we want to thank you for your hard work and dedication throughout the long hours that have been spent testing this release.

With the closing of Season 1, we would like to congratulate everyone who finished in the top 25 on the leader boards. Season 1 leader boards can be found at https://xeragame.com/leaderboard. We will be granting your seasonal reward soon to those who qualified.

As we have been working non-stop in the past week to finalize the content that is being released for this patch, we feel confident and many bugs have been fixed with this patch, however due to us working up until the release of this new patch, it is possible that some bugs may appear over the next few days. We ask that everyone please report any issues to us via our support email at support@xeragame.com so that our team can assign it to the appropriate team members, and be able to follow up on your report. Our staff is also available via our discord server at https://discord.gg/xera to answer any questions you may have.

One of the most common questions we see every day is “Why did you do this? Why was this changed?” We have anticipated some of the questions and along with these patch notes, we have included some notes from our development team to try and help players understand the reasoning behind some of the changes to the overall game play. It is very important to us that we receive useful feedback from the community as we have always been and always will be a community driven game and our team is happy to discuss ideas with the community.

We are excited for this fresh start to XERA: Survival and hope that you are just as excited to join us for the new Season. As was previously announced, we have done a full wipe of all game stats and items in conjunction with the start of Season 2. As a special thank you to players who participated during our holiday events, any player that had a holiday item will retain 1 copy of each different holiday item that was present in their GI at the time of the wipe.

Cheers,

The Spotted Kiwi Interactive Team

Developer Notes

Game User Interface Overhaul

We felt like the game’s UI was getting quite dated, it has done wonders for the duration of our alpha and early access - but we felt an additional polish was required moving forward. This will be one of the main changes you will notice in Season 2. We have gone through basically all the game’s UIs and gave them a face-lift, including a new font, new general feel and many bug fixes and QOL improvements.

Character Core Status

We have adjusted the rate of hunger - it will now drain faster, we hope that with this change players will need to watch it more closely and move into areas which they can find supplies to keep their hunger and thirst replenished. We felt that food items were usually eaten to obtain more backpack space - rather than actually trying to increase those stats.

Loot and Loot Tables

We have carried out some major changes to loot tables, making mid - high tiered gear less accessible. With this we hope that it will give a higher sense of achievement when coming across these items.

We have also introduced a new container interaction system, which helps us fill the world with more loot and creates a new mechanic for players to search objects for items. Over time we will make more objects interactable and searchable.

We have also reduced the amount of items that spawn at the legacy spawn points. Doing this also helps balance the loot economy by limiting the supply of items.

Currency / Vendor Changes

We have dramatically reduced the buy-back rates of all items in the game. We felt that it was very easy for players to gain a few high-tier weapons, sell them to a trader and gain a lot of currency. This allowed players to be able to stack their stash potentially with enough gear to last a season. This change will hopefully assist with the overall goal of Season 2’s looting to be more satisfying.

Weapons / Armours and Conditions system

The introduction of the condition system allows us to ultimately “tier” gear under the hood. For example, a brand new weapon will deal it’s full base damage, whereas a more worn weapon will deal less damage. The same goes for armours in a sense of what protection they provide the player is also dependent on its condition. Thus coming across less worn gear becomes more desirable. Gear also degrades with use and with damage dealt that has been dealt to it.

Important Note: We are still in the process of finishing the design behind the repairing of items, and this will be hot-fixed in the coming weeks. Feel free to give us your feedback on how you would like to see the repairing system implemented.

AI / Humanoids

We have done some design tweaks to the humanoids, one being that you can now “stun” them without them dealing damage to you. This is useful when going one-on-one with a robot using a melee weapon however, taking on a group of humanoids will still come with a certain degree of difficulty. We have also made some changes to the melee system as well in order to make fighting robots more responsive. These changes are mostly in first-person - so we recommend using first person when fighting robots with melees as it will be more accurate.

Throwables

We’ve carried out another pass on our throwables system. We have added some new animations when cooking a grenade. Fixed a lot of bugs and in this season we have introduced a new throwable - a molotov cocktail. We have some more throwables in the works that will be implemented throughout the next updates, such as an EMP grenade.

World / Map

We have introduced some new buildings, reworked existing buildings, as well as some changes to various areas throughout the map. We have extensively placed intractable cabinets throughout buildings and over time there will be more added.

We are working through our older assets and replacing them with assets that have been made in-house by our artists, including buildings, props, items and more. We will continue to do so over the coming weeks as we prepare these all for our new map.

