Outcore: Desktop Adventure cover
Outcore: Desktop Adventure screenshot
Genre: Platform, Role-playing (RPG), Simulator, Adventure, Indie, Visual Novel

Outcore: Desktop Adventure

The "Cute animals with clown noses" update!

I'm happy to announce Outcore's biggest, most important update ever since "The big 2023 update" earlier this year.

Please welcome...

The "Cute animals with clown noses" update!





Finally, after ten thousand years, I've managed to focus ALL player feedback into one singular feature which everyone can enjoy. It took hundreds of the best engineers around the world to develop this, but we managed to overcome the technical difficulties involved in developing such a complex system.

You can finally, look at cute animals with big red clown noses instead of playing Outcore

Look, buddy, I'll be frank with you. The game has like 17k post-release wishlis++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+

+654

Sorry, my cat just landed his abnormally gigantic ass on the keyboard. Here's proof


Anyway, as I was saying, The game has like 17k post-release wishlists. That's like 17,000 people who showed interest in the game but haven't played it even though it's free. This is my dream game, and I'm gonna make them play it, you hear me???
The only way to convert them was to pull out the big guns, the forbidden weapon, the illegal Danish: Cute animals.

I could have just let you look at regular cute animals, but then I would have missed the opportunity to subconsciously remind you to buy the clown nose DLCs, which you don't have to but you should definitely remember that they exist and that I hunger for french fries and schnitzel in pita which I can buy using YOUR money.

"Finally, Doctor Shinobi, YOU'VE DONE IT! I no longer have to play your stupid game. I will now proceed to tell ALL MY FRIENDS about Outcore's new awesome update. Next, please add a feature that lets me order hard-boiled eggs directly to my home".

Yeah!!!! Go tell your friends about the update! And have fun, I worked very hard on this update just for you!

Ohhhhhhh.... by the way


I made a new attempt to fix the annoying black screen bug. Hopefully, the bug-fixing editions (and maybe the base one) should fix it for everyone. If you're still getting black screens, let me know on the game's Steam forums or Discord server.

OHHHH, by the way 2.0


I'm working on a new game which I hope to announce sometime between this micro-second and the end of August. Unfortunately, it won't contain cute animals with big red clown noses

June 26th update


  • - Remember the blog post about the "racism" bug? Well, it's fixed again. No more manually adding support for weird characters for the rest of eternity.

    This time it's almost certainly fixed for good. That said, there's also a very decent chance I may have made that bug worse. Only time and your angry comments will tell.

  • - Fixed the game's rendering on 5:4 aspect ratio screens, which should allow cavemen to play Outcore.
  • - Fixed the memory window not recognizing Lumi being dropped into it for some players

The "racism" bug

Patch notes:



  • Attempted to fix a bug that makes the game break for people who have French names (I'm dead serious. More details below)
  • Upgraded the engine version. This will hopefully help fix rare crash bugs
  • Made it easier for hackers to write an autosplitter for Outcore.


French names bug


For some players, when Lumi asks the player to open a folder such as "Documents" or "Downloads", she fails to recognize the folders being opened. She simply stands there doing nothing, leaving players confused.


After receiving several "Player.log" files from players who encountered this bug I noticed something common: They all appear to have French Windows usernames.

"Doctor Shinobi, you little clown, did you just make a racist bug?"


Woah woah woah hold on, I can explain everything.
I suddenly remembered it's not just French! This also used to happen with... Turkish people!

"Great, now you're racist against the Turkish people too"


Or am I...??? I'm going to prove my innocence by presenting the technical details behind this bug.

Why this bug happens


Aright nerds, let's dive in.

I previously publicly mentioned that when you play Outcore you actually run 2 apps at the same time:

  • Outcore, the game.
  • A special invisible program I wrote called "WindowsUtility", which in short we'll call WU.

I wrote WU to assist Outcore with interacting with your Windows OS. For example, you know how at the beginning of the game Lumi's glitch blob points you to her first file? It knows its position on the screen thanks to WU.

Outcore and WU communicate with each other like a server and a client, except they are both on your computer. The bug occurs inside WU, way before the information is communicated to Outcore.

