the erupting volcanic moon

9/21/2018

Hello everyone!

Today we’re taking a quick look at Brittle Hollow’s Volcanic Moon!

Volcanic Moon

The volcanic moon that orbits Brittle Hollow and is a large part of the dynamic system that defines this planet. Over the course of the time loop the moon's many volcanoes spit out meteors made of lava. These high speed projectiles careen to the surface of Brittle Hollow’s fragmented crust and explode on impact. It is because of this that flying close to the moon increases the chances of the player’s ship being critically damaged.

The volcanic moon seen from the surface of Brittle Hollow.

Due to the extreme temperatures of the moon’s surface landing on the moon is ill advised. The lava on the surface of the volcanic moon is rendered with a unique shader that creates a dynamic variation between molten lava and cooling lava based on how close it is to a nearby shore.

The surface of the volcanic moon halfway through the time loop.

Due intense amount of lava, sculpting the surface of the Volcanic moon was a challenging task. The main objective was to make the terrain unique and distinct over time as the lava drains from the surface. Because the volcanoes are so large relative to the tiny moon, it was difficult to create terrain that wasn’t impassable due to misalignment with gravity. Much of the moon’s terrain was hand sculpted to solve these problems.

Pre-Pre-Certification

As this is a development blog, we felt we should shed some light on where the project is currently at. We are making our way to Pre-Certification for two specific platforms, which is a process that has to be done for almost every platform the game gets ported to. This means we are scrubbing through the game to remove any hiccups or unintended behaviors from assets, also known as debugging. This is a time consuming process as there are many hiccups that are unique per platform.

We’re telling you this, our wonderful fans, because our goal is for there to be a lot of exciting updates and reveals in the coming months. As we are currently we are deep in the trenches of debugging, we need your support more than ever. Please send any letters with your excitement for the Outer Wilds to our support email: [email protected].

That’s the End of This Update

Join us in another two weeks for another development update. Have a great weekend everyone!

Cheers,

Mobius

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Jackson_wxyz link

10/2/2018 12:23:02 am

Hello! Since you asked, I just want to tell you a little about why I am looking forward to the game you guys have been making for all these years.

So, around March 2015 was when I first played one of the alpha versions of Outer Wilds that had been floating around online. In the past year I had graduated college in Colorado, then spent six months in India, and now I had returned to Colorado for a week to visit a few college pals before continuing back home to my family. Before leaving for India, I had applied to several aerospace engineering grad schools (I've always loved sci-fi and majored in physics, but Kerbal Space Program and SpaceX rocket-landing-attempt videos pushed me over into wanting to become a rocket engineer), but had so far received only rejection letters, so I had no clue what would happen in my future. Anyways, there I am in Colorado, experiencing a potent mix of feelings -- deep relaxation and happiness at being home with friends, mixed with this very confused, lost-in-space feeling of uncertainty about the future, and an acute sense of how so much of my life path was arbitrary and random. (why these good friends and not others? why this city/state/country and not anywhere else? why now and not some other time?) Plus all the other strange swirling thoughts created by travel, solitude, novelty, adventure, etc.

I should also mention my background with videogames. I was huge into Kerbal Space Program at the time, but not other space-sim or simulation games. My greatest love is for expressive puzzle games, like Braid and Starseed Pilgrim, and for walking-sim-style exploration, as in Portal 2, Journey, Fract OSC, etc.

Anyways, I probably saw your game mentioned in connection to Kerbal Space Program, maybe highlighted in a Scott Manley video or possibly on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. I downloaded it and was immediately entranced. The little starting village is charming and wonderful, while the museum/observatory in particular is an absolutely irresistible hook into Outer Wilds' many mysteries. I forget when I first started to realize what exactly was going on in the game -- was it when I saw the frame-by-frame video in the museum, downlinked from the little sputnik that orbits Timber Hearth? Or did I simply look up and notice the moon and the lights in the sky slowly moving? What I certainly do remember is blasting off in the cartoony lunar lander and watching the starting villiage zoom out from under me, first revealing a round little world wrapped in blue skies, then a tumbling orrery of other planets and moons. That moment is really something -- a totally simulated/procedural event, but with drama and power to equal the perfectly choreographed reveals of any Bioshock intro sequence.

