Hello chasers! This month we had a lot of work done on integrating custom key bindings for keyboard and mouse players, Kickstarter backers exclusive decals, road network update and progress on world polish, and finally the huge integration on our new weather systems.
KEY BINDINGS
We integrated a series of categories of customizable key bindings for keyboard and mouse players to let our players choose the way they want to play OUTBRK in a comfortable way.
KICKSTARTER EXCLUSIVE DECALS
New exclusive car decals were integrated in the game and are ready to be distributed to Kickstarter backers that backed the different founders packages (bronze, silver and gold). If you don’t remember your pledge package, you can always log on Kickstarter and double check here : https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/outbrkgame/outbrk-the-multiplayer-storm-chasing-experience
WORLD BUILDING
A huge pass has been done to add more interstates exit ramps and more North/South roads to improve a bit the connectivity of the road network. You can see where they were added in the world HERE and HERE.
Here are a few screenshots of these news additions:
Some progress has been also done on the world building polish tracked in THIS TASK .
Here are some screenshot of the detailing work done this month:
NEW WEATHER UPDATE
Our external development teams completed their first mandate on the development of our new clouds and tornado visuals, so most of the technical work on our side this month has been focused on the integration of the new clouds, tornado, physics and destruction technologies into our main development branch, plug all our gameplay systems into these new features, and debug and optimize it for OUTBRK.
We also integrated two new weather scenarios to stress test our systems into various conditions to spot edge cases. We had a lot of support from our team of internal testers to find and document new issues and helped us gain a tremendous amount of time to get all of this working properly. Among those testers, “WalkOverYou” overtook a large amount of extra responsibilities in coordinating the testing efforts and has now been nominated as our Lead Tester. You will be able to recognize him in Discord and Steam with his distinct role, say hi! Without overshadowing any of the other testers fantastic support, WalkOverYou’s quality work had a definitive positive impact on our development velocity at tackling this colossal integration task.
We know that after talking about all this exciting progress on the integration of the new weather everybody must be excited about seeing it now, we are preparing a dedicated reveal video early this month, so stay tuned!
NEXT STEPS
Once the clouds will be finally revealed, our next step will be focusing on large scale public testing. This will be our final step before early access release to make sure that our online multiplayer servers can handle everything once we launch the game. We’re currently debugging some of our gameplay systems that have some issues interacting with the new weather systems, and once this is resolved, we will communicate our playtest strategy publicly.
That's all for this development update ! Please keep Wishlisting the game on Steam, as it helps us break through the visibility algorithm and reach potential new chasers! If you haven't already, Wishlist OUTBRK here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1107320/OUTBRK/ Till next time, chasers. -The OUTBRK Team
OUTBRK: Development Outlook (March 2024)
Hello chasers and happy Easter to those who celebrate! This month we integrated a new playable unique car, new billboard designs, new animated lights for player cars, deployed servers in new regions and optimized the game when driving around.
INTEGRATED PLAYABLE LIVESTORMCHASERS.COM CAR
We integrated the chase car of Kickstarter backers livestormchasers.com and all its exterior and interior accessories. The led lights can be turned on and off by the player to improve visibility in hazardous conditions. You can see the reveal post on their official Facebook page here : https://www.facebook.com/100044525645683/posts/962897378537775/
BILLBOARDS
We integrated a lot of new billboard designs in the world, including all Kickstarter rewards we received. If you had a billboard design Kickstarter backer reward and you didn’t send us your design, please send it to contact@outbrkgame.com. Here are some of the newly integrated billboards that can be seen all over when driving around.
ANIMATED LIGHTS
We integrated animated hazard lights that can be activated by the players for more immersion and roleplay opportunities. There will be 3 models available for early access, a small, a medium and a large hazard light. Here they are in action:
REGIONS SUPPORT
So far, all of our playtests sessions were limited to the Americas for technical reasons. As we gear up for Early Access, this also means we started deploying servers across the ocean to accommodate players from other regions. We now have a server cluster in North-Europe on which we started testing matchmaking connectivity and stability. We don’t expect to have a lot of server clusters for early access, but enough so that our international players can have a nice gaming experience without too much latency. We can relatively easily add more server clusters in different regions if the game becomes successful in regions we didn’t anticipate in the future.
