Hey all,

It’s been a little while since I updated you here as I’ve been busy working on my new game Exo Rally Championship! 🏎️

But I wanted to write up a quick message to let you know that Exo One is on sale this week as part of the Save & Sound Steam showcase, full of great titles with awesome soundtracks! Be sure to go and check it out from now until November 7th.

That’s all for now, enjoy and talk soon!
-Jay

Hi folks,

I’m absolutely pumped to finally reveal my new game, Exo Rally Championship, to the world. Just debuted it as part of PC Gaming Show 2023, but in case you didn’t catch it there, here’s the reveal trailer:

I’ve been working away on this for a good while now with Rhys Lindsay and Mark Billington on board to make up the full Exbleative team. Rhys was responsible for Exo One’s stunning soundtrack, and now brings his programming skills as well as his musical talents to the table for Exo Rally. Mark contributes with his math and physics skills to help with vehicle simulation.

Exo Rally Championship is the galaxy’s most dangerous off-road racing event. The final frontier of racing - remote, unexplored, extreme exoplanetary rally.

You’ll take the wheel of advanced RCS thruster-enhanced rovers and attempt to master a brutally realistic racing simulation. You’ll have to conquer unforgiving and inhospitable alien landscapes, speeding between waypoints on procedurally generated stages filled with hardware-breaking weather and terrain challenges. There’s a career mode inspired by Earth's legendary rally events, where you can customize, tune, and repair your rover to optimize performance in the face of diverse environments. It’s all about pushing the boundaries of speed and control as you tackle the most intense off-road rallying event in the galaxy.

After making Exo One I really wanted to explore traversal on other worlds from a totally different angle. Exoplanetary rally brings together all the elements of an exoplanet and challenges you to face them head on - its gravity, terrain, weather, atmosphere, and endless hazards. Every aspect of the planet is materially affecting your rover and your time, pushing you dangerously close to the limit.

It’s a bit of a departure from Exo One, but I’m so excited to be working on it - I started out working on racing games, and it feels great to be back. I’d love to know your thoughts on the game - it shouldn’t be long until we start opening up early playtest demos right here on Steam!

If you could throw it a Wishlist it really does make all the difference to tiny teams like ours. Or if you wanna chat Exo Rally Championship, there’s a new Discord we’ve just launched here: https://discord.gg/75wYhXzHP3


Stay tuned,
-Jay

Hi folks,

It’s been a little while since my last update - I took some much-needed time to have a little break over the holidays, and to generally sort out Life Stuff™ following the madness of launch. Alongside all that, I’ve also been working away on some new features for Exo One, and I’m very happy to finally say that, after much testing and tweaking, those new features are now live in-game.

The centrepiece of the update is the new Level Select feature, which has been the most-requested feature ever since the game launched, so it feels great to finally have that delivered. The Level Select will appear once you’ve completed the game for the first time, so it’s perfect for those of you who are keen to hop back in from time to time, just playing through your favourite planets - skipping across the oceans of Nautica, or diving through the clouds of Darwin III, perhaps? I’d be super curious to know your faves (or least faves) and why. Let me know in the comments!

Alongside the Level Select, there’s also a cutscene skip now - once the game has been completed, players can skip most cutscenes, wormholes, and intro sequences.

I’ll post a full list of ALL the patch changes at the bottom of the post 👇

To celebrate the update, Exo One is 25% off (our biggest discount yet, and probably the biggest one for a while) as part of Steam’s Midweek Madness offering, which is pretty cool. If you’ve got friends who you think might dig the game, now is the perfect time to bug them about it!

Thanks as ever for all the support, and feel free to hop over to the Discord[discord.gg] if you want to chat all things Exo.

Many thanks for the support, as always!
-Jay

PATCH NOTES
Version 22.02.06.2201

• Planet Select Screen
  
  • Unlocks when game completed
    
  • Save games not affected
    
  • Energy collect achievements aren’t recorded
    
  • Game complete times aren’t recorded
    
  • Player is given the max possible collectable energy from the prior planets (not all energy possible in entire game)
    
  • Intro sequences still not skippable, apologies for final planet!
• Skipping Cutscenes:
  
  • Unlocks when game completed
    
  • Can skip most cutscenes, wormholes, intro sequence
• New controller selection method. Automatically selects only 1 controller if multiple are plugged in, to stop wheels etc from contributing constant incorrect input. Pauses game when controller is unplugged. Can manually choose a different controller in the settings > controller remapping screen.
  
• Fix: Black Sky Bug, which affected mostly Win7 and 8 users.
  
• Win7 and 8 now officially supported
  
• Minor LOD fixes
  
• “Special” action can be remapped now for controllers (unnecessary for mouse/keyboard, though).
  
• Energy collecting exploits fixed
  
• Slightly more Ocean underwater up force
  
• Possible fix for rare Jungle camera shake bug
  
• Game end prompt changed to Esc/Start button and players are re-prompted if they don’t see it and hit escape to quit.
  
• End planet dodgy movement fixed if player provides fast/early input

Hey folks,

4 days out from launch, and it's all been a bit of a whirlwind, I gotta say! Feeling pretty overwhelmed by everything right now, and am not getting much sleep, but overall I'm super happy with how the launch is going!

Just wanted to keep you updated on patches/fixes going on my side since launch.

Version… 1st couple Steam patches(?):


- fixed a Comet crash bug that occurred when Continuing from main menu
- fixed Comet gravity bug
- added geysers to Comet surface since a somewhat large number of people were getting stuck
- fixed speed running time bug that caused all 3 achievements to unlock upon completing the game in any time


Additionally to this, there's now a test branch. It contains a somewhat untested version of the game, with patches about to go into the public/default version of the game. It's potentially unstable and try at your own risk. Your save games WILL be affected.

