I promised myself I wouldn’t work on the game during my break, but I also felt I should write a short update to wrap up the year. I’ll write a bigger one once I send my mailing list message next week, so I’ll stick to the playtest that happened over the past week.

The playtest went really well, and I got great feedback as in the previous one! The number of players doubled to ~10, so I saw a broader set of players reacting to Outsider. While the first playtest was done by “my buddies”, the second had a few new friends who weren’t biased by having known me for years.

I was happy they didn’t find any major problems, so the feedback was mostly a collection of low to medium-severity issues. The most important ones were related to the soundtrack “volume” (as I expected, given that I haven’t done any audio mastering work) and a very detailed examination of the current state of gamepad support, which still needs a good deal of “fit and finish” improvements.

One thing that I must say is that I will not fix every reported problem. The reason is something I’ve learned throughout the years about product development: you have finite time, so you must focus on making the product great for your core audience and simply decent for everybody else. Most importantly, never address feedback that will degrade the product for your core audience.

A playtester mentioned that the game opened with a “wall of text”, which is true. The game does start with exposition, which works really well for, well, people who enjoy reading and exposition. These people also happen to be ones raving about Outsider’s uncompromising narrative focus, sometimes approaching a traditional book, and its tweak on the “book formula”. But then, should I just ignore the feedback?

Removing important text would alienate my core audience, which is what one should never do. At the same time, I combined this user’s report with another user’s request for tweaks on the text spacing. By doing that, I can make the text look less like a “wall of text” while improving readability for everybody, including the core audience. I’ll also take the opportunity to replace some of it with more utilitarian game instructions, probably in another font/color, so the “wall” feeling is lessened. The wall might remain as tall as it is today, but it will hopefully be prettier!

Ultimately, many/most gamers aren’t part of my target audience and will never like the game, no matter what I do. That’s fine; Galantrix is proud of making niche games. Even the best games have their detractors; for instance, I vocally criticize Outer Wilds, a commercially successful, award-winning game. Despite its many ingenious design decisions, Outer Wilds is one of the few games I rage quit due to its unforgiving, tedious core loop, which, as it seems, was loved by the rest of the universe.

That’s it for today. Again, huge thanks to the amazing playtesters and everybody reading this blog and supporting Galantrix! My New Year’s resolution is to release Outsider in 2025, so stay tuned! :)

HAPPY 2025!