Today, we’ve released Outsider’s Playtest 2 build to playtesters! If you read the past entries, you know that I’ve rewritten most of the Playtest 1 code and added a huge number of features. In fact, despite the relatively short play time (30-60 minutes), this build has almost all the features we want to ship in the game’s final release. Aside from the inevitable bugs and some minor features, more than 80% - if not more - of the work going forward will be on graphics, music and writing, not code.

This week was, then, a release week. Knowing that they are never easy, I made sure to leave sizeable “slack” in the plan. I needed it! Alex brought a nasty flu from school, and I was sick, sometimes with a fever, every day of the week. I don’t like schedule delays, so I just powered through the flu and got 6 to 7 hours of work done every day. Things went as usual, with a fresh assortment of last-minute “release week” problems… In this case, I discovered how bad an idea was to use the bleeding edge of Godot Beta builds!

Typically, you use “regular compilation” to develop your game, which Godot can do very efficiently. Whenever you want to release your game, you need to perform an “export”, which is a slower build that packages your game in a way that anyone can consume. The problems I experienced were related to how Godot creates this build… Code that would work perfectly in development builds was broken in the exported one. This has nothing to do with preprocessor directives but with internal details of how Godot operates. It took me hours to trace the problems to known Godot Beta bugs! Also, given that I badly wanted some of the Beta improvements, I couldn’t simply revert back to a stable version of Godot… The end result was a painful heroic grind to implement workarounds (and, unfortunately, a couple of nasty hacks that are invisible to players).

With the game out of the door, I’ll spend the rest of 2024 just chilling and going through the feedback (last-minute bug fixes might be needed, but I’m feeling a lot better now).

On January 6th, I’ll start the next, and most important stretch in this project: the road to the Steam demo. I plan to release it sometime in late February or early March, and it will consist of the Playtest 2 codebase plus bug fixes, a couple of refactorings and smaller features, in addition to 3 new chapters. Altogether, I expect the demo to contain nearly 2 hours of gameplay. Not bad for a demo!

Considering the inevitable reduction in coding, some of the future blog posts could become very dull… “This week I wrote half a chapter; it was hard!”, “Last week I spent more time doing grammar checks and cleanup”. However, my recent announcement in the Galantrix Discord hints at the solution to this problem:

Galantrix has a strong stance regarding spoilers; our stance is that they aren’t a big deal and often enhance the experience. When I’m drinking wine, I want to know about the grapes.

Over the next several weeks, as I’m writing most of the story, I’ll publish devlog entries rich in mild spoilers, henceforth referred to as “enhancers”. Reading these entries is the best way to experience the game (but you don’t have to read them). Devlog entries containing enhancers will be marked with an asterisk on the title out of respect for people who don’t like them.

Be on the lookout for posts with an asterisk on the title because they will contain “enhancers”. As I wrote above, reading these will give you the full Outsider experience. Many mysteries from past posts will suddenly become clear… And the world will finally learn about what’s really behind Outsider.

Whenever I just want to “talk business”, I’ll leave the asterisk out. At a minimum, the monthly mailing list emails (published on this site) won’t contain “enhancers”, but I’ll probably post “business” topics more often than that.

As it is appropriate with any adapted and/or fictional story, my lawyer recommended sharing a full disclaimer. The game has it, but as I’ll post story content on this site, I want to make sure you see it:

The ‘Outsider’ video game and related blog posts do not represent or claim that the events, situations, or characters depicted are truthful or factual accounts. Any resemblance to actual events, situations, extraterrestrial beings, or humans, living or deceased, is purely coincidental and unintentional.

You can read more about such disclaimers here. This should fully answer any and all questions about whether Outsider depicts actual events. I think it’s the easiest way to handle this potentially complicated topic.

Asterisk posts will link back to this one just in case.

Merry Christmas!