- EXANIMA 0.9.5.2c BETA - 18 September 2026
EXANIMA 0.9.5.2c BETA A patch with various improvements and fixes before we move on to testing changes to combat mechanics. Improved stagger mechanics (less stunlock) Adjusted combat AI aggressiveness (reduced) Fixed some character mass inconsistencies Adjusted grip of spetums, glaives and guisarmes Fixed incorrect assembly of falchions Remastered some more items Performance improvements Fixed incorrect rendering of wet hair Fixed missing rainfall sound effects Fixed some incorrect fog effects Fixed characters sometimes not gripping weapons properly Fixed NPCs doing weird poses when first engaging Fixed odd leaning in characters screens for tall characters Improved item icon highlighting The game now caps to 30 fps when it doesn't have focus Fixed double click on NPCs causing crashes under some conditions Fixed double click on NPCs not working under some conditions Fixed a foot devourin…
- Coffee Diary - September 2026 - 7 September 2026
Hey Exanimates, We recently released an update which added some pretty big new features including a save system. This did include some small content updates, but there won't be large content additions until version 1.0. As we expected, this update wasn't well received by everyone. Some of the people who wanted a "save system" really wanted a zero friction savescum simulator. We've seen too many games utterly ruined by developers giving in to these kind of demands. We put a lot of effort into this admittedly complex design, we gave our reasons, it takes a lot of things to craft a specific experience and atmosphere. Discovery, mystery, tension and player ingenuity are core to Exanima's. We're not going to abandon that and try to appeal to everyone. At some point you have to accept and respect that. As long as you understand and value the spirit of the game, this update had some impactful…
- Exanima 0.9.5.2 - 18 August 2026
This update introduces various new features and interactions to the late game. Importantly this introduces a "save system", but it is only a part of what's added and it is fairly involved. We're only going to talk about it in vague terms as we'd like for you to discover these new interactions in game yourselves. There's various new mechanics and changes to mechanics that open up new strategies for approaching some of the game's most difficult challenges. This changelog covers some notable additions, but details were omitted in order to not spoil what some new features and mechanics are: Late game save system introduced Added an alternate "cheat death" mechanic A new "minion" can now be acquiredAdded a new way to progress through content Added various new interactions and mechanics Added ability to combine and separate certain items Added new crystal interactions and mechanics Added new…
- Coffee Diary - August 2026 - 3 August 2026
Hey Exanimates, Exanima 0.9.5.1 is currently in public testing. This version introduces the late game save system, an alternative "cheat death" mechanic, a new minion, a new way to traverse late game content and various new features and mechanics to support all this and more. These features have been a long time in the making and various things that have been in the game for as long finally have a purpose. They introduce new interactions, important strategic elements and new ways to experience the game. If you want to participate in the test you can find all the information on our Discord, where we have a dedicated thread for feedback and to report any issues. As we iron out the kinks in this latest update we're also working towards the new combat features and skills. The first order of business though is an overhaul of shields so that our artists can work on the many assets for procedu…
- Coffee Diary - July 2026 - 6 July 2026
Hey Exanimates, We've been steadily releasing patches since the update with many improvements and fixes, but the flow of patches has stopped over the last couple of weeks as we've been working on some bigger changes for a larger patch. This will include the post portal save system, but also a few other notable features. We're very close to completing this, hopefully within a week or so, and once this is done we can again make some general improvements. The save system is fairly complex, but we've been past implementing that for some time and have been working on some other features that we want to add along with it. No doubt some of you will have a pretty good idea of what's coming given that we've been putting the pieces of these features in the game for some time, but we'd still rather you discover them and their nuances in game yourself, so we can't really talk about them in detail h…
- Coffee Diary - June 2026 - 1 June 2026
Hey Exanimates, So the update is finally out, that was quick right? Right. It's been great seeing many people get back into the game and all the positive feedback. We've been busy patching and hotfixing, some things we'd hoped we'd fixed actually weren't and going from a few testers to so many players uncovered various things that flew under the radar or are specific to some system configurations. So much has been changed and rebuilt, so there's going to be some issues and things that need adjusting again. We've addressed a lot of this already, and made a bunch of improvements and content fixes too. The last few months we've mostly been trying to get everything ready for the update rather than working on anything new, so our attention has been largely on what comes after this update and leading up to 1.0. As we've mentioned we won't be tearing the guts out of our engine again, so we sho…
