Long time no see, huh?

It’s been a while since we made our last update, and if we're being completely honest, we planned to make this post in August... August 2021.

There might have been an extended break from the team, but we haven't given up! Amidst regular life continuing to divert our attention and some unfortunate industry decisions, we've made the decision and took the time to work on some big changes. In fact, if you're reading this post on our website, you might notice one of them right now. We’ve had a big focus on restructuring and redesigning our main NovaDawn site, to give it more of a professional feel, and in the process a lot of work has been done on the back-end of the EXIM website to make future updates and blog posts easier and less of a chore. In the future all of our blog posts about the game will still be on the EXIM site, but the main Novadawn site will feature posts across all of our projects. 

Our websites aren’t the only thing to receive a huge overhaul, we're also proud to announce EXIM: Reborn!

What’s EXIM: Reborn? Well, we’re in the process of rebuilding the entire game from almost-scratch on a new engine!... Yeah. (Also the name of the game isn't actually changing, that's just a euphamism covering the fact that the development is moving to a new engine. The game is still just called EXIM!)

So far the task hasn’t been too much of a struggle and we’ve already got a lot of the pivotal systems back up and running. The decision, despite setting us back, is proving to be for the best so far. Not only has it reignited our passion for the project, but we’re finding benefits outside of the ones we expected.

We’ll be dedicating a post to the thought process behind the recreation, and give you an update on how it’s going very soon, but that's not all, take a look at some of the other things we've been working on and look forward to showing you! (Before 2025 this time, we promise)

UI

We’ll be taking a dive into the UI design process for Exim as well as the game's design and aesthetic as a whole, with an analysis of our decisions and sneak-peak of some in-game prototypes.

Characters

There are still a lot of characters we have to announce, and with more than half of the characters sporting their first-pass models we’re getting ready to show off more profiles and sneak peaks, as well as getting into how we create our characters.

Dialogue

We've been hard at work creating our bespoke dialogue system, getting it integrated and up and running. We're very proud of it, so much so that in the not too distant future we want to make it available to other aspiring indie devs. We figured it's about time we talk about some actual game development, and take a look at how things fit together.

Website

When we started making these development blogs, we wanted to discuss our decisions around the business aspects of being an indie studio as well as the process of making games. Along those lines, covering development and design decisions around the website might also be a good place to start, given that this is the primary medium the majority of viewers will experience anything related to EXIM - at least until the game actually comes out. With our new website up and running, we’ll step away from the game to talk about some of the wider issues of being an indie developer and talk business.

Now feels like the right time for us to revive the blog, since we’re getting into the aspects of development that we can talk about and showcase, and we’re looking forward to what we have in store for the near future and hope to give you more updates soon!