We’ve also made some tweaks to the lighting in-game, including upgrading our sky system, and some post-processing effects to give the game an extra polish pass. Unfortunately there are still some FPS problems with the new sky system which occur during dusk and dawn, which we hope to iron out throughout the next few weeks.

Steam Trading Cards

We have introduced Steam trading cards which will be dropped for every 2 hours of gameplay (up to 3 cards). This adds an additional goal to work towards, as well as a fun activity to trade between your friends. When activated if you meet the requirements of play-time - you will be granted cards automatically.

Patch Notes

General

Implemented Quickslot System
Implemented Interaction Container System
Implemented Item Condition System
Implemented Turret System
Implemented Steam Trading Cards
Upgraded Engine to Unreal Engine 4.24.3

Item Condition System

Certain Items will spawn now spawn with a random condition
Condition is lowered each time an item is used or takes damage
Body Armour will now degrade when damage is dealt to the torso and arms (5% of the damage value will be taken off the armours health)
Helmets will now degrade when damage is dealt to the head (5% of the damage value will be taken off the armours health)
Weapons will now degrade after each confirmed hit (To players or objects in the world) - each weapon has a different degradation scale
Melees will now degrade after each confirmed hit (To players or objects in the world) - each weapon has a different degradation scale

Armour / Helmet Protection System

Body Armour protection will now scale depending on the condition (E.g 20% condition = 0.2 * Base Protection)
Helmet’s protection will now scale depending on the condition (E.g 20% condition = 0.2 * Base Protection)

Loot

Reduced max loot range in Redwood Valley to 1000 - 1800 (was 1800-2700)
Additions, adjustments and balances made to Main Spawn Table
Additions, adjustments and balances made to Military Spawn Table
Additions, adjustments and balances made to Crashed Helicopter / Civilian Bunker Spawn Table
Added new Low, Medium, High tier Spawn Tables
Added various new items to the loot tables
Adjustments made to items that spawn at Police Stations - Now spawns from tiered military loot table (was main loot table)

Quickslot System

A row of quick slots will now appear on the HUD
Your main equipment slots will appear on the quickslots
Added ability to add items to 5,6,7,8 quickslots
You can now scroll through your quick slots with mouse wheel or use the keyboard keys

Interaction Container System

Objects inside some houses can now be searched
Containers randomly spawn items based off it’s own unique loot table
Container rotate loot every so often, timer reset by interaction

Deployable System

You can now rotate deployable objects with your scroll wheel
Some deployable items can no longer be deployed in the safe zones

World / Map

Overhauled general lighting in Redwood Valley
Upgraded dynamic day and night system
Updated post processing settings
Updated LUT to adjust colors
Added new wheat models to farms
Some buildings have the new container system in them
Delay added to opening car trunks
Added duffle bag (container) to car trunks instead of loot spawns
Added new hospital models to Redsville
Added another gas station to Redsville
Replaced old house models in Redsville
Added new police station to Redsville
Various improvements to Redsville
All cabin models replaced with more detailed model
Various new cabin locations
Added new storage containers to compound tents
Each military roadblock now has 5 AI that spawn
Military roadblocks moved to new container system
Fixed some doors that allowed one-way shooting to occur
Fixed some fences that allowed one-way shooting to occur

Supply Drops

New supply drop model implemented
Added new flare particles to supply drop
Supply drops now use the new container system
Supply drops will now de-spawn after 5 minutes after being opened (was 1 minute)
Balanced Supply Drop Loot Tables and Drop Rates
Removed G-17 Supply Drops from the spawn table

Helicopter Crash Event

Increased time between events to spawn once every 60-80 minutes (was every 45 minutes)

Weather system

Reduced speed at which clouds cover the sky when weather changes

Drone

Drone will now play static when damaged
Drone will now play static when detonated or destroyed
New Drone HUD implemented
Drones health will now transfer to condition % when not being used

