The Curtain Rises
It has been quite some time since the last developer letter, so here is some context.
I am a solo developer, and I have been rewriting Xero from the ground up since 2022. At first I used a well-known game engine, but it ran into problems very early on, so I switched to building my own engine instead.
Rewriting a whole game is not easy, but by around 2024 I had it in a near 1:1 state. To be clear, this rewrite does not use any of the existing code of the game. It is a complete rethink of how everything should work, so the game can grow and stay maintainable later on. Along the way I also had to build the engine itself, an editor for it and all kinds of development tools for Xero, and it kept turning into more and more work.
In early 2026 it was finally ready for a playtest, and a bunch of you joined in. That build was nowhere near what you see today though. It was a 1:1 clone of Xero running at a higher framerate, on the new codebase and my own engine. That is when I realized the benefits I was after would not show up any time soon. Before artists could get new content out in a reasonable time, I would have had to keep building the engine, its editor and much more.
For context, getting content into the current Xero is quite a nightmare. The game is heavily limited in what it can do, its model and effect formats are ancient and painful to work with, and a game held together by glue, without real access to its code, is not something you can maintain. That is the entire reason I started this work in the first place.
The early 2026 playtests also made me realize I wanna do more with the game than just build a clone I can maintain. Until then I was saving those ideas for an unnamed “new game” somewhere in the future, but I decided the future is now. So I switched engines one more time, to Godot, an open-source engine I can maintain myself, and got to work. What you see below is the result so far, and it keeps changing and improving every day.
TL;DR: I have been rebuilding Xero on my own since 2022. After my own engine, it now runs on Godot, which finally lets me go beyond a 1:1 copy of the old game.
A new playtest is coming soon. It will be largely focused around ensuring gameplay is smooth, but I also want to try out deeper gameplay changes, mostly around guns, with some experiments on melee. I wanna have the whole thing ready for a public release within 6 months (playtest much sooner), but do not quote me on that. Depending on how playtests go, this timeline could be much shorter.
Everything in this letter was captured in the game and is still in development.
The old game runs on a limited and purpose-built engine from 20 years ago.
Every change there takes way longer than it should, but that is no more.
The new game runs on Godot, a modern open-source engine. For you, that means:
- New maps, items and features can come out much faster.
- The game looks better and makes better use of modern hardware.
- Versions for Linux and macOS are relatively easy to do and already ran successfully.
In the old game, players connected directly to each other. Each game decided what its own character did and told everyone else. So a cheater only had to lie, anyone in your match could see your IP, and one bad connection could ruin the match for everyone.
That is gone. Your game now only talks to our servers. It sends the keys you press and where you aim, and the server handles the rest: movement, hits and score. Other players never see your IP.
As the server decides everything, all cheats except wallhacks or aimbots just stop working.
Macro use also becomes much easier to spot and with the changes we plan, obsolete.
As for ping: a direct connection sounds faster, but a match was only as smooth as the worst connection in it. Our servers sit in data centers in Europe, North America and Asia, and each match picks the one with the best ping for its players. A bad connection now only lags that one player.
Characters
Characters are shaded from scratch and lit by the map around them.
OLD
NEWMaps
Every map gets new lighting and effects.
OLD
NEW
OLD
NEWBreakable objects
Breakable objects come apart in a wave of light and regenerate after a while.
Rain
It rains on Luna-2 and Nightmare. Drops splash, puddles form, and wet surfaces reflect the lights.
Every screen has been redesigned.
Settings
All settings are one flat list. Many of them also show live previews of what they change.
To top it off, these settings are available in-game! What a time to be alive, right?
HUD
The gameplay view is new from corner to corner.
OLD
NEWThe radar shows allies, visible enemies and pings. You can expand it to see everything.
The event feed has been beautifully re-designed, now also showing when someone is on fire.
Scoreboard
The scoreboard shows both teams, the rules of the match and your own stats. Click a player to see their profile, add them as a friend, or report or block them.
Chat
Chat works the same everywhere: in a match, at halftime and on the results screen. It has channels for everyone, your team and your party, plus an emote picker.
Pings
You can now ping what you see: the Fumbi, a spot, a wall or an enemy. Ping twice quickly to warn of danger. Your team sees every ping in the world and on the radar.
Health bars and damage numbers
Every player has a health bar overhead, and every hit shows its damage as it lands.
Halftime
At halftime you see how your team is doing and pick your next character.
Results
The results screen shows off the top players of the match.
Since the servers calculate every match from the inputs of the players, they can also save those inputs. Play them back and the match rebuilds exactly as it happened. It is not a video, it is the match itself.
A replay holds every player. Watch through the eyes of anyone, or fly around with a free camera. Pause, slow down, speed up or jump to any moment. Chat and pings play back too, right when they were sent.
Every replay can be shared with a link, and anyone with the link can watch it.
The goal is to shift the game to using matchmaking primarily.
This will require testing, to see how feasible it is for our strong yet small community.
Ranked will be a very large aspect of the new game and the leveling system will have drastic changes done to it as well.
With this change, we are also introducing a party system, allowing you to invite your friends to a party and then navigate to rooms or start a matchmaking/ranked queue with them.
A room list will remain, at least for the near future.
There are many more things that are planned and actively being worked on. One of which will be PvE content, but there is nothing to show yet in that regard.
Special thanks
Mae, our solo artist, who has helped a ton over the years
Vivyy, for helping maintain the current Xero, among other things
- You, the player, for playing and supporting the game
This is only the beginning. More Developer Letters are on the way.
I will be diving deeper into everything I’ve shown here, and into things yet to be revealed.