OUTBRK News

Welcome back chasers!

Last month we officially announced what our upcoming playtest structure will look like and touched on the next steps of scenario selection for OUTBRK.

In the background, we've been continuing to chip away at both the final pieces of the Unity 2021 upgrade and actively continuing to detail the environment.


New Hail Cages:

Our modeling partners have continued to create many of the vehicle accessories that players will be able to select from for their chase car. Just recently, a good chunk of work on the hail cages have been completed. Here are some work in progress screenshots:



World Design:

One of the core components of OUTBRK that sets the game apart from others is the incredible world size and diversity included in the different localities in the game. We're hand curating the various towns and points of interest that will make each region of the game feel unique and immersive.

We're now on our "third pass" of detailing. This includes adding small props on residential, commercial and industrial areas, adding rocks where the terrain elevation is steep enough, small revisions to the road networks, and terrain textures that help refining the different landscapes.

Towns will also have wayfinding signs at neighboring intersections to help players navigate the world while also adding a personalized touch to each town.

Next Playtest:

We know our fans are eager to get more information about the next playtest - we anticipate being able to officially start planning the logistics soon and will have news in the coming weeks to set the date and time of the event. The playtest has been on hold because of an issue preventing us from uploading builds on Steam - which is mandatory for online play. We believe we found the issue but we need to run a few more tests before confirming it. That being said, we were able to successfully join a multiplayer round for the first time since the Unity 2021 update and logged our review notes in this Trello task. We don’t judge any of these issues to be a blocker for the coming up playtest, so as soon as we validate that our Steam upload issue has been resolved, we will be starting planning the next playtest on our Discord server.

Need a reminder for the playtest format? Here you go!

• 2 nights of playtest sessions.
  
• 50 players maximum in each “pool” of players.
  
• Approximately 8-10 players per server as scheduled.
  
• First round for those who have previously playtested.
  
• Second round with any players who have not previously played. Priority will be given to kickstarter backers that could not participate in the session back and March.
  

As always, stay up to date with our Trello page. We update the information often and remain committed to transparency as we get closer and closer to being able to plan the next steps for OUTBRK’s early access release.

Until next time, chasers!

The OUTBRK Team

Welcome back and Happy Holidays Chasers!

Here we are, looking ahead to a new year, and we’re continuing to make progress on some of the things we need to complete before setting our sights to our next round, and biggest round of playtesting yet! The unfortunate timing of having a server machine go down did stagnate some progress, and of course was not kind to the pocketbooks, but we’re moving ahead once again.


Before The Next Playtest

We’ve just wrapped up troubleshooting and implementing a new and improved tool to make populating vegetation (trees, grass, bushes, etc) a much more quick and efficient process. Doing so has allowed us to move ahead in beginning to paint the environment and also generate the new vegetation we’ve been showing in the last few newsletters. We’ve already gotten a few world cells completed!

Here is a screenshot showing the new ground textures and vegetation in the Outbrk world. Keep in mind the screenshot was taken in the game editor and not representative of the final product :

You can follow the work on this task on our Trello board.

The Next Playtest

As we look ahead to the next playtest, we’re not able to pin the date down as of today, but we do know what it will look like. Our first kickstarter backers playtest consisted of 50 players. We’ll be reaching out to those players again to schedule an initial round of playtesting with just players who have previously had an opportunity to play the game.

We took feedback from our earlier playtests into heavy consideration as we’ve made many of the adjustments during our latest stretch of development.

A second round of playtest sessions will be scheduled around the same period for an additional 50 players that haven’t played the game yet! We’ll first prioritize Kickstarter Backers that were unable to participate in our playtest of last March, and fill up with a few randomly selected members of our discord community. More information on this second playtest and how to participate will come soon.


Here’s a quick summary:

• 2 nights of playtest sessions
  
• 50 players maximum in each “pool” of players
  
• Approximately 8-10 players per server as scheduled
  
• First round for those who have previously playtested
  
• Second round extended to community members
  
• We will prioritize Kickstarter Backers that missed the first playtest for the second round
  

If you missed the highlights from the first Kickstarter backers playtests we did back in March 2022, check this video out!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


Scenario Selection

We recently had a channel active in our Discord for community members to suggest different iconic weather events that we should consider bringing to life in-game. We’ve taken some time to evaluate recommendations and have a short-list that we’re taking a deeper look into. While we won’t quite share it, we will tease some information about the next scenario type we’re looking to bring to the game.

Our current scenario in-game (bonus points to whoever knows it!) is what storm chasers would call “HP” or “high precipitation”. There’s heavy rain and an embedded hail core, nasty stuff! We’re looking at potential elevated “LP” (low precipitation) storms for our next scenario and have some great suggestions from the recommendations of our Discord Community!


We’ll have additional updates on timelines in the future, but we’re excited to share that we’ve made significant progress and essentially have completed all components of the Unity upgrade to once again have the game in end-to-end playable state for our next playtest!


Happy New Year, Chasers!
- The OUTBRK Team

Welcome back once again chasers!

It's been another solid month of progress on OUTBRK and we're excited to be getting closer to being ready to test out the new camera and storm reporting tool. While we've made good progress, we unfortunately saw our primary server machine experience a hardware failure, causing us to have to replace it in order to continue our current work. This did cause a slight delay in our work last month, but we’re back up and running now.

