Blog Archives

Meet the Team: Lara Colson!

8/30/2016

We realized there's a couple of our team we have yet to introduce! With that in mind, this updates introduces our youngest team member, Lara Colson!

HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN WORKING ON OUTER WILDS?
Lara: Since the end of November, so it's been about... 9 months! (gosh, time really does fly!)

WHAT DO YOU DO ON A DAILY BASIS IN THE STUDIO?
Lara: I'm usually knee deep in 3d modeling something-- a planet's surface, or a mountain on a planet, or a little Hearthian on a mountain on a planet... And so on. Right now I'm working on characters! They'll be scattered across the solar system someday soon.

Whether it's an environment thing or a character thing, there's lots of alt-tabbing between maya, zbrush, and photoshop.

Brittle Hollow Terrain , Crafted by Lara

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THE INTENTIONALITY OF WANDERING

8/18/2016

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We chat with creative director Alex Beachum about how design is being adjusted now that we're so deep into production!

SO WE’RE NEARING THE POINT WHERE ALL THE LOCATIONS IN THE GAME HAVE BEEN DESIGNED. HOW DO YOU FEEL THE DESIGN OF THE GAME STANDS CURRENTLY?

Alex: We just kind of did a high level reassessment a little while ago, level-design style-wise, and we realized that we really wanted to take a new pass on pathing. Because the game is kind of all of these nodes with content in them with either paths between the nodes or no paths because it’s just on the surface of the planet, and when it’s easy to see the node it works fine, because you see an object and you think, “Oh, I’m supposed to investigate this.” But we realized a lot of the paths…

You’d be in a place with a node with paths leading to different places away from it and players would kind of choose which one to go down randomly, and you wouldn’t have any real idea of what you’d find on the other side...which isn’t bad, per se, but the whole point of the game is having your choices motivated by your curiosity. So we decided to telegraph where paths lead. Ideally this happens visually, so you think, “Oh this path leads to a tower in the distance, I’m going to follow it.” But underground this doesn’t work as well so we’re trying to add trailmarkers and some things more cryptic so you have a little bit of information to go on when choosing instead of just flipping a coin.

Example of forking path where more information is required

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Post Cards From the Outer Wilds Ventures!

8/18/2016

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Our amazingly talented artist, Alice Li, has been creating all the backer rewards headed your way when production ends! Here are the postcard sketches: hope y'all enjoy! We think they're a pretty good tour of the solar system...at least the known solar system!