September Updates
about 2 years ago – Sat, Sep 24, 2022 at 12:40:01 AM

Hello, everyone! We (Aurorian Studios) have a big announcement to make, but first a little history.

We took Freedom Games as our publisher two years ago because, frankly, they're really cool people with a great passion for games and gave us an awesome deal. While creating the game we’ve hit several hurdles - we had trouble finding programmers on a tight schedule, we initially overscoped, and others. Through this process both we and Freedom Games have worked through it, but ultimately due to several factors (some internal, some external) we failed to hit milestones that would affect the quality of the game and the timeline.

Freedom was great to us. They wanted to keep us on, and continue development because they saw the vision of this game that we’ve spent years of our lives pouring into. As the scope of the game increased beyond what was originally planned and things fell behind, it required more support from Freedom. Through this process we’ve relied more and more on Freedom to invest, staff, and support the production of the game. As complexity increased, it became obvious that simplicity is better. A starship can only have one captain!

Today we are announcing that Freedom Games is officially taking over development of One Lonely Outpost.
 

We can’t wait to see the exciting places they take it! They understand the farming sim appeal, the vision we had for a bright future and bringing a lonely planet to life, and that you all have been so patiently waiting. Freedom Games is putting in additional resources to bring One Lonely Outpost to fruition and plans to fulfill the Kickstarter.

Aurorian Studios, however, is exiting. Trust us, this is not what we had intended. We have loved this game from the start, and feel a duty to you, our fans. At this point, we have come to the conclusion that Freedom Games is the best way to get One Lonely Outpost to you, and that is what matters most of all. Freedom Games is giving us a great exit deal in spite of all the setbacks on our end, and we’ll be excitedly waiting for the release of the game next year.

Thank you to all our fans. You have been patient and loving to this little indie team - most of which is staying on! Brad (lead), Nateo (lead artist) and Laura (writer) are the last members from the Kickstarter era and are leaving, but most of the team is continuing on under Freedom’s leadership.

So, for the exciting bit: One Lonely Outpost is continuing on its way to you, the fans, and will be every bit as exciting as you deserve it to be! Now, as we pass things off to Freedom Games, Kerri, the associate producer that has helped with the community since the beginning of the partnership, will get into some updates about how development is going so far as well as an update on the alpha build for our backers!

Alpha

It’s been quite some time since we last updated the build for our alpha tier backers. We are currently planning to have the build updated for you all next week! This build will be showcasing our updated UI system as well as the new art direction we’ve been working on.

Once that build is ready to go live, we will send out an announcement to you all letting you know it’s live.

Game Dev Updates

We're currently working on getting everyone's landers into the game, all set up and ready for their crew members! Of course, as always, all content you see here is subject to change and may not be a final product. First up, we have Aaron's lander! Back in July, we showed off a bit of the concept art, outside view and a glance at what the inside was going to look like. Now we can show off a bit of what the lander is now looking like actually in game!

From the outside 

To the inside

Next up we have Jim Bob and Elisha's lander! For anyone who doesn't know Jimbob is a single father to Elisha and definitely enjoys his dad jokes 😆 In your lonely outpost, you'll find him to be your water guy, always making sure the outpost has fresh water to drink. 

The outside of his lander

The inside

And upstairs in Elisha's room

We also have a look at some of the power generators that you can use around your outpost ⚡

We have an upclose look at how they glow at night

And even a look at how they will actually look like as you play in game

As always, if you haven't already, feel free to join our Discord (which will be getting some updates) as well as follow us on Twitter.

To the stars!

August Updates
about 2 years ago – Thu, Aug 25, 2022 at 08:42:49 AM

Hey OLO fans!

It’s been another month of hard development work so we have even more to show off about the game. We do want to start off with talking about our presence at Gamescom! Freedom Games has an awesome booth at the in-person event in Germany, so we’ve been lucky enough to be able to participate! As part of being in the event, we’ve crafted a new trailer to show off just how far the game has come since our trailer from E3 last year.

As you all may have noticed in the trailer, we have delayed the game a little bit longer. I know that this isn’t what any of you wanted to hear, but as the great Miyamoto said, “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.” We want to avoid remotely giving any of you a potentially bad, or even rough game. We are currently targeting March of 2023 to launch into EA. With that in mind though, for our backers that are looking for their beta build, we are aiming to have that to you in February 2023!

With all of that being said, we do want to show off a bit of what we’ve been working on over the past month! 👀We've currently been working on updating the environment and UI. The game is getting more and more polished as we're working towards EA. 

As always, thank you all so much for your support so far. We know it’s been a bumpy ride, but knowing that we have such an amazing community behind us supporting us, makes it all feel worthwhile. If you haven’t already, please join our Discord where you can connect with the rest of the community as well as our team. Discord members also get to participate in different awesome events, which we’re working on ramping up more as we get closer towards launch, plus exclusive Moocifer adventures!

July's Big Art Update
over 2 years ago – Wed, Jul 13, 2022 at 01:57:26 AM

Hey everyone! We’re still hard at work to hopefully be bringing you more content soon and get back on track with showing off all of that hard work. For this month's update, as promised with our last update, we have some new and improved art to show off to you all today.

