Exanima — patch notes and updates
Stored observation / content update:
Dated developer announcements recorded from Steam. Open the source for the complete update.
| Update | Date | Excerpt / source |
|---|---|---|
| Coffee Diary - May 2026 | 2026-05-04 | Hey Exanimates, The complete update is currently in testing and at this point we're just looking for issues that need to be urgently fixed before release and tuning various things. The latest test includes the changes we discussed in the last diary, many improvements and additions to the Gardens including a sub-level, the new shaper and their thaumaturgy domain, another new creature, new items and various other things. Some of the changes and additions are quite significant and involve major engine level changes, so they certainly need some testing, but we've already solved a good portion of important issues in a very brief period of testing. |
| Coffee Diary - April 2026 | 2026-04-06 | Hey Exanimates, It has been a very busy month indeed. Our next test run will basically be a release candidate that includes pretty much everything. Testing so far has gone pretty smoothly, so hopefully the trend will continue, though there are some pretty big changes and additions. Besides some more content and polish for the Gardens, a lot of focus has been on overall polish and making sure that some core systems are really solid. We mentioned we were working on solving some pathfinding issues, mostly to stop your companions and enemies from falling into holes with your precious loot, but this went really deep with a lot of fundamental impro |
| Coffee Diary - March 2026 | 2026-03-02 | Hey Exanimates, We've finally started insider testing of the update! We've done one patch and we've got another big patch on the way. The testing release already feels very solid, with only a couple of very specific issues that we want to do some more targeted testing on. The new map is massive, varied and looks very different from anything so far. We've been trying some more complex things with the environment design and they have been well received and are working well. We're still adding a bit of visual polish to some assets and things like a few more small objects here and there, but these are small touches. We're going to make one signif |
| Coffee Diary - February 2026 | 2026-02-02 | Hey Exanimates, We quickly recorded a video at the last minute to showcase some of the improvements discussed in this diary, but read on for a more in depth and accurate explanation. We last talked about some difficulties we encountered with physics for a new creature, and how despite our efforts to get it working with some incremental improvements and adjustments, it became clear that some aspects of our character physics required a significant overhaul. While it's unfortunate that it's taken so much additional work (no one wants the work on this update to stop more than us!), this has led to some really important improvements to the game ov |
| Coffee Diary - January 2026 | 2026-01-05 | 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 a |
| Coffee Diary - December 2025 | 2025-12-01 | 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 s |
| Coffee Diary - November 2025 | 2025-11-03 | 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 for |
| Coffee Diary - October 2025 | 2025-10-06 | 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 |
| Coffee Diary - September 2025 | 2025-09-01 | 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 |
| Coffee Diary - August 2025 | 2025-08-04 | 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 |
| Coffee Diary - July 2025 | 2025-07-07 | 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 d |
| Coffee Diary - June 2025 | 2025-06-02 | 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 f |
| Coffee Diary - May 2025 | 2025-05-05 | 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 cra |
| Coffee Diary - April 2025 | 2025-04-07 | 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, workin |
| Coffee Diary - March 2025 | 2025-03-03 | 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 see |
| Coffee Diary - February 2025 | 2025-02-03 | 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, |
| Coffee Diary - January 2025 | 2025-01-06 | 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 |
| Coffee Diary - December 2024 | 2024-12-02 | 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 f |
| Coffee Diary - November 2024 | 2024-11-04 | 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 sh |
| Coffee Diary - October 2024 | 2024-10-07 | 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 in |