CAMERA AND REPORTING MODULES
The new camera tool has been in the works for several months and was a direct result of player feedback from our last playtest. Our current direction with this tool has enhanced the immersion and in-game utility of the camera and we're excited to test it out in the future. You can see our streamlined flow of taking pictures and reporting a weather element on our in-game chaser network.

Camera :


Weather elements reporting :



END GAME SCREEN
Players also requested the option to be able to save the in-game pictures taken to share with their friends and keep locally on their machine. We heard you, and we're working on that as a feature, too! Take a look at our new end game screen:



UNITY UPDATE
The Unity 2021 upgrade has allowed us to take advantage of several robust upgrades with the new engine, but through the process, we've found several "must-fix" bugs, specifically with the dedicated server infrastructure and ultimately the multiplayer experience. With the complexity of our in-game weather and cloud systems, we've had to do a good bit of testing to get things working as they previously were on multiplayer servers. We've been able to identify the cause of basically all of the bugs and have already resolved the majority of them. For full details, check out this Trello thread.

VEGETATION
Lastly, additional work has been done on our world building with the integration of our newest ground textures and vegetation assets. With the OUTBRK world both large and diverse in nature, making sure the environment in OUTBRK is immersive and realistic has been essential.



As we look ahead to the coming months, we're making steady progress and have more to share in the near future. As always, be sure to follow along with development on our Trello Page!

-The OUTBRK team

With Marc taking some well deserved vacation this month, October was a little less packed with advancement on OUTBRK gameplay integration, however we’re wrapping up the last elements of the Unity 2021 upgrade on the server side, have added 20+ realistic ground textures to our terrain, added new streamlined vegetation assets and refocused the design of the camera and reporting systems.

Ground Textures and New Vegetation

With the Unity 2021 upgrade, we’ve been able to leverage additional capabilities for environmental shaders and textures that will help make a massive map feel distinct and alive. We’re looking to make each biome feel unique and realistic, and a lot of that comes from the ground vegetation. A colossal amount of work has also been made for each of our vegetation assets to behave the same when affected by wind.

Here are some examples of what the vegetation used to look like, and how we’re able to improve it with the new editor update.

Old Vegetation New Vegetation

Development Focus and Next Playtest:

The latest stretch of OUTBRK development has been essential for readying the game for eventual Early Access release. From the get-go, we’ve been committed to being transparent through all stages of development. The last few months have contained substantial improvements to the game and we’re excited to be wrapping up several foundational components to the game so that we can start planning additional playtests.

For the people that follow our public development Trello board, here are the two tasks we need to finish before starting to plan the next sessions of playtesting with community members:
New Camera Module:
Following the last playtest’s feedback, we streamlined the camera and storm-element reporting process. We spent a bit of time in design to make sure that it will create a nice gaming experience and we’re now starting the integration in the game.

Must Fix Bugs Prior to Playtests:
As we completed the Unity update, we found some bugs on systems that were previously working. This was expected, but we have to fix this regression before letting some players back into the game.

As always, our Discord is a great place to engage with our community and to learn more about where we’re at in Development. We’re getting ready to start going through scenarios that have been recommended to us, so if you’ve got an iconic severe weather day that needs to be in OUTBRK, be sure to let us know in the #outbrk-scenario-suggestion channel on Discord!

Join the OUTBRK Discord server here:

Stay tuned for the next Outlook, chasers! As always, be sure to follow along with development on our Trello Page!


(Marc on his hard-earned vacation!)
The OUTBRK team

It’s the end of September and we’re here with another exciting OUTBRK Development Outlook. Our team has continued to check off several essential tasks and the Unity 2021 update is essentially complete - which will allow for us to proceed with several of the tasks necessary to get ready for additional community playtests and eventual Early Access!




As development has progressed, we’ve had a goal to improve the way that the players see the storm systems and elements. The Unity 2021 update allows us to have massive tornadoes naturally lit by the position of the sun, and have lightning strikes cast high resolution shadows in the world.





With a world as big as OUTBRK’s (625km²), there’s going to be a ton of ground to cover, literally! We’ve begun the next pass of improvements to the world and along with that and the Unity update comes higher quality ground textures. Here are 6 of the 28 different ground textures that will make up the terrain of OUTBRK.



These improvements to the world will help each biome feel different from the last while being gentle on performance for players.




In last month’s newsletter, we shared some work in progress on our mobile mesonets. Following some feedback by users, we created a new version with more updated instruments. Here is our current version :





With work on several of the critical game elements nearing completion, our team is getting ready to identify a broader range of scenarios to integrate into OUTBRK. So far, this process required a good bit of time, so we’ve limited integrating scenarios in our development version and while we have a short list of events now - we’ll be looking to our community for help compiling more scenarios. We know our diverse community will have some iconic chase days in mind - and we’ll be looking at bringing some of those to OUTBRK! Make sure to join our Discord where all of this will take place. We'll have a text channel with instructions in the coming weeks!

As always, stay up to date with the game’s development on our public Trello planning page!

https://trello.com/b/nsBmMfIa/outbrk-game

Until next time, chasers!

-The OUTBRK Team