October Recap

Hello, everyone!
We hope you all had a spoopy Halloween on Tuesday!

This month has seen a lot of progress. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to mention everything in our previous updates, so we’d like to give you all a brief summary of some of our major production accomplishments. And don’t worry, we’ll have a special update coming that will answer some of your questions from last time!

Over the course of October we’ve:

• Finished the Dark Bramble Terrain

One of the biggest leaps we’ve made in progress was finishing the vines for Dark Bramble. All vines have been placed and all Dark Bramble related assets are now final art.

• Begun Final Art Implementation on Brittle Hollow

Another huge leap in progress was Brittle Hollow’s transition to final art. In October, we finally started phasing out the gray box art and look forward to having that finished up soon. Brittle Hollow has always been the biggest challenge for our art team. Not only is it one of the largest planets, but it also features both an inner surface and outer surface. It represents more terrain on its own than the both the Hourglass Twins and Giant’s Deep combined.

Luckily, we’ve come up with a modular design that the designers used to build most of the planet. This should greatly reduce how much time and effort the art team will have to spend creating each fragment.

• Implemented Final Art Nomai Architecture

Nomai architecture is everywhere in Outer Wilds and half of the player’s journey is discovering their ancient ruins. Our art team has been chugging away at these models and are on the way to completing their implementation.

• Implemented a New Nomai Text Reveal System

For awhile now, the Nomai text on walls was displayed as a sprawling tree of spirals with each spiral representing a line of dialogue recorded by the Nomai. It was quite overwhelming for some players to read with no clear path of dialogue to follow. However, this month we finally implemented the Nomai Text Reveal System. The system starts with only the base spiral revealed. Then, when translated, all the answers to that spiral appear for translation. While helping the player follow the conversations better it also provides the player with better visual feedback.

• Upgraded the Ship Damage System

Last update we gave you guys a little insight into the new Ship Damage system. While at first Ship damage was displayed as the overall Ship health, we now have a new system where individual parts of the ship can break. We are now implementing the final visuals for that system including the final UI.

• Welcomed Kelsey into the Office for the next Month

Our Writer, Kelsey Beachum, has joined us for a month to finish the narrative and make surface level tweaks to the dialogue based off the playtests. Having her here has been a tremendous help and the narrative is on its way to completion. And yes, she is Alex Beachum’s sister.

• Finished the Final Player Model and two Travellers

The final player model is currently finished and undergoing animation progress. Closely behind are two traveller models, Gabbro and Feldspar, who have also been started this month.

• Run Weekly Playtests

Last month we started running weekly playtests instead of bi-weekly. We’ve been getting excellent feedback from our players and with our writer Kelsey in the office, we have been refining the narrative accordingly.
​

• We Said Goodbye to Alena

Lastly, we said goodbye to Lead Artist Alena last Friday. She has been with us for just over a year and has created countless models for Outer Wilds. We’re so sad to see her leave, but we wish her all the best!

Until Next Time!
That’s all for now! We’ll have a special update next week with the answers to some of your questions from the last update.

We hope you all have a great weekend!
​
Cheers,
Mobius