ROAD OPTIMISATION
In an effort to make the game run smoother at early access, we found significant improvements on the way we calculate our road trajectories, resulting in smaller file size. This will reduce fps drops that some users had when driving around during playtests, especially when approaching a city.
NEXT STEPS
We’re still working diligently on integrating the volumetric cloud and tornado. The collaboration with the shader artists team is going very well, we have a weekly meeting with their team every Friday and they submit their progress regularly. We are at the last phase of debugging and we already started recording footage to show this new technology in a proper video. This part of the work is what takes the biggest chunk of our development time since we’re making a weather game after all, and we can’t wait for the big reveal you’re all been waiting for!
That's all for this development update ! Please keep Wishlisting the game on Steam, as it helps us break through the visibility algorithm and reach potential new chasers! If you haven't already, Wishlist OUTBRK here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1107320/OUTBRK/ Till next time, chasers. -The OUTBRK Team
OUTBRK: Development Outlook (February 2024)
Hello chasers ! On this February 29th, we’re bringing you a monthly newsletter filled with pictures of world building updates, new car customization content, new bumpable physics, update on testing and update on the visuals of the game.
WORLD BUILDING
A lot of detailing was done in Grassland Park, located at the center north of the map. Here are some screenshots showing what was done this month.
CAR COLORS AND DECALS
We integrated one more batch of colors and decals for our customizable cars, bringing up the current total to 22 colors and 40 decals. Here are some examples :
BUMPABLE PHYSICS
We’re working on adding bumpable physics on smaller props and having it synchronized over the network in a multiplayer match. It looks pretty good from the player’s perspective, but in this newsletter we’re showing you the result of testing in a multiplayer match from another player’s perspective. We will be looking at improving this a little bit, but we’re happy with this result and will be slowly putting this behavior on more objects over time.
TESTING AND BALANCING
This month we focused heavily on networking and matchmaking issues, doing multiplayer testing every weekend to fix major offenders. We had a lot of success finally fixing one major issue where we could see other players’ cars teleporting around when driving long distances, we greatly improved the speed and reliability of getting into an online game and fixed multiple other networking issues contained in this list : https://trello.com/c/xzDpVLrM/814-test-results-240224
We also started looking at the balancing of the points earned during a chase, the deduction of points from fuel, hail and collision, so that we can balance the price of items in the garage before the early access launch for a fair and engaging progression loop.
NEXT STEPS
We've been talking about it here and there, but the next big step we’re getting ready to take is to finally update the cloud and tornado technology and visuals to its final form before early access. We’re moving from mesh and particles to a fully volumetric solution, which will be much more realistic visually and less demanding on the framerate. We don’t have anything to show just yet, and we will do a proper showcase video for this because we truly believe this is a groundbreaking innovation. More on this very soon !
That's all for this development update ! Please keep Wishlisting the game on Steam, as it helps us break through the visibility algorithm and reach potential new chasers! If you haven't already, Wishlist OUTBRK here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1107320/OUTBRK/ Till next time, chasers. -The OUTBRK Team
OUTBRK: Development Outlook (January 2024)
Hello chasers ! It’s already 2024 and we’re starting very strong with a newsletter packed with content and new features. We’re showing progress on our game menus, steam achievements, a new towing feature to help players that got themselves in sticky situations, new 3D models, fully playable Dominator 3 and more!
MENU GRAPHICS AND CONTROLLER SUPPORT
This month, we integrated graphics and full controller support in all the game menus. We also integrated the Offline mode, which was a stretch goal from our Kickstarter Campaign. Here is what our game mode selection screen looks like in game :
We also have pretty new icons for Steam Achievements integrated and functional.
TOWING/UNSTUCK FEATURE
If players get too brave going off-road and stay stuck in a ditch or in a lake, we integrated a neat way to unstuck your car and get teleported back to the nearest gas station. It costs some of your hard earned chase money, so use it as a last resort only !
