The FREE Outsider Demo is now available on Steam for immediate download! If you have a PC, you can now play it on Windows (or Linux using Proton). Playing the full Demo is one of the best ways to help Outsider succeed right now - more on that below. And if you haven’t wishlisted the game yet, that’s also a good opportunity to do it. ;-)

I “soft released” the Demo a week ago to ensure it was stable and as bug-free as possible before announcing it broadly. This involved a lot of last-minute polish features and bug fixes. Thankfully, I have a great team of playtesters who tested the game through Steam before the Demo was available. Steam has excellent features for this workflow, enabling game companies to create hidden game versions that are only available to playtesters.

I cannot guarantee that everybody will love the Demo, but at least it delivers my vision quite well. If you want to know what the game is about, go check it out. I’m super excited about having reached this milestone and still feeling fortunate that I had the opportunity to work on a game that is now, at least partially, available to the whole world.

The Demo contains a full tutorial and four chapters out of roughly 20-25 planned chapters. This might not sound like much, but picking all possible story branches will expose you to over 20K words. The average path is longer than most short stories and is in the “Novelette” range. I won’t apologize too much for the cliffhanger at the end of the Demo, but rest assured that it will not have an abrupt ending. You get the equivalent of a pilot first season of a Science Fiction series.

I don’t get to see who plays the game (unless you’re my friend on Steam), but I get metrics on how many people play it. I will be super happy if most of you decide to give it a try! I strongly believe in Outsider and I’d love to see Nando’s story touch others as it touched me.

Speaking of the Demo, I started seeing a massive number of Chinese and Russian accounts downloading it as soon as the current Steam Fest began. Either that or thousands of people from Hong Kong and the Russian Federation love the game despite never launching it! In theory, this is something that I could just shrug off and filter out manually in my engagement metrics. Unfortunately, the game’s exposure and wishlist pace took a nosedive when the bot downloads intensified. I can’t be sure whether this is caused by the bots damaging my metrics or if Steam Fest is just taking attention away from the Demo. What I do know is that there are reports of unscrupulous game developers paying bot farms to “fake-play” their own games while hurting competitors’ games by downloading but never playing them, negatively affecting their metrics. I suspect foul play and a combination of factors. While I’m confident things will return to normal once Steam Fest is over, I don’t want to waste a week’s worth of wishlists.

Given this, you can help Outsider fight the good fight by downloading the game and simply playing it for 20+ minutes. I’d rather see Outsider dying in obscurity than give even a single cent to these bots. One thing you might not know about me is that I spent a good portion of my game industry career fighting foreign bot farms. These people are my sworn enemies, and I’ll do anything I can to destroy their “businesses”.

With the Demo out of the door, I’ll start spending time on Marketing, a key aspect of making a game successful. I’ll have to balance it with writing the rest of the story, which will be no small undertaking. Despite completing roughly 50% of the project, I still have to write over 80K words to finish it. I’ve never tackled a writing project at this scale, so I’ll keep you posted on how that progresses.

Aside from the Demo, I’ll discuss my career and game development saga at the upcoming Atlanta Sci-Fi and Fantasy Expo! I’m honored and excited to have been accepted as a speaker; if you live in Atlanta, I’d love to see you there! I’ll tell you how that goes on my next update.