Doubling Down At The Day Of The Devs!

Greetings from Outer Wilds Ventures!

Last weekend we were lucky enough to be invited to Day of the Devs, a free event in San Francisco hosted by Double Fine and iam8bit that lets fans play the best-of-the-best indie games from across the world! We were super humbled to be included with so many awesome games, meet awesome developers & fans, and get to playtest the starting village on Timber Hearth!

This dev blog will focus on what we changed leading up to the event & what we learned from it in terms of level design, input changes, art, and tech. Hope you enjoy!

Preparation!
One of the nice things about showcasing a demo at these kind of events is that it forces us to make our game as presentable and playable as possible. This isn’t to say our build was in disrepair, but when there’s ten months of production in front of us, it’s easy for us to ignore the broken texture of the fire, or the missing button prompts to do X or Y, or that we always meant to replace a certain character model.

Logan and Jeffrey working late night to get the Day of the Devs Build out

This was the first demo we’ve created since the game came to Mobius (as the alpha demo was based off of the IGF-winning build). We’ve been making a lot significant progress under the hood, which includes:

1. Dialogue System: The old system was one of the oldest and jankiest systems in the game. Our new overhauled system allows the writer and designers to easily set conditionals, array multiple options, and control dialogue flow based off of what the player has already done or seen in the game.
2. Input System: This was another old system that needed a thorough overhaul to incorporate multiple inputs and correct sequencing for the cleanest player experience. In the old system, the player could be viewing the map and unintentionally flying the ship at the same time!
3. New Translation System: We're totally changing the way players interact with texts from the ancient race of the game, the Nomai, to something more diagetic and engaging. This new system had to be built from scratch.
4. New Scene Integration/Sector Loading: To make the game run at a performant rate despite an entire solar system of physics simulation occurring every frame, we needed to figure out how to separate each planet into its own scene and each scene and each location into multiple sectors which determine what needs to be rendered for the player and what can run cheaply in the background.

​And that’s not even including the large additions of level design and artistic improvement we’ve been working on! Knowing that the majority of demo time would be devoted to the opening sequence in the player’s village, we decided to focus on making this as complete an experience as possible.

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