When Lumi asks you to open a folder, she instructs WU to check the address of any folder that you open.
Let's say Lumi asks the player to open the Downloads folder. Outcore will send a love letter to WU saying "Hey WU, my brother which I dearly love. please let me know when a folder with the address 'C:\Users\DoctorShinobi\Downloads' is opened and focused"

WU will then check the address of every folder that is opened. If it's equal to C:\Users\DoctorShinobi\Downloads then WU will respond to Outcore with this letter:
"Greetings, Outcore, my twin sibling which I definitely do not hate for being more popular than me, the folder you requested has been opened by the master of this computer".

Outcore will then notify Lumi about this exciting news. She will change animation and probably say something like "wow look at this, it's my file, yeaaahh let's gooo".

BUT


French names, amright? In French you have these accented letters such as "é, è, ê, ô, û, à, É, È, Ê, Ô, Û, À, ï, Ï, ë, Ë", and more!

Let's imagine this hypothetical universe in which I am French. Lumi would ask WU to monitor this folder:
C:\Users\DôctôrShinôbï\Downloads
When the folder is opened and WU checks its address, it's actually going to read something that looks like this:
C%3A%5CUsers%5CD%F4ct%F4rShin%F4b%EF%5CDownloads

Weird, right? I'll tell you why it looks like this.
If you ever looked at a website's address, you'd often see symbols like this. I don't know what's up with URLs but they don't really support all types of characters. To work around that, browsers/websites encode the URL addresses, which is called "escaping".
When you escape a URL, you're replacing all special characters with regular ones that represent them.

For example, "/" is replaced with "%5C". "ô" is replaced with "%F4", and so on...
Then after the escaped URL is transferred somewhere, the receiving end can unescape it to get the original text.
The folder URL that WU reads is escaped. to Unescape it, I use a C# function called "Uri.UnescapeDataString". It works well most of the time, but it fails to unescape accented letters for some reason.

The somewhat bizarre solution is to manually unescape the URLs myself. This is something I've done in the past with accented Turkish letters, but had to extend with more letters for the French ones:


Can't say I'm super happy with this since I keep discovering new letters that need to be added. But at least it should be good enough for most cases.

If you still encounter this issue then let me know in the Steam forums on the game's Discord server

Bug fixes

- Attempted to fix a case where the player's settings fail to load
- Attempted to fix an error preventing the memory window from opening
- Fixed an error preventing some windows from being closed (such as the memory loader)
- Added a bunch of safety checks which should help me identify the source of some errors.

French localization + CT nerf


  • Outcore can now be played in French!
    The translations were made by Alexis Barroso, Alexis Deschamps, Léo L'hoost ,Maude Nantel, Kariane Lacharité from PrismaLoc
  • Nerfed Captain Tutorial to be less difficult than the final boss of a Souls game
  • Fixed an issue preventing Paint from being opened on some computers
  • Fixed a bunch of errors that occurred in the background for some people

Minor patch


  • Attempt to fix the invisible walls bug at the last boss.

The Big 2023 Update


  • Added a weird blue gnome to the gnome village

Minor changes to make the game a bit less annoying for some players

- Increased the maximum resolution a safe key can be before Lumi tells the player it's too big
- The second safe key will now require slightly fewer pixels before Lumi considers it big enough/filled
- The core of the computer boss's dash attack will now lock on 0.4 seconds faster. This will make it easier for players to dodge

January 6 update

Have you ever played Outcore, finished the nightmare flashback that ends with the main menu showing up, and then quit the game because you thought that was the end? Well, this patch is for you:

  • At the end of the nightmare flashback - pressing "exit" will now cause a group of clowns to break into your house, beat your ass, spread weird rumors about you among your friends, and continue the game into the next story chapter because you didn't finish the game.

    Happy birthday.

German localization


  1. The game now supports the German language! This was possible thanks to the hard work by Alexander Leiner & Simon Dehne from PrismaLoc
  2. Fixed the mouse being able to leave the main screen when aiming a star
  3. Fixed the final boss's health bar extending out of the screen when the main screen's aspect ratio is less than 16:9