NEW MODELS
We integrated a variation of plexiglass hail cages to fit the body of all of our 5 playable civilian cars and 2 new probe models. You can see them all displayed here in our garage.
DOMINATOR 3
Last month we showed our new Dominator 3 car model. This month we worked on integrating the gameplay functionality of it. Now that it’s all in-game, players that can afford this beast can drive it, light up its massive light bar, and activate its intercept mode to lower it and resist the strongest of tornadoes.
NEXT STEPS
We ran some multiplayer stability tests and found some issues like this one and that one that we’re working to fix in priority before doing larger tests, but as soon as we have stable servers, we will be looking at doing capacity tests and trying to get as many people in as possible to test the limit of our servers. We also implemented the infrastructure and associated data to have player-driven destruction (running over stop signs…etc) and other players seeing it correctly and we now have to test it in multiplayer sessions to see what kind of bugs could result out of this.
That's all for this development update ! Please keep Wishlisting the game on Steam, as it helps us break through the visibility algorithm and reach potential new chasers! If you haven't already, Wishlist OUTBRK here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1107320/OUTBRK/ Till next time, chasers. -The OUTBRK Team
OUTBRK: Development Outlook (December 2023)
Happy Holidays chasers ! 2023 was a pivotal year for Outbrk and we can’t wait to show you what we have in store planned for 2024. It might be a vacation for many of you, but we certainly have been hard at work this month integrating more car cosmetics, testing and scaling our systems and updating the in-game Dominator 3 car model.
CAR DECALS
We integrated all 25 kickstarter backer reward text and image decals on all our playable cars, and created about 15 new unique decals so all players can give a unique look to their chase car. Here are a few screenshots :
MULTIPLE TEST SESSIONS AND EXTENSIVE DEBUGGING
We did multiple test sessions and identified bugs that needed fixing in priority. Below are all the things we fixed, but the highlights are the following : fixed issues with voice and text chat, fixed a bug where players were getting stuck loading into an online game, and changed entirely the way we do the ocean, lakes and rivers to fix a crash that was introduced recently by the water rendering system. December 18th December 21th December 23rd December 24th
ONLINE INFRASTRUCTURE AND SERVER SCALING
Making an online game means putting a lot of effort into the stability of the game servers and matchmaking systems. This month we initiated the process of moving all our game servers into a scalable service to support more players and be more robust than our own personal hardware. Moving our Outbrk multiplayer game servers from a 2nd computer in a closet to the professional liveops service playfab.com , is a big step to concretize the eventual early access release of the game.
NEW DOMINATOR 3 MODEL
The Dominator 3 was one of the first car models integrated in Outbrk, but since its initial reveal, the game progressed so much the car needed a visual update to match the quality of our other playable cars. Here are some screenshots of the updated in-game model without side decals, temporarily :
NEXT STEPS
We’re in the middle of the big server infrastructure switch and it is going well so far. This will require a lot of testing, but this will also allow us to increase our testing team in the near future, so this is exciting! Once this is done, we will be increasing the playtest frequency and player pool size to stress test our servers as much as possible.
That's all for this development update ! Please keep Wishlisting the game on Steam, as it helps us break through the visibility algorithm and reach potential new chasers! If you haven't already, Wishlist OUTBRK here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1107320/OUTBRK/ Till next time, chasers. -The OUTBRK Team
OUTBRK: Development Outlook (November 2023)
Hello chasers ! We have a huge newsletter this month filled with new content and features to show you. We have a large integration of new cars and improvement to the driving experience, integration of stats and achievements, a preview of our original soundtrack and an appearance of Marc and David on the Weather Pods Disaster Relief Telethon.
New Playable Cars
This month we integrated 3 new playable cars, completing our early access roaster for what we call civilian cars.
We also started integrating the different chaser cars that will be available in-game, starting with Daniel Shaw unique car.
Driving Updates
We integrated a quick action wheel when driving to better expose the different abilities our playable cars have, such as blinkers and wiper speeds. This is the same menu where players will be able to activate custom car actions such as emergency lights or lowering tornado intercept vehicles to the ground. In this screenshot, we can also see another improvement we did this month, animating the character’s arms on the driving wheel!
