OUTBRK News

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.


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 :



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



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.


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 :




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

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.



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.



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!



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.


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.

https://soundcloud.com/outbrk-storm-chasing-game/menu_background_loop



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


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

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.



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 :





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 :





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 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

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.



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:




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:




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 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

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.



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 :




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 :




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 :




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 :




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