Hi everyone! Happy (almost) Halloween! đ»Weâre back again this month to show off some more of our progress as we work towards our big EA launch next year. The main things weâll be showing off this month are some more of our NPC lander progress, as well as some extremely adorable animals. đDefinitely stay until the end to see these cuties!
Of course, as always, things are still work in progress and subject to change between now and Early Access.
Sallyâs Lander
Sally has just landed at your outpost and is ready to become a part of the colony. Upon her landing, youâll need to welcome her and have a couple of conversations to help build your relationship with her. Sheâs always looking to learn about others, so you might get some odd questions, like this one:
Now to her lander! As you can see, it's a little cramped in there, but itâs just enough to keep Sally feeling right at home.
Leelooâs Lander
Leeloo is actually one of our Kickstarter backers' creations. While we donât have Leeloo ready to show off just yet, we do have her lander! Leeloo is a botanist, which you can definitely see from her natural themed decor throughout her lander.
Colony Center
Our colony center has a beautiful rock formation surrounding it. It's all coming together for our beautiful desert planet. This, of course, won't be the exact angle that you see it from in the game, but we had to give you all a nice look at it!
Cute Animals!
You may have seen some of these cuties on our social media previously, but theyâre getting some new animations. They can now show off their emotions a bit more and really let you know if youâve hurt their feelings. Hopefully once youâre in the game, you wonât see these very often.
Discord AMA
Earlier this month, we did an AMA with our game director, Manu Floret, in our community Discord. Our amazing community asked all kinds of questions about the game and we want to showcase some of those questions and answers as you may have those same questions!
Q: What sort of things will be included in Early Access at launch? A: Fishing, animals (like the ones you see above), water and power systems, insects, shops, prospecting and maintanence!
Q: Are there seasons? A: Yes! Radiant (24 days), Autumnal (16 days), Boreal (24 days), and Vernal (16 days). Weeks on this planet are 8 days long, thus the length of the seasons being multiples of 8.
Q: Is gene splicing still going to be a thing? A: Yes! It likely won't be in our Early Access but will be there in our 1.0 launch.
Q: Will there be character customization? A: Yes! It will pretty limited, but there will be some customization.
September Updates
đ Happy Fall everyone! đ The holidays are just around the corner, but we're not slowing down on our updates! Weâve been continuing to work hard on OLO over the past month and have made some incredible progress to show you all today!
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's update, 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 đ 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
Hey OLO fans! Itâs 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 weâve been lucky enough to be able to participate! As part of being in the event, weâve 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 isnât what any of you wanted to hear, but as the great Miyamoto said, âA delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.â We want to avoid remotely giving any of you a potentially bad, or even rough game. We are currently targeting March 2023 to launch into EA.
With all of that being said, we do want to show off a bit of what weâve been working on over the past month! đ 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 itâs been a bumpy ride, but knowing that we have such an amazing community behind us supporting us, makes it all feel worthwhile. If you havenât 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 weâre working on ramping up more as we get closer towards launch, plus exclusive Moocifer adventures!
Julyâs Art Update
Hey everyone! Weâre still hard at work to hopefully be bringing you more content soon and get back on track with showing off all our 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, hereâs 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 đ
While talking about the space van, if you would like to vote for the new official name of it, head over to our Discord to submit your vote!
Aaronâs lander
Weâve also been making progress on upgrading the look of the rest of the beginning of the game, like when Aaron joins the colony! Hereâs 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
Hereâs a quick look at some concept art that our team has been working on as well! What do you think these are for đ€
Don't worry if you think the game will be entirely 3D now. It's not! It will still be a 2D experience. The 3D look is just to add in our 3D lighting! 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. In the meantime, join our Discord if you havenât already!
Major Updates
Hey OLO Fans!
First off, we want to thank you all for being so patient with us. Itâs been quite some time since our last update, so we have lots to update you all on. Letâs 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 bit 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, 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, letâs get into some timeline updates.
Timeline
So our timeline has definitely shifted a little bit as Iâm sure youâve 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 weâve had to do, weâve had to push the beta back some. We plan to have a better update about when exactly it will happen. For now, we mainly wanted to give yall a better look sort of behind the curtains as to what has been going on and why weâve been delinquent on updates for the past almost yr at this point.
Rectifying it
Now that you know all of the struggles weâve been working through, letâs dive into how exactly weâve 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 weâve 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
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 folks and the new processes that theyâve 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. Itâs 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 đ) or follow us on Twitter!
July / August Dev Updates
Hey OLO Fans!
Weâve been continuing to work hard on One Lonely Outpost and we have lots to update you on, so letâs get right into it!
Behold! Corn! (and 3D lighting)
The one big thing weâve 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. Weâve had to do a lot of testing and reworking to get to this point, but weâre beyond excited with how it is turning out!
Test of our custom-made sprite modeling system with Sydney. Don't worry about the artifacts in the shadow; we already know how to fix those :)
Worldbuilding
With all of the 3D lighting work happening, weâve 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.
Weâve also been working on more ship interiors for all of our NPCâs. Lots are definitely still being worked on, but hereâs a look at just a few of them. Simons Interior (Synthetic Botanist)
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!
Say hi to the final version of Eve! A shy but brilliant scientist researching the alien ruins!
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, weâve 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
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! Also donât forget to wishlist One Lonely Outpost if you havenât already!
We were at E3!
In case you missed our E3 segment or just want to see it again, you can view it over on the Freedom Games Youtube channel or just below!
Make sure to tune into the E3 broadcast today at 1:30pm PT to see our new One Lonely Outpost trailer! Once youâve seen it, make sure to come back and tell us what you think about it! Weâd love to know your thoughts about all the progress weâve been making!
Our team lead, Brad, will also be doing a livestream over on our Twitch with Little Rock Games (developers of To the Rescue) and Blue Goo Games (developers of Space Chef) at 1pm PST to talk about To the Rescue, then live react to the One Lonely Outpost E3 segment, and then to talk indie development of games like One Lonely Outpost and Space Chef.