Stats and Achievements
OUTBRK being a simulation game based on scientific data, adding stats tracking and achievements were very important for our early access release. We tackled the majority of the stats integration including everything from driving distance to strongest winds recorded. We’re also in the process of adding around 60 achievements to highlight players’ accomplishments in the game.
OUTBRK Menu Theme Song
We’re happy to reveal a little preview of the OUTBRK original soundtrack, starting with the menu loop music. It will play in the background when navigating menus, customizing your car or character, fine tuning your settings or waiting to join a match.
Lastly, we did an appearance on the Weather Pods Disaster Relief Telethon with the Carolina Weather Group to chat about the game and the production challenges. Here is the recording of our segment : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxOIfsB_v0s
Next Steps
For the last couple of months, we’ve been working with a team of visual effects artists to redo our clouds and tornado look without compromising on the scientific accuracy of our game systems. They delivered the first complete version of the cloud system and we’re getting to work on replacing our current cloud technology to this new system. This is not a small task, but we can’t wait to show you the impressive results of this colossal visual improvement.
That's all for this development update ! Please keep Wishlisting the game on Steam, as it helps us break through the visibility algorithm and reach potential new chasers! If you haven't already, Wishlist OUTBRK here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1107320/OUTBRK/ Till next time, chasers. -The OUTBRK Team
OUTBRK: Development Outlook (October 2023)
Hello chasers ! This month has been focused on CONTENT ! We worked really hard to integrate a great amount of car customisation, character customisation, and put all this content in our game shop.
Car Customisation
We’ve shown progression on our car models in the last few updates, the models are now all integrated in-game, purchasable and ready to equip via the in-game garage. Here is what is looks like :
Character Customisation
Our character modelers continued to deliver some amazing content and we continued the work to bring this content to life in OUTBRK. We now have our final playable character roster for Early Access. They also have customisation options such as hairs and clothes.
Here is the progress on our in-game character customisation menu :
We have also worked on integrating and polishing our in-game animations to correctly fit the new characters :
Technical Progress
Good progress was made on the game stability of our multiplayer feature. The addition of more content caused some expected issues that we were able to swiftly resolve. We also had a significant breakthrough on fixing a networking issue where other players’ cars could be seen teleporting around that took months to find the source and it seems to be resolved for good and we’re very happy about that.
Next Steps
Next steps are to continue adding more content, we have 2 more cars and a couple more 3D models on the way. Work on the world building is also ready to resume in full force. Lastly, we’re ironing out our steam pipeline to support more players in our next playtests and fixing more multiplayer issues to give players a nice gameplay experience.
That's all for this development update ! Please keep Wishlisting the game on Steam, as it helps us break through the visibility algorithm and reach potential new chasers! If you haven't already, Wishlist OUTBRK here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1107320/OUTBRK/ Till next time, chasers. -The OUTBRK Team
OUTBRK: Development Outlook (September 2023)
Hello chasers ! We had a PACKED month of development with huge progress on the menu flow for car and character customisation, working with 3d artists to get additional models ready and integrating more social features that are integral to the multiplayer experience.
Customization UI in game
Personalizing the look of your chase car and character is central to the gameplay experience. This month we worked to design and integrate a fully functional User Interface to handle all the customisation options there are in the game. Here is a look at that interface working fully with our game systems:
A lot of new 3d models!
This month we onboarded an additional 3d modeler to help us create all the assets needed for early access. He’s slowly getting up to speed with our production pipeline and started sending us exciting previews. Here is a little collection of screenshots of our modeling team’s work of this month:
Social features
Being able to communicate and coordinate with other players is an important part of the chasing immersion. This month we worked to integrate a text chat system and fix a lot of bugs with our voice chat to smooth the experience as much as possible. We started to integrate quality of life features such as a volume meter for every player in the server and a way to mute them entirely if you prefer not to hear them.
