July's Big Art Update
over 3 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...
almost 4 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
over 4 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.

Beta Timeline + Dev Updates
over 4 years ago – Fri, Nov 19, 2021 at 10:58:17 PM

Hi everyone! It's Brad, the Project Lead for One Lonely Outpost. It has been a while so I’m here to offer an update on the status of things. First off, Laura and I had our 3rd child - Little Freya! 

Both Freya and Laura are both doing well - but even on the third go around a newborn takes a phenomenal amount of attention and time, thus the delay on sending out a proper announcement to everyone. 

I know that you've all been anxiously awaiting the Beta this past month and some. As you’ve probably noticed, we haven’t released that Early Access Beta yet. We've been working hard on all the necessary features to make it fun for you to play, and don't want to release it until we've reached that point. We plan to give you a more formal timeline with any changes by the end of the year.

In other updates, our publisher, who has been great throughout this process, helped us out by sending over a true industry veteran tech lead who has helped us figure out what went wrong with our original timeline, how to get back on track, and greatly improved the reliability of getting things done in general. We also doubled the programming team size with highly experienced new faces like Joe, John, and Alex - all of them veteran game devs.

I want to let you know that we've all been working like crazy, and we're doing everything we can to get this game completed to the vision that we presented last year a month ago in the Kickstarter.  I'll end this by thanking everyone still reading for hearing me out. We're very sorry for the delay, and we'll see you soon with another update!

One Lonely Outpost July/August Dev Update (New visual style tech!)
over 4 years ago – Tue, Aug 17, 2021 at 11:57:14 PM

Hey OLO Fans!

We’ve been continuing to work hard on One Lonely Outpost and we have lots to update you on, so let’s get right into it!

Behold! Corn! (and 3D lighting)

The one big thing we’ve been working on behind the scenes is finally ready to be shown off. We will be including 3D lighting in our pixel art environments! Below you can see a gif of what this lighting looks like. We’ve had to do a lot of testing and reworking to get to this point, but we’re beyond excited with how it is turning out!

Worldbuilding

With all of the 3D lighting work happening, we’ve also been optimizing & tentatively finalizing the map layout. You might have gotten a peek into what this all looks like over on our Twitter or discord.

We’ve also been working on more ship interiors for all of our NPC’s. Lots are definitely still being worked on, but here’s a look at just a few of them.

Narrative

We're going all-in with the characters - mountains of interact dialogue, lots of cutscenes for those who show an interest in the characters, and more! (though for the most part interacting with the NPCs extensively will be optional, but why would you want to avoid them?) 

You'll notice later that we brought on a lot of writers, including Xan who has previously worked on Coral Island, and Matt who worked on a licensed Final Fantasy IP.  Portraits and sprites are also coming along great. We're also finally getting to those short stories promised to Backers - we'll have the first batch ready later this year!

Fishing!

We've got a prototype of the fishing minigame done now - it's pretty far from our final idea, but in our (probably not so humble) opinion, we think it already gives Stardew's fishing a run for it's money xD

In the final version, not only will it just look better in general, but you'll also be able to customize your fishing gear to make the hook float higher or lower, and attract different kinds of fish. We use a left/right reeling mechanic - It's much easier than it might look.

Expanded team!

To help get all of these awesome parts of development done, we’ve added lots of new members to our team! If you see them around in the Discord, definitely say hello and welcome them!

5 new writers - Ana, Matt, Xan, Laurie and Jesse

3 new 3D artists - Ali, Samer, and Marco

1 new programmer - Michael

1 new designer - Mark

1 new audio director - Dale

Thanks again!

Thank you all for your support throughout development so far. If you want to be a part of the community, maybe see some behind the scenes happenings, as well as get direct access to us devs to ask questions, make sure to join our Discord! Also don’t forget to wishlist One Lonely Outpost if you haven’t already!