Happy New Year!

In December 2024, we “shipped” the second playtest build, as promised, which enabled me to take some well-deserved vacations! I took a 2-week break over the holidays and did minimal work related to the company: talking to playtesters and fixing a bug, that’s it. Despite enjoying building Outsider, this is a real job and, most certainly, “actual work”!

One thing that happened to me when working on game-related areas, specifically my XBOX and Blizzard days, is that I’d spend less time playing games than my lifetime average. This also happened with Outsider, so taking a couple of weeks off was great for going back to my favorite hobby! I finally got around to finishing Resident Evil 7 and playing a lot of ZX Spectrum games. I got a little ZX Spectrum replica for Christmas, and I had a blast playing some of the classics from my childhood! If you think that the “Spectrum” is a mall in Orange County, California, it’s probably because you didn’t grow up in Europe or South America in the 80s :).

The second playtest was a success. We doubled the number of playtesters, and I was very happy that they didn’t find any severe problems! I did receive some problem reports and feature requests, so I’ll get around to fixing them when I’m officially back to work next week.

The next two months will be about pushing towards the next big milestone, the game’s Steam unveiling and the “Demo” feature set. While I did promise a public demo, and the promise still stands, I might decide to start Outsider on the Early Access route instead of the plain “Coming Soon” route. If I do that, the demo might only be initially offered to Early Access customers. I’m not saying I’ll wait until the final release to publish a public demo, just that I might always ensure that paid customers have an “experience delta” versus what’s available for free. In this case, I’d publish the demo as soon as Early Access content is ahead of the demo content.

With that, I’m ready to finally talk more about the game itself. Please note that “talking about the game” necessarily implies sharing “spoilers”. I think that light-to-moderate spoilers can actually enhance the enjoyment of stories. I won’t argue this point in detail, but I’ll say that the full Outsider experience involves reading a bit about the game before playing it. You are not required to do that at all, but I recommend it. After this email, most of these “spoilers” will be shared on the main Galantrix site as blog posts marked with an asterisk (*).

If you don’t like spoilers of any kind, you can stop reading right now. See you later, and Happy 2025!

If you’re still here, also make sure to read the Outsider disclaimer before reading the “spoilers”. Some playtesters have already asked me whether the game’s story is true (this also happened when I privately released the original novella back in 2015). For all such questions and their variations regarding the game’s story, the answer will always be “Read the Disclaimer”.

Now, let’s talk about the game!

Outsider is a narrative game based on the writings of one of my oldest friends, Fernando Vidal. To summarize, Nando disappeared a few days after leaving a “data stash” with me. This stash contained much of our shared childhood and young adult memories, which he dutifully preserved, and an absolutely incredible and detailed report of what I can call an “Extraterrestrial Contact”.

At first, I was just shocked by the whole situation. It’s the kind of thing that happens on weird Reddit reports or random newsgroup messages but never happens to you. At first, I thought (like Nando himself did) that the whole thing was a prank. But well, despite the many leads he left behind, I haven’t seen or heard from him in over 10 years. If this is a prank, he’s pretty serious about it. He’s putting his money where his mouth is, so to speak…

Outsider is an attempt to capture his writings in an accessible format. It is a game like no other, if I can even call it a “game”, so it’s hard to characterize it narrowly. It’s a mix between a Visual Novel and a “Gamebook” where you’ll spend most of your time reading Nando’s logs and choosing how Nando should respond. You will not “play Nando” (that’s impossible given that Nando is, well, Nando), but as a sort of “inner voice” that tries to guide him in the very unique situation he’s in.

If the game captures Nando’s story, how is it possible that you, the player, can make choices? Because that’s the only way I could put the threads of his story together. Nando didn’t leave behind a sequential diary or log. Imagine a mess of conversation snippets that describe conflicting events for a given day, like “On Saturday, I ate pasta for lunch” and “On Saturday, I ate tacos for lunch”. Did he eat pasta or tacos on Saturday? Or both (yuck)? Understanding this and untangling the mess took me literally years.

For the original 2015 story, I confess that I had to fill in the blanks with a lot of stuff I simply made up. I hadn’t been able to put most of the entries together, so the result was a story that only vaguely resembled what he wrote. While I did understand the nature of these parallel narratives back then, I could only partially assemble them as a single end-to-end sequence suitable for a regular novel.

Over the years, as I gained a better understanding of his writings, I thought about releasing a standard book full of footnotes like “In a separate entry, he actually reports saying Y instead of X”, but I couldn’t make it work. It was hard deciding what the main narrative should be, and reading the branches was unbearable. My poor family couldn’t stand hearing about my frustration with this problem anymore!

Ultimately, I decided that turning it into a game was the most accessible way of telling the world what happened, as Nando wanted. Outsider is, in a nutshell, one long dialogue, but boy, what a dialogue! Building this game keeps reminding me how much I was blown away by what Nando wrote. While many games dare to be philosophical and talk about things other than killing other people or chasing girls, there is nothing out there with the range of content of Nando’s contact story.

This will undoubtedly create problems in marketing the game… Is there an intersection between gamers and people interested in reading about what is considered a “fringe” topic? Do people care to read speculations about the fate of our planet, the nature of alien life, the existence of God and the meaning of existence itself in a videogame? I have no idea, but I also don’t care. This story needs to be told, and fate chose me to do it.