Alpha 3 Skirmish Galaxy: Starts 4th April

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Hi everyone,

On Tuesday we asked if the Alpha players wanted us to launch a second galaxy. The response was a definite YES from most players so we’re busy getting it ready.

We didn’t want to keep players waiting long so set a launch date less than a week away – Thursday April 4th at 15:00 UTC (we’re planning to release the next patch on Monday, if there are any significant issues around this we may have to delay the launch).

The galaxy will be called the ‘Alpha 3 Skirmish’ galaxy (A3 Skirmish) and all current Alpha players will be able to join. A3 Skirmish will run until one player wins!

The Alpha 3 main galaxy: remains the mainstay galaxy, will run alongside the experimental A3 Skirmish galaxy, and will continue after the A3 Skirmish galaxy has ended. So don’t neglect your existing games in the main galaxy!

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Alpha players: want a second galaxy?

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Hi everyone,

We’re thinking of launching a second galaxy but first want to make sure that it’s something players want?

We believe it’s possible to launch a second galaxy that would be fun, a different experience to the current galaxy, AND would only briefly distract the devs from their current roadmap tasks.

The other galaxy would carry on as normal – both galaxies running at the same time – and players wouldn’t have to join the second galaxy if they didn’t want to.

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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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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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Alpha 2 Galaxy: and the winners are…

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Hi everyone,

The Alpha 2 Galaxy endgame contest has now closed (on Jan 7 2019) so it’s time to announce the winners!

The Alpha 2 galaxy – which has been running for over a year now – is still playable, but will collapse under the weight of its own gravity (well, get turned off) this Monday January 14th at around 11:00 UTC.

But the Alpha 3 galaxy is still in its infancy and not going anywhere soon, and with plenty of improvements and new features on the way – so stayed tuned…

Share your videos and screenshots

Before we announce the Alpha 2 galaxy winners, we have a favour to ask 🙂

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New ‘Alpha 3’ Galaxy Launches Friday @ 16:00 UTC!

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Hi everyone,

We’re excited to announce that a new ‘Alpha 3’ galaxy will launch TOMORROW (Friday December 7th) at 16:00 UTC – finally!

Existing Alpha players

A new patch will be released at this time – existing Alpha players will then see the new ‘Alpha 3’ galaxy in the game selection list ready to join (in addition to the ongoing Alpha 2 galaxy).

More Steam Keys going out

Almost 2,000 players joined the last ‘Alpha 2’ galaxy but in this galaxy there will be even more players involved!

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Alpha Galaxy: Endgame and New Leaderboards!

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Hi everyone,

The current ‘Alpha 2’ galaxy has been running since December 2017 and is nearing the end of its life – we want to make sure it goes out with a bang!

Tomorrow, Wednesday November 21st at 16:00 UTC, we’re launching new leaderboards to recognise player excellence across different areas of gameplay.

The galaxy will close a few weeks later on Monday January 7th at 11:00 UTC. We’ll then publish the outright winners and overall Top 20 of each leaderboard category on the website.

If you’re wondering what Outscape is? It’s the new name for Beyond Dark. Find out more here.

View Leaderboards

New leaderboard categories

There will now be 6 leaderboard categories in the game, each recognizing player excellence in a different area of gameplay:

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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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