This week, I completed the “Alpha” version of Chapters 2-4, totaling close to 15K words across all branches and bringing the game close to 21K if you include the tutorial and Chapter 1. As Outsider uses branching narratives, the player will only see from 30% to 60% of the total word count on a single playthrough, depending on choices.

Outsider, like most branching narrative games, will be intrinsically replayable. However, I designed it so players wouldn’t have to keep going through the entire story over and over and over to see all the branches and endings. Figuring out how the game branches work is a mini-puzzle in itself, but not a very hard one. I estimate that someone can see close to 80% of the story by playing the game twice and, helped by a couple of strategically placed saved games, see the remaining content with limited repetition.

This is a significant departure from many (but not all) similar games that require you to go through unskippable cutscenes and extremely tedious repetition just to see a tiny bit of extra dialogue. One playtester mentioned wanting to save the game before every decision, which is a leftover from these other games… This is completely unnecessary in Outsider and why the game only offers a limited number of save game slots. Once players figure out the logic behind the choices, they will see that aggressive saving isn’t the optimal way to play the game.

This week, I also worked on something I haven’t talked much about before… Outsider’s big overarching optional puzzles. Yes, the game has puzzles, but you don’t need to solve them to access multiple “good” endings (remember that Outsider has no “bad” endings). You could go through the entire game without even noticing any puzzles! How’s that possible? I’m not saying! :).

I’m only mentioning it here because it will be in the marketing materials. Puzzles will take a nontrivial amount of work to design and a nontrivial amount of work to solve. They are not easy puzzles, and that’s how I want them to be, as they are optional. Of course, astute solvers and walkthrough-assisted players will be rewarded with additional game content.

Overall, I feel pretty good about this week’s output, which also included graphics work unrelated to puzzles, and think the game remains on track for the public demo before the end of February (Steam approval delays could bring its availability into March, however).