Current Priorities & Role of the Community

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tl;dr: The community is super important in developing Outscape. We need to focus on usability for new players to make Outscape successful due to a ‘usability crisis’, but this must not be at the expense of strategic depth. Because we are working on usability plus some very large items (e.g. Alliances) where we can’t show incremental progress, it may make the community wonder where we are going. We understand this is a difficult phase for the community, but all will be solved (details within).

Intro

The past few weeks have been quite hectic for the Outscape team with a lot of intense development on new core gameplay features. Based on some of the recent community feedback, we thought we should make the current development priorities clear and clarify the important role the community is playing and can play during the current winter/spring seasons.

In early January we published the core of our roadmap detailing what we will be working on over the coming months. The truth is that important features such as alliances and social elements such as the ability to trade/give fleets and planets to other players, chat and player profiles/achievements had their development pushed back in 2017/2018, mainly because these are all classed as ‘Extra Large’ items in terms of engineering effort – meaning it’s hard to focus on much else whilst these items are in progress. In Early ’19 we decided to bite the bullet and begin working on these, knowing it will be hard to do the smaller more incremental things community members are used to.

Usability Crisis

What we perhaps didn’t do a great job of explaining was the ‘usability crisis’ we have been facing for new players. We noted briefly in the roadmap blog post:

The game is not newbie friendly… 60% of players drop off very quickly because of this, however those that persevere through the first few sessions tend to find a rewarding experience.

Let us illustrate this with a chart of # Daily Active Users when we started the Alpha 2 and Alpha 3 Galaxies:

Outscape Daily Active users – showing steep decline over the course of time after each galaxy launch
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Achievements: we want your suggestions!

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Hello friends,

We’re working on achievements at the moment as part of our work on player profiles and wanted to pick your brains!

Achievements should be fun, bring mini-challenges to the game, and help illustrate a player’s progress (the image above is an early design mockup).

To begin with, we want to finalize around 50 of them. Some will be progressive e.g. capture 5 enemy planets, successfully defend 3 invasions; and others will be one-off actions e.g. construct a dreadnought, take back a lost planet…

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Q1 2019 Outscape Roadmap & Survey Findings

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Hi all,

Happy New Year! We wanted to give you an outline on what we will be building in Q1 and hence what you can expect to be incrementally layered into Outscape, as well as an update on the findings from the recent mini survey.

A huge thanks to all of you who completed the mini-survey we sent out over the holiday period! This survey was much shorter than previous ones, and helped us to understand if we were moving the needle or not on the key areas players highlighted in the last full survey, as well as allowing us to keep our thumb on the pulse more generally.

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Roadmap to Beta

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Hi everyone,

Finally – it’s time to show you what’s coming to the game over the next 3 months as we walk you through the roadmap!

We’ve already started work on it, but hadn’t been ready to present it until now while it remained a work in progress. There’s been a ton of feedback in the forums and player surveys which we’ve had to condense into pill form, chew up, and spit back out in the shape of a coherent plan… An old adage is likely to apply 😉

When does Beta start and what’s been going on?

If you haven’t seen our post from a couple of days ago, give it a quick once-over before reading on. It lays out key dates including when Beta starts and some of what’s been going on behind the scenes (and may shed some light on parts of this roadmap). That the game was developed by just two developers (until recently) seems to have shocked a lot of you – and we guess something we should be proud of 🙂

The Roadmap

If this post is ‘too long, not gonna read’, at the end you’ll be able to find details of the chart version of the roadmap.

Please keep in mind that this is our roadmap for the next 3 months to get us to Beta – there are a gazillion features we have planned and will start on right after these. Think of the features listed here as a slice of a much grander vision – rather than the whole pie 🙂 But without any further ado:

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When does Beta start and what’s been going on?

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Hi everyone,

Wondering when you’ll be able to play Beyond Dark, what’s going on, or where the latest roadmap is? Then this post is for you. If not, ummmm, keep reading and we’ll tell you anyway… And we’ll also throw in some behind-the-scenes details for good measure!

Before we get to when Beta will start and when you’ll be able to play – there’s a couple of things we wanted to share with you first…

Growing the team

Number of developers and time available for bugs/maintenance vs gameplay and new features

Until very recently, the game was entirely built and maintained by just two developers! But over the last couple of months, we’ve added two more and are still actively hiring.

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Followup: Server performance test

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Hi everyone,

Thanks to all of you that took part in Saturday’s server performance test! Although we’d have enjoyed nothing more than seeing our CTO doused in ice water, on the plus side, we’re pretty satisfied with how the test went.

About the test

One of the key challenges for the development team is to ensure the game servers can scale efficiently and at a predictable rate.

We don’t use maximum spec server instances for the current Alpha galaxy to help us achieve this, as bottlenecks and other issues are identified earlier than they would be if we were using the most powerful hardware.

Analysing server performance at higher than usual levels enables us to check that achieved performance is inline with our theoretical projections and avoid any nasty surprises!

The results…

The following graphs cover a four day period with the start of the test (20:00 UTC, Aug 11) marked with a yellow line:

Currently connected users

It was awesome to see that enough Alpha players were able to make the start of the test. As you can see in the above graph, a few minutes after the start, the number of players online was almost double other peak times!

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Help Bring Beyond Dark to Steam!

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Hey everyone, you may have already seen, but we have recently launched our campaign to get pre-approved on Steam via their Greenlight process! If you haven’t yet seen our page, be sure to do so to check out our new preview trailer.

For anyone that doesn’t know, Greenlight is Valve’s way of determining which games should be accepted for release on the Steam store. Once Greenlit, developers are free to release their game on Steam as soon as they are ready.

We stated a while ago Beyond Dark would be available on Steam, and so wanted to get it pre-approved on there, to avoid any possible delays when the time for release comes. Some games never get Greenlit, while for others it can take a number of months, so fingers crossed it doesn’t take too long!

Please note that we do plan to make the full release of Beyond Dark available outside of Steam – including directly from us. The Beta software though, when released, will be available exclusively from us (we’ll let everyone know when this will be when we can).

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