Hello everyone!

This week we wanted to have a short little update to talk a little bit about the Outer Wilds audio.

After a planet has gone through its final art pass it starts to go through its audio pass. This month we’ve been working heavily with our SFX Designer, Chuck Russom, to refine the SFX of completed planets. Specifically we have been concentrating on the massive planet Giant’s Deep and the cozy world of Timber Hearth. 

Check out our soundcloud here.

That’s all for this week! We hope everyone has a great weekend and Happy Thanksgiving!

Cheers,
Mobius

Hello, everyone!

We’re coming at you this week with a special update to discuss more playtest reviews and questions.

Playtest Review

We’ve reached a new level with our playtests in both scope and results.

Scope-wise, in addition to our weekend playtests, we are now conducting much larger sessions in the middle of the week where we’ve quadrupled our playtesters from one to four. Originally our builds were not stable enough to allow that many to play at once. With one person, we could step in quickly and resolve a bug without interrupting the playtest for too long. But now we can sit back and spend more time observing where players go and analyze what’s working in game and what’s not.

In terms of results, we are so happy to see the game running as intended. We’ve had many playtesters enjoy Outer Wilds in the past, but now we are finally seeing players obsess over  its mysteries and delve deep into our worlds to find the answers to their questions. The game now truly encourages investigative work and rewards player curiosity.

Questions

Which leads us to some of the questions about the game’s difficulty from our previous playtest review. We’d like to reassure all of you that Outer Wilds remains a challenging game and still demands a lot of its players.

From playtests we have observed two general “types” of players during playtests.

• Player 1: Enjoys the controls and the difficult stunts the game allows once you master the game mechanics. But some of them aren’t completely into narrative.

• Player 2: Enjoys the story, the writing and the mysteries of the solar system. But some of them find the controls a little difficult to master.

Of course our greatest fans are those who fit both categories. These are the fans that enjoy both the challenge of space exploration and xeno-archaeological narrative. But our objective is to make the game also accessible to players who gravitate more to one of these categories.

Part of the solution is the implementation of difficulty levels that will impact things such as how much damage you suffer and how much resources you have available. If you enjoyed having to be very careful with your O2 levels, your landings, and being punished for careless jetpacking then you have nothing to worry about. The hard difficulty levels will still provide you with challenges and hard decisions that were present in the alpha. But if your interest lies more in the narrative, the easy difficulty settings will help these players experience and explore the narrative without having to worry about dying constantly.

Another concern was the ability to get lost in Outer Wilds. We want that to be a choice and not the frustrating result of bad narrative and level design. The game remains as open as ever. Even more so now that the planets are so much more detailed and expansive. But if players wish to investigate something, we want them to be able to do so without getting aimlessly lost all the time. On the other hand, if you decide willingly to just jump into a random cave or jetpack into the unknown, be sure you will get lost. And if you survive long enough, you might just find something unexpected along the way!

We hope this answers some of your questions and please continue to tell us about your hopes and wishes for the game.

That's all for this week!

Cheers,

Mobius

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!