Here's how to access it:
- Library
- Right click Exo One
- Properties
- Betas > "test"

Here's the latest patch notes from said test branch:

Version: 21.11.22.0519
- Japanese text bugs fixed, still some drop shadow issues remain to be fixed
- Frame rate limiter for main menu limits to refresh rate
- Gnowee, fixed energy sound pickup not firing
- Gnowee, fixed distant terrain sometimes flickering on/off
- Darwin, fixed some incorrect/dull lighting
- Coronides, adjusted vents on main rock, added vents on final small rock, made level slightly easier as many players finding incredibly difficult

Anyone who knows Japanese, there were missing characters. If you could please check for us if it all looks correct that would be amazing!

Once I can confirm this test branch fixes all the listed issues and is stable this will be going live on the main branch (hopefully in the next couple of days).

If you REALLY want to help with testing Exo One going forward, there's a new "test-branch" chat channel over on the Discord where we'll be discussing all the upcoming changes as they happen.

Final note: there are a couple of known issues we've had a few reports of that are completely stopping a handful of people from being able to experience the game (some getting stuck on the start screen, some finding the first level sky doesn't load in and they're unable to progress, and a few other edge case issues. Fixing these particular issues is my highest priority right now, and I'm working night and day to get to the bottom of them. Please try to be a little patient with me if you are experiencing any major issues like the above, check out the pinned threads on the Steam forums and hopefully we'll get those figured out in the days to come. Watch this space for more news as things progress!

Much love,
-Jay

Well here we are, that probably fleeting moment where we're happily finished but there's still yet to be any bug reports or negative reviews posted haha. For now, I can happily say Exo One is OUT NOW!

I truly hope you'll enjoy playing Exo One! I know it's not perfect but one of my biggest goals has always been to create a unique game unlike anything else you've played, and I think I've succeeded there to some extent at the very least! I was lucky enough through developing Exo One to take inspiration from some of my favourite games, films, tv-shows and create my own unique thing. I love sci-fi and space - I grew up watching Star Trek with my brother, then battling him for the PC so we could play whatever the latest game was we were hopelessly addicted to. So to create a planet hopping sci-fi space adventure with my own story, art, sounds and game mechanics feels pretttty great.

I want to say thanks to my wife and business partner Nic, there wasn't much in the game or business decisions I didn't run past her. Thanks so much to Rhys Lindsay for creating what I believe is honestly the perfect soundtrack for Exo One, and for being my version control person, and listening and raging with me at everything that went wrong during development on an almost daily basis (also thanks to Nic for this one, I raged a lot, game dev is hard!!). Thanks to Dave Kazi for taking on all those technical fiddly UI/settings things I'm terrible at and chopping off probably at least a year off Exo One's dev time. Many thanks to Future Friends and Alex Fairwood in particular for being an amazing publisher, for making my crazy 5 year journey worthwhile financially, and just for being great fun to hang out with on a daily basis. It would not have been half as fun, and the game wouldn't have been as good without y’all.

Last but not least, thanks so much to you, and all of my backers, who kept me on my toes, supported me and encouraged me till the end!

Let me know what you think! I'll be hanging around on Discord when I can, hopefully not completely swamped with bugs! If you want to help me out around launch, Steam reviews, shares on social media and telling your friends about the game are all greatly appreciated!

Catch you all again for a post-launch update, hopefully it's somewhat smooth sailing!

Best Regards,
Jay

Oh hai,

Our 5 year journey (whoops!) to create Exo One is almost over! Exo One finally has a release date - it'll be out on November 18th, exactly one week from today!

Here’s the release date announcement trailer!
After so many delays and thinking we've been finished for at least a full year, it's hard to imagine Exo One will soon be complete and released, and then I need to get used to the strange new reality of not working on this game!

We’ve had our hopes set on November 18th for a while, but I didn’t want to announce it earlier in case some last minute setback threw everything into confusion. I brought on some extra help at the beginning of September to help me get through all of the remaining issues that have been holding things up for so long now, and having a fresh set of eyes on the problems helped a lot.

Since the beginning we've talked about Exo One being a solo developed title, but the more time has passed, the more help I've gotten, and I can assure you we'd be nowhere near releasing right now if it wasn't for some amazing help from my publisher Future Friends, and our Xbox port team, All In! Games. Dave Kazi has been on board for a while now helping on code, and Rhys Lindsay too occasionally (in addition to amazing work on the music). So while Exo One is certainly a one man vision, it's certainly not just a solo/one man team anymore, and I've got to give props to these guys, plus Unity, all the plugin developers and of course for the 100th time, ya'll(!) for supporting me over a kinda crazy long development cycle.

Hi folks!

Just wanted to let y’all know that we’ve just given the Exo One Prologue a big localization update! You can now play this first little taste of Exo One in:

• English
  
• French
  
• German
  
• Chinese (Simplified or Traditional)
  
• Japanese
  
• Spanish
  
• Brazilian Portuguese
  
• Russian

That’s a lotta languages! Hopefully, this will open up the Prologue to a whole bunch of new people looking for a serene, otherworldly (and FREE!) gaming fix.

This update also includes some minor big fixes and improvements to ensure players have the smoothest experience possible.

If you haven't tried the Prologue out yet, check it out below:

https://gtm.you1.cn/storesteam/app/1375530/Exo_One_Prologue/

Played the Prologue and liked it? I’d be eternally grateful if you could head over to the page and chuck the game a mini review - it really does make all the difference for a tiny team like ours.

Happy floating!
-Jay