Helicopter Transport System

Helicopter transport now costs 50 currency to ride

User Interfaces

Added new text font replacing old main font
Updated icon font to latest version
Main HUD overhauled
ATV HUD redesigned
Drone HUD redesigned
Inventory HUD redesigned
Global Inventory UI redesigned
Vendor shop UI redesigned
Inventory character render moved to new capture system (higher quality)
Inventory character render animations improved
Updated tool-tip UI
Fixed an issue with vendor UI allowing players to overflow the text box
Vendor UI will dynamically update price when quantities are changed
Reduced icon size on the map
Updated map image
Cosmetics screen redesigned
Skin preview render updated to new system
Skin preview now shows default attachment on the weapon
Skins that you no longer own will auto unequip
New server browser
New leader board UI
Twitch usernames will now display on the leader boards
Trade menu now updates weight of the other player depending on what items you have moved in the UI
Added new yellow color when only a partial stack can be picked up when looking at an item.
- This will allow for partial stacks to be able to be picked up
Fixed an issue with item context menu overflowing the screen
Fixed an issue with level up UI showing wrong global stash weight

Trade System

Overhauled P2P trade system UI
Fixed various issues with items not transferring correctly
Fixed various UI problems

Global Stash

Added search function to the global stash UI
Updated loading UI Widget in Global Stash
You can now right click on equipped items to quickly move them to the global stash

Vendor

Vendor will only buy items with more than 20% durability
Vendor’s buy price will adjust depending on items condition

Inventory

Attach button will only appear in right click menu when you have compatible items
Weapon attachments will now auto equip when joining a server
Inventory will attempt to pickup partial amounts of a stack when your inventory is near full
Inventory will now require a second confirmation to dismantle an item

Medical System

Medical station is no longer able to be put into your quick-med slot. It can be put in a new quickslot.
Healing using the inventory will now play the heal animation

Animations

Increased smooth delay for crouch animations
Implemented new first person animation blend system (Should fix snapping when crouching)
Improved first person aim offset for melee weapons (should be more accurate)

Throwable System

Fixed an issue which allowed players to med while cooking a grenade
Fixed an issue with grenades being thrown in a strange direction
You can no longer open the inventory while cooking a grenade
Throwables will now auto-throw when nearing their end of cook duration

Items

Designed a new thumbnail capture system for items
Every item has a new in-game thumbnail
Replaced all medical items with new models
Tool-tip will now display gram value when less than 1kg
Throwables will now auto-equip to the throwable slot
Added a weight to nails

Compounds

New container system added to tents inside compounds
Compounds will now have 1 super humanoid (even while inactive) with a 20 minute respawn time

Weapons

Fixed an issue with the Honey Badger’s iron sight texture having the wrong textures
Reduced M16 base damage to 11.5% was 12%

Key Binds System

Game keybinds will automatically check and bind newly added keybinds

Melee

Improved melee hit registration while in first person
Melees will now hit exactly where the crosshair is while in first person

Vehicles

You can now store items on an ATV
Fixed an issue causing ATV to still make “run over” sound effects when out of fuel
Super humanoid and stalker humanoid will now block the ATV instead of being able to drive through them
Improved physics of running over robots at higher latencies
ATV has some new textures

Humanoids

Humanoids will no longer drop loot on the ground - you will now need to search the body to find loot inside
Humanoids will now despawn 90 seconds after being killed (was 30 seconds)
Fixed an issue with humanoids not going into ragdoll if you move into its replication distance or load in after it has been killed
Humanoids will now stop when damaged
You can now interrupt a humanoids melee attack

Safe Settlements

Lowered passive stat restore while in the safe settlements
Vendor NPC for the market has been named “Marquet”

Character / Player

Added new back-mount locations for weapons when the player has a backpack equipped

Crafting System

Crafting system now supports use of tools
Spiked Bat now requires hammer to craft
C4 Recipe now requires electronics, batteries and duct tape
Crafting recipes now have tool-tips for the item
Added Fishing Station Recipe
Added Tier 1 Turret Recipe
Added Tier 2 Turret Recipe
Added Tier 3 Turret Recipe
Added Campfire Recipe
Added Barbed Wire Bat Recipe
Added Molotov Cocktail Recipe

New Items Added or Renamed

Juice Box (Replaces Soda)
Painkillers (Replaces Antibiotics)
Medical Station (Replaces Medical Kit)
Barbed Wire
Rope
Molotov Cocktail
Canned Tomatoes
Canned Beets
Can of Tuna
Crackers
Chocolate Bar
Bag MRE
Auto-Turret T1
Auto-Turret T2
Auto-Turret T3
Sandbag Barrier
Fishing Net
Fishing Station
Raw Small Fish
Cooked Small Fish
Raw Fish
Cooked Fish
Camp Fire
Fishing Bait
Wooden Sticks
Hammer
Wrench
Sandbag
Various Turret Parts (7 total)
Barbed Wire Bat