Next steps
Next steps are to test the new content we’ve recently done to make sure everything works as intended and integrate even more content from our outsourcers in the game such as more cars, more car customisation options, more playable characters and more clothes. Regarding the next playtest, this month we’re going to put into place the Steam Playtest feature for Outbrk to allow more playtests to happen without requiring us so much planning work every single playtest session. This will lead to more frequent and bigger playtests in the future!
That's all for this development update ! Please keep Wishlisting the game on Steam, as it helps us break through the visibility algorithm and reach potential new chasers! If you haven't already, Wishlist OUTBRK here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1107320/OUTBRK/ Till next time, chasers. -The OUTBRK Team
OUTBRK: Development Outlook (August 2023)
Hello everyone ! It’s time for another monthly development update! In this newsletter we’re going to show the latest developments on our game systems, world building and player character customisation.
In-Game Weather Report System
Like we mentioned in our last month newsletter, we designed and integrated our new standalone report system to report storm elements on the map. It used to be inside the camera module but it didn’t feel fair to force players to waste pictures just to do a weather report. So here is it, in game :
Dense Fields & Residential Grass
We worked on our procedural vegetation recipe to have a good world details variety, this month we added dense field (corn and sunflower) and short residential grass, here are some screenshots taken in game :
Point of Interests in the world
We started integrating more unique point of interests to bring a little bit more credibility in our different cities, here is one quick screenshot taking in Unity of a street soccer field :
OUTBRK Playable Characters
Two months ago, we shared a little test for our playable character. Since then, we have onboarded a team of character artists to bring more realism and most importantly, customisation, to our playable character. Here is the first test of a gameplay character integrated in Unity :
Next steps
We’ve been doing some incredible progress with our new cloud technology development with our team of technical VFX artists and we can’t wait to show the result of this, but it will take a couple of months before we can properly showcase this fantastic work. We’re also continuing the development process of our character, with doing more content (shirts, pants, shoes…etc) and also have a female body type available for early access. We’re also doing a lot of debugging with our testing team to deliver a polished and comfortable game experience. Looking forward, we will start planning another round of playtest to test our new gameplay systems. We don’t have anything to announce for this yet, we have a lot of work to prepare for this, we hope to have more concrete information about our next playtest in next month’s newsletter.
That's all for this development update ! Please keep Wishlisting the game on Steam, as it helps us break through the visibility algorithm and reach potential new chasers! If you haven't already, Wishlist OUTBRK here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1107320/OUTBRK/ Till next time, chasers.
-The OUTBRK Team
OUTBRK: Development Outlook (July 2023)
Hello everyone ! It’s time for another monthly development update! In this newsletter we’re going to show the latest gameplay developments, designs, and technological tests we’ve been doing!
New camera gameplay
Last month we showed some design exploration in photoshop for a new camera system, and this month, we implemented it in the game. We decided to redo some parts of our game systems following observations we made while doing playtests with players and we think this new version is much more engaging and rewarding. Here is how it looks like in-game :
Interview with german storm chasing community Meteopool
An exclusive interview with german storm chasing community Meteopool was published on their website, the interview was conducted in english and was published in german here : https://www.meteopool.org/de/forum/szene-lobby/blog/outbrk-stormchasing-simulator-als-3d-spiel-interview-t199-p1.htm
New car modeling
We’re starting the integration of a new playable car, this time it’s a kickstarter backer car of backer “radarbsm”, here is a work in progress : We also completed the game integration of our Altitude car model, here it is in our garage (grass on the floor is a temporary bug) :
External teams onboarding
With our game production going very well, we started to onboard more external teams to help us complete the early access version of OUTBRK. This month we started working with a new technical artist to help improve the look of our clouds, and a character artist to develop better playable characters and allow better customisation. This is a very exciting step of development as we kick in full gear our production pipeline.
Next steps
The next development steps are to create the standalone report system, help our external teams to get started working on the project, and fixing bugs our testing team spotted on our text and voice chat systems.
That's all for this development update ! Please keep Wishlisting the game on Steam, as it helps us break through the visibility algorithm and reach potential new chasers! If you haven't already, Wishlist OUTBRK here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1107320/OUTBRK/ Till next time, chasers. -The OUTBRK Team
