Bare Mettle Entertainment, the UK company behind the independent dungeon crawler Exanima, has used its November development diary to explain a substantial round of work on the game’s physics. The 2 November post is a progress report, not a dated promise of a public release. The developers say their current focus is bringing combat and character skills closer to a final design after exploring multiplayer systems. That makes the diary useful for players who have followed the long-running Early Access project: it shows what the small team is trying to improve, while leaving the timing of any player-facing update open.
The central combat change is a move away from a binary parry system, where contact simply switches an attack off. Bare Mettle says it is working toward blocks and deflections that follow the physical contact between weapons. An attack might push through a weak defence, reach around it or glance away, depending on angle and force. The team hopes this will make shields and defensive gear more than passive barriers and give players more control over positioning and timing. The diary says the system is still being developed, so readers should not assume every described mechanic is already in the current public build.
That redesign has pushed the developers to revisit the underlying physics. The team describes work on how objects stack and come to rest, how collisions behave, and how the simulation decides which objects need to remain active. In one example from the diary, Bare Mettle says a character standing on roughly 1,500 objects can be simulated in 1.1 milliseconds on a single thread, with only a small portion of the objects actively moving. This is the developer’s own test result, not an independent benchmark, but it illustrates why performance matters in a game where the environment is designed to respond to physical interactions.
The diary also discusses less glamorous problems with very visible consequences. Weapons could become stuck inside shields after objects intersected, and cancelling a placement action could cause objects to snap back into a space that had changed in the meantime. Bare Mettle says it has improved collision recovery and changed placement so that players move a visual preview until they confirm the new position. The developers also mention better shadow options and additional work on creatures, procedural shields, alchemy, dyes and vegetation. These are ongoing development tasks, not a list of features confirmed for a particular patch date.
Exanima has been available in Early Access on Steam since 2015, and the store describes it as a 3D isometric role-playing game built around physics-driven combat and interactive environments. The November diary offers a reminder of the unusual engineering workload behind that premise: every improvement to combat can affect performance, multiplayer synchronization and the behaviour of objects across a level. For players, the practical question is whether the eventual changes make fights clearer and more responsive without losing the unpredictable physical character that defines the game. Bare Mettle has shared its direction, but has not attached a release date to this work.
Sources: