Outsider Oct 2024 Update [Mailing List]

What a difference a month makes… I’ve read my last update, and everything I describe there feels like pre-history. I did real work in August, but I started coding the game in September. I did a 2-week mad focus on coding and built nearly 50% of the final game code in that stretch. As I mentioned to the Discord members, I must have coded the equivalent of 3-6 months of output from the average developer in my previous company. Not because I’m a great developer but because a software engineer can achieve incredible productivity when free of distractions and using a development environment focused on quick iteration.

Because of this productivity Spike, I finally got a playable version of the game showing basic test content. Imagine Super Mario Bros. with a jumping and running Mario, a pipe, and a single enemy; gameplay without the game! Even with the tiny test content, I can already tell that Outsider will become the game I wanted to play but couldn’t because nobody had made it.

This, in fact, is the ultimate guiding principle for everything I do. I chose Outsider as my first game because there was nothing quite like it out there. This alone doesn’t make it a good game; many innovative indie games are neither fun nor interesting. But I always believed that small indies should push the envelope with innovation, even if the games end up becoming an “evolutionary dead end”, as they say.

For instance, some of the greatest gaming innovations of the past 10 years are deck builders, such as Balatro and Inscryption, and Idle games, such as A Dark Room and Clicker Heroes. Both genres could have been introduced near the dawn of gaming in the late 20th century. Even an old mainframe could run A Dark Room with hardly any change! These games are amazing because they rely on timeless mechanics instead of technology.

Despite all my efforts in graphics and music, Outsider will be a mix of 1980s dynamic narrative games and 1970s treasure hunts. If you tone down the music and graphical quality, hallmarks of modern gaming technology, it could run on an Apple II+ with 48K RAM and a floppy disk drive. And this is a feature, not a bug. If I ever make games beyond Outsider, I want to keep this “timeless appeal” that uses modern technology to enhance the experience rather than define it.

In the past month, I released a plan detailing the milestones the game needs to reach before being ready for a demo release; and just so you know, I’ve already completed M1 and M2! This means the game remains on track for a late November or early December demo showcasing the gameplay and the first chapter. The next 3 weeks will be key for ensuring that I can reach this goal, as I still need to do most of the writing for Chapter 1, and as I discovered this week, writing for games is hard, much harder than “just writing”. Currently, my draft, which I wrote over three days, has 4800 words. This is just a little over half of what I need for the demo and less than 10% of the planned final word count! This doesn’t include the inevitable rewrites, testing, and translation into game code… :/

Besides coding, planning, and writing, I also released a rough mix of our second song, Lazuli. It’s not quite “Berlin Ambient” as I wanted… It’s almost “danceable” at some points, which would be a first among my songs! Music making, like creative writing, is one of those activities where you never know what you will get, as art has a life of its own!

If you want some eye candy, I also have an in-game screenshot and the Store capsule to share. The store capsule, which appears when people are browsing through games on Steam and other stores, is almost finished. Regarding the screenshot, you might have been able to identify it as a map… But of where? If you can tell, you will know where the game opening takes place! It’s pretty easy to guess if you know me! :)

I have three last things to share. Firstly, I changed the game name back to Outsider. I apologize for the confusion, but you aren’t a true game maker if you don’t change your game name at least once during development! Outsider Zero, the previously announced name, was creating confusion, and I ended up having much better ideas for name continuity if I build more games in the Outsider “cycle”. Forget “Outsider Zero”, it’s just “Outsider” from now on, like the novella on which the game is based.

Secondly, I completely scrapped the plans for launching Outsider as a free game, even for a limited time period. I liked the idea of having a temporary free period as a marketing tool, but the current game store and market dynamics are absolutely brutal for free games. Development is never free, so players nowadays assume that “free” is the same as “full of microtransactions and/or ads”. The current free audience is very different from Outsider’s target audience, so I realized the game would reach fewer people if it were free, even temporarily. I don’t have a price to announce, but I will say one thing: it will be more than $10. I believe in the game, and many small narrative indie games are launching in the $10-$20 range.

Thirdly, speaking of price, I will give free Steam keys to our biggest fans as long as Steam allows it. I can’t guarantee it because I don’t own Valve, but my current plan is to hand out keys to the first 50 people to join our Discord and remain there until the game’s official release on Steam in 2025. Distribution will be through Discord if that’s still allowed. Hurry up, there are only 13 spots left :).

This was a long update… See you in November!