And after that, I mean, the game is amazing! It's ridiculously original, and it all works so well. The first shocking supernova, the cycles of exploration, the branching trails of clues. In that early alpha version, Dark Bramble and the wandering comet were fairly bare, but the other planets are just so packed with surprising events and structures and secrets. The story of the lost civilization is sweet and mysterious. (I wish there was an option somewhere to enable a "way too much lore" setting!) Travelling between the planets is exciting and new; I particularly enjoyed trying to push the limits of what was possible with just the jetpack. (If I remember correctly, it's possible both to escape the surface of Giant's Deep, and to go from Timber Hearth to the surface of the moon, using just the jetpack.) The whole feeling of playing is totally delightful, like discovering new puzzles in Portal or Perspective (another alpha-version student project), or first exploring the hills and valleys of Minecraft.

Then of course there is the whole aesthetic of the game, of cozy human warmth and familiar human scales of space and time, applied to the normally cold, remote, inhuman cosmos. It's a deeply satisfying mix, a feeling similar to nostalgia but still with the freshness and challenge of exploration/newness. (The game feels similar to Fez in some ways... the charming science-themed village, the dramatic coming-of-age/hero's-quest-style revelation adventure moment, the mastery of strange new rules, the small self-contained floating levels, the secrets of a lost civilization.) I'm never sure how exactly to feel about these kinds of experiences -- like, surely this is some kind of watered-down or anthropomorphized view of things that is somehow bad to consume, and we should be better off just living in the wild rush and horror of raw reality with all its extremes, or something. But, look, I am not some kind of Nietzsche standing naked on a mountaintop or time-travelling Oppenheimer tracking down a princess (for more on that, see my Braid mod, "Braid: More Now Than Ever"), I am just an ordinary human living on Earth and not knowing where my life is going to go, and hoping that he can still have time t

10/2/2018 12:24:22 am

(for more on that, see my Braid mod, "Braid: More Now Than Ever"), I am just an ordinary human living on Earth and not knowing where my life is going to go, and hoping that he can still have time to play clever little games and kick back and shoot the shit with his old college pals, now that everyone is graduated and all our lives are starting to pull in different directions. And besides, when it comes to exploring the actual cold inhuman vast universe, what does it mean to do that? Space exploration means making space legible, making it traversable, making it safe, making it cozy and habitable -- so it is like they say in the stories after all, that going out and seeing new things and gaining new knowledge and standing on mountaintops is only one side of it, since real exploration and expansion is the process of transmuting strange weird scary things into things that are comfortingly human-like and human-scale. Anyways, the point is that playing your game (which I first played on my own, then excitedly introduced to my friend from college), which would have been utterly delightful under any circumstances, was under my particular circumstances the kind of thing that gets wrapped up in all the thoughts and emotions of a situation and acts to somehow tie them together or solidify them or etc. Later that week I received a letter of acceptance from the aerospace grad school at CU Boulder -- somehow the most competitive school I applied to was the only one that accepted me. This not only acted to lock in my future career trajectory, but also ensured I would spend the next two years in Colorado, giving me an extended lease on being together with many of the friends I had made.

Today I live in Washington, DC and I work on cubesats at a company called Spacequest. I promise I am a vastly more normal person in everyday life than this comment would suggest -- rambly stream of consciousness life-story metaphors are usually not my thing, and I far more often spend my time doing responsible adult stuff like planning trips to the grocery store, reading The Economist, and wondering if "Meigakure" will ever come out. (Although my writing style in this comment has been a little off-the-wall, I really do just absolutely adore Outer Wilds. It's not my exact favorite game -- is it too boring/cliche to say that title belongs to The Witness? -- nor can I credit it with pushing me into choosing an aerospace career since I had already done that by the time I played. But it really is one of the most joyful and expressive and exploration-centered games I've ever seen, and its cozy-cosmos feeling is something that stuck with me, becoming a part of how I think about the solar system and space exploration along with many other influences from science, sci-fi, history, etc.) I am looking forwards to buying the full completed version of Outer Wilds for two reasons. First is of course the fact that I fucking LOVE your game and think it's absolutely brilliant, plus these dev-blog screenshots look beautiful. Second is that I can't wait to share the game with my wife (who is also big into videogames, walking sims and puzzle games like me plus some multiplayer stuff and acrobatic immersive-sim type games like Thief, Dishonored, Mirror's Edge, etc), and more broadly I think Outer Wilds seems like a relatively accessible game that I could share with friends and family who would otherwise be uninterested in games, or who are big gamers but who I could never successfully convince to try their hand at Kerbal Space Program.

Good luck finishing the game! I hope you sell a billion copies and everyone loves it and you get to make a second game 10x bigger and totally different and in virtual reality. But you should know that you've already created something powerful and rare and valuable.

Jackson_wxyz

Bubble Trouble 3 link

3/2/2019 05:40:21 am

In this amusement, your central goal is to explore every one of the bubbles and move to the following dimension.

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