- Exanima 0.9.5 - 20 May 2026
Before we get into everything that's in this update, we need to address the elephant in the room. Most of you don't closely follow the game's development, and this was to say the least an unusually long time between updates. Exanima is an unusual game, filled with features you won't see elsewhere, probably because no other developer is stupid enough to attempt them, let alone all of them at once. It has grown far beyond its original scope, with layers of complexity that create an organically rich experience, but also multiply into something extremely difficult to develop and inevitably flawed in some ways. We've toiled endlessly to remove the flaws while making it richer still, in response to the desires of our players and the varying ambitions of our team pushing the envelope further. It's been a chaotic growth, but it doesn't have to make sense, this isn't just some game to us, it's o…
- Coffee Diary - May 2026 - 4 May 2026
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. Of course the other new creature was a lot of work, but after having just done a big overhaul of character physics and general improvements for the last one, we didn't run into much of the same issues again. This other creature does have some uniqu…
- Coffee Diary - April 2026 - 6 April 2026
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 improvements and additions to pathfinding systems and features. The smarter pathing is a big improvement and NPCs can now negotiate some seriously tricky paths. In the same vein, we wanted to finally solve issues with characters occasionally getting stuc…
- Coffee Diary - March 2026 - 2 March 2026
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 significant addition in the test build still, the new thaumaturge / shaper encounter, which needs a little revision after many changes to character physics and AI, but that's it. Leading up to the test release it's mostly been finalising content and just…
- Coffee Diary - February 2026 - 2 February 2026
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 overall and how it plays. Considering how difficult this character physics work is and how much time we've spent on these things in the past with varying levels of success, we got through these many and big improvements surprisingly quickly. After we'…
- Coffee Diary - January 2026 - 5 January 2026
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 animation problem. Our character's movements are driven exclusively by physical forces and virtual muscles, they physically interact with everything, they must promptly react to inputs and move in any direction while also turning, performing actions,…
- Coffee Diary - December 2025 - 1 December 2025
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 switching everything over to it we improved many things. We won't repeat all things it was designed to support and how it improves our creature and animation workflow, but we immediately saw benefits and took advantage of some of the new features. In…
- Coffee Diary - November 2025 - 3 November 2025
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 force work. Why fix a problem once when you can fix it forever? While making the game and our own engine, in total we probably spend more time developing our content and asset creation tools. We have our own unique way of doing everything from physics,…
- Coffee Diary - October 2025 - 6 October 2025
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, we plan to continue making content indefinitely and also releasing the tools to the community. Optimisation has been a particular concern, as vegetation is notoriously expensive because of the complex 3D models with many layers to render. Usually…
- Coffee Diary - September 2025 - 1 September 2025
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 behaviour, following on the tricky issues we discussed last month, but a big change in this patch was to how emotions interact with roles and dialogue. This is a difficult problem because accounting for all the different emotions, how they can chang…
- Coffee Diary - August 2025 - 4 August 2025
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 well. We've also seen lots of thorough testing of every possible item combination for the new apparel system, which we've been fixing quickly thanks to the new system, and just general bug and issue reporting. We've done a few hotfixes and one big…
- Coffee Diary - July 2025 - 7 July 2025
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 driven by an emotion system, with roles only really being able to nudge things in a direction and provide some specific interactions and reactions. That didn't really allow for more rational behaviour, and often creates a harsh disconnect between how…
- Coffee Diary - June 2025 - 2 June 2025
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 foundation is solid. We've been getting a lot of useful feedback and suggestions from testers, and had some in-depth discussions. We're still figuring out what the right balance is for NPCs being talkative and reactive and we'll be experimenting with…
- Coffee Diary - May 2025 - 5 May 2025
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 crafting it, trying to understand its possibilities and limitations, and what might be too ambitious and complex to develop and work with. Ultimately we went all in on complexity, including every feature we've considered that seemed useful, but the rea…