The Space Van

You may remember in the opening sequence of the game where you fly in on your spaceship, landing on your new homeworld. Well, as a refresher, here’s what your spaceship looked like previously:

Also a quick reminder as to what the inside cabin of the spaceship, where you would buy and sell stuff on Deliverzon, looks like as well:

After doing some work for our 3D lighting system, here is what your spaceship looks like now! As well as what the upgraded interior looks like 👀

While talking about the space van, if you would like to vote for the new official name of it, head over to our Discord where will be soon running a poll for the fan vote of the new space van name!

Aaron’s lander

We’ve also been making progress on upgrading the look of the rest of the beginning of the game, like when Aaron joins the colony! Here’s a look at what the lander and the lander's interior looked like in our old beta:

Just like the space van, while working on the 3D lighting system, it got a very nice upgrade!

Sneak Peak

Here’s a quick look at some concept art that our team has been working on as well! What do you think these are for 🤔

We plan to have even more to show you next month! This is only the beginning of all the awesome upgrades that we have to show you all. As always, thank you all for supporting us and being patient with us throughout all of this. In the meantime, join our Discord if you haven’t already!

Major Updates - Thank you all for being patient with us, we have lots to dive into...
over 2 years ago – Tue, Jun 14, 2022 at 07:29:30 PM

Hey OLO Fans!

First off, we want to thank you all for being so patient with us. It’s been quite some time since our last update, so we have lots to update you all on. Let’s just dive right into it.

Development

So you may remember from our last update (although quite some time ago) that we showed off some of our new 3D lighting aspects. Adding this in has taken quite a lot longer than we originally thought it would but we have finally gotten into a good process with it!

As we just mentioned with getting into a good process with the 3D lighting, our processes needed a little bit of reworking. To be completely frank, we were in what is known as development hell. Having to rework practically the entire game for multiplayer, while going with almost an entirely new art direction, and just not having great processes in place to help us accomplish all of it really had us in a rough spot.

With all of this being said, the game is quite a bit different from the alpha that our Kickstarter backers have had access to. Different in a very exciting way to say the least! We aren't quite ready to show off the new stuff just yet, but we will have something for you all soon!

We cannot wait for you all to get to your hands on it and finally play it! Speaking of, let’s get into some timeline updates.

Timeline

So our timeline has definitely shifted a little bit as I’m sure you’ve noticed. We are now targeting Q4 for our Early Access release.

Besides the Early Access update, we know the next big question you all have about timelines is when the beta will be released. Fret not! We have not forgotten about it. With all of the reworking we’ve had to do, we’ve had to push the beta back some once more. We plan to have a better update about when exactly it will happen. For now, we mainly wanted to give everyone a better look sort of behind the curtains as to what has been going on and why we’ve been delinquent on updates for the past almost year at this point.

Rectifying it

Now that you know all of the struggles we’ve been working through, let’s dive into how exactly we’ve been getting ourselves back into the proper swing of things. So, to help get us back on track and really working towards our Early Access we’ve made quite a few new additions to our team!
Emmanuel Floret - Game Director
Johan Balan - Art Director
Alexander Samarin - Senior programmer
John Gilette - Senior programmer
Gerald Gombrio - Junior programmer
Gabriel Lucena - 3D programmer
Daniel Harris - Senior artist

Along with all of those additions, we want to give a special shout out to one of our Discord mods, RaveMonkey, who we have now brought on to help Kerri out with community management. If you have any questions in the Discord, her or Kerri will likely be the ones to help get you those answers so that the rest of our team can continue focusing on development.

With all of these new team members and the new processes that they’ve helped us implement, our development train derailment has been placed back on the tracks and is now properly chugging towards EA!

Again, thank you all for supporting us, believing in us and being patient with us through all of this. As fellow gamers and backers of many Kickstarters ourselves, we very much understand how worrying delays can be as well as the prolonged radio silence up to this point. It’s definitely hard to make this update, but in order to be the most transparent with you all, it must be done. We hope that you all will continue sticking around with us.
If you want to join our (not so lonely) outpost, you can join our Discord (where we may be running some emoji contests 👀) or follow us on Twitter!

Timeline shifts + Dev Updates
almost 3 years ago – Sun, Dec 19, 2021 at 11:06:58 PM

New Timelines

Hey everyone! Project lead, Brad, here. The time has finally come to give you that update about our timeline. We've been making incredible progress over the past couple months and are aiming to have the Beta ready for our backers in April/May of 2022.  I know this isn’t exactly what you all wanted to hear, but it’s unfortunately just a reality of indie game development. Timelines inevitably shift in order to accommodate a scope larger than originally expected to bring you, the backers, an even better game. This does mean that our Early Access release will most likely be shifting to late Q2, with our full release shifting a little bit as well. As we get closer to these time frames, we’ll of course update you on more exact dates. We’ve also decided in order to better accommodate for the holidays, we won’t charge any BackerKit cards until January.

Dev Updates

In other news, since it's been a little bit since we've given you all a glimpse at our progress, here's a look at tentatively Beta-ready HUD, Gene Splicing UI, and full cast character portraits we've been doing!

Thank you all for sticking around with us even through all of the delays we’ve had recently. We greatly appreciate all of your support thus far and I can’t wait to share more of our One (not so) Lonely Outpost.