Beta Timeline + Dev Updates
about 3 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 3 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!

E3 and more!
over 3 years ago – Tue, Jun 08, 2021 at 12:56:58 AM

Hi everyone!

Brad the Project Lead here! We’ve been working hard over the past couple months and have lots that we want to share with you but can’t share the details of what's been taking so much of our time just yet. That being said, we will be at E3 this year! There you’ll be able to see a lot of what we’ve been working on. Make sure to tune in June 14th at 2:10pm PT to check that out!

Now on to what we’ve been working on that we can talk about:

Most of the areas and world have finished the design process (7 overworld maps in total), and the cast is more or less complete as well (with over 30 characters!). Multiplayer rework is drawing to a close by next month, which was another big chunk of what was taking so much time. As mentioned, there’s some secret things we can’t share about just yet, but we’ve been hard at work on that as well!

Our team has also been growing quite a bit! The team is nearly complete at 20 amazing full time members, and content will start rolling out crazy fast next month as we ramp up for the last stretch before Beta release in October.  Despite the lack of flashy, visible progress to show, we're still on track for Beta and Early Access launch windows we previously stated!

Last but not least, the Ruins, Gene Splicing, and Plant Breeding designs are all coming along nicely, and both Gene Splicing and Plant Breeding will soon be added to the game well before the Beta.

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 the devs to ask questions, make sure to join our Discord!  https://discord.com/invite/onelonelyoutpost While we haven't been able to keep up as much as we'd like with the Kickstarter updates, we're still active in the Discord server, so come say hi! There's also a stream about every other week on Friday where I show off the latest of the game that we can show, and I'm always happy to answer questions during the stream too!

Also don’t forget to wishlist One Lonely Outpost if you haven’t already!

Good news, less good news, and great news!
over 3 years ago – Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 11:51:23 AM

 The Good News

Today we have some exciting news to share, which is that we can finally announce that One Lonely Outpost will be published by Freedom Games (https://freedom.gg). We’ve been working with the Freedom team for a number of months behind the scenes, but are now ready to officially announce our partnership. Teaming up with a publisher is what will help us deliver the best possible game to the most players.

For those of you who may not know, a game publisher not only can provide additional investment and funding for developing the game, but also takes care of a lot of the business and marketing side of releasing a game. That includes setting up and managing our store pages and the console release process, marketing and advertising the game, helping showcase the game at both digital and live events, PR, and other similar functions. Really it lets us totally focus on working to make the game the best it can be, and provides us with the resources to do so.

You may be concerned about horror stories of publishers ruining the vision of a game or forcing arbitrary restrictions on the dev team. For Freedom, that can’t be further from the reality we have experienced with them. Freedom has been an amazing partner to us, only enhancing and supporting our vision. We were very careful when considering which publishers offer to accept, and selected Freedom because they are committed to our vision of the game, and only want to see it reach its full potential as we see it. We maintain complete creative and development freedom, and Freedom (heh) wouldn’t have it any other way! As if that wasn’t enough, the Freedom Co-Founder owns a 60 acre farm! How cool is that?

The Less Good News

Which brings us to another announcement we have to share about our release timeline. Originally we had been aiming to have our Steam Early Access release around October of this year. That timeline was based on our plans and resources at the time, and with changes on both of those fronts (ultimately for the better), we’ve decided that we are going to push our Early Access release into the first few months of 2022.

The decision to push back Early Access was not an easy one, as we know you’re all crazy excited about this. We know it may be tough to hear that it’s going to be even longer before many of you are able to play OLO, but this adjusted timeline will let us deliver a significantly better game to you all, one that really lives up to the vision we have that you’ve all supported. 

With that said, we will be starting our Beta (“Earlier Access,” as we’ve called it previously) further in advance of the Early Access than originally planned. Before it was going to be about 3 months before that release, but now it will come in October, more like 5-6 months before normal Early Access. We are also NOT pushing out the full release of the game at this time - we are still on track to fully release OLO out of Early Access in late 2022. We’ll see how that date holds up in the long run, but for now it’s still good!

The Great News

Thanks to this delay and the publisher, we’ll be able to add Multiplayer and detailed, game-wide pixel art, along with just... MORE. More NPCs, more cutscenes, more mini games, more all-around, and all of that will be of greater quality too. There’s even yet again more things being developed that we can’t talk about yet as we're working out all the details! For those itching for a hint, lets just say we're working on taking a leaf out of the book of games like Pathway and Sea of Stars, visually.

In the future, more updates will be posting to Steam as we slowly begin to transition from early alpha to our final production. We'll still post here from time to time, but joining our discord or following us on Steam are the best ways to stay on the bleeding edge of updates.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1465550/

discord.gg/anxEG5t

As always, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your support and encouragement! We can’t wait to share One Lonely Outpost’s truest vision with you all.

(PS: Don’t forget to complete your BackerKit survey if you haven’t yet done so! $80 and above backers really need to get those done by end of tomorrow!)

Surveys and Artists and Multiplayer - oh my!
almost 4 years ago – Fri, Feb 19, 2021 at 12:38:31 AM

Survey Coming Soon!

Exciting things are coming soon! For all of our current backers with Alpha access and above, please be on the lookout for a survey coming in the next couple days. It is important that you fill this survey out ASAP so that you can continue to have access to the alpha builds going forward. Everyone else will also get surveys as well, though they may come a little later. These cover things like which platform you want and so forth.  

Along with the surveys, we will have Pre-Orders and limited Late-backer options available too - keep an eye on social media and/or discord announcements for links and more details tomorrow!

January & February Progress

We’ve been making progress over the past month or so on all different aspects of the game...

Expanded Team & Game-wide art upgrade: We've added 3 new artists, Irina, Matteo, and Gregor, rounding out our art team to perfection and allowing us to tentatively push towards our ideal vision of the game - fully rendered environments! I've always disliked that the concept art usually looks better than the game. So, we're now pushing towards having the entire game hand-rendered in pixel art! Tiles and grids will only be in the game to aid with farming and customizing your farm area - the rest will be beautifully hand-created pixel art. 

Multiplayer Groundwork:  Multiplayer has definitely been our biggest hurdle as it’s taken considerable rewiring in the game in order to make sure that it works how it needs to. But! The sooner we put 'the time' in to finish the not-so-interesting mountain of work that goes into multiplayer, the less work it will take overall, leaving more time for other features we want to add. If all goes well, we'll be out from under the shadow of multiplayer rewrites by the end of April, and there might even be a (VERY shaky) version of it to try then! Or maybe not - multiplayer is known in the industry as the most difficult feature you can add to a game for good reason, so we'll just have to wait and see.

Animals: Another big thing we’re going to be working on adding into the game is the ability to purchase animals and their robo animal counterparts.

Next Alpha ETA: As for our next alpha build, we’re hoping to have it out in early March! This build will be fairly light since so much has gone into multiplayer work. We plan to introduce 2 new NPCs into the game as well as some new cutscenes and an additional fruit tree, which you may have seen teased on our socials previously.  Animals may or may not make it in, but we're hopeful!

More To Come: Some more exciting things happening with the project which we will cover in the next update!

Thank You!

We want to thank you for all of your continued support since the end of Kickstarter and since the launch of the Steam page. Definitely go wishlist the game if you haven’t already and share it with your friends. Also make sure to look for the survey later this week. We will have another update to explain everything for that announcement that goes along with the survey.

Don’t forget to join us on Discord too! Us devs hang out there all the time, and are happy to answer questions! https://discord.gg/EQDMDYKqC5