Hello everybody!

Thank you for subscribing to our mailing list and hanging in there despite our lengthy silence. I had to do a lot before being ready to send an update, but I’m happy to announce that the Galantrix journey begins today!

Firstly, I’ll use this very first message to make a special announcement: our first game won’t be Outsider, the game teased in our first marketing video, but its prequel, which starts pre-production today with the working name of Outsider Zero.

Let me talk a little about the history of Outsider. As some of you might know, I’ve wanted to build a game since, well, forever. I have a notebook with literally dozens of game ideas in different stages of development. This notebook contains concepts, links to technical articles, brain dumps, transcription from voice recordings I took during walks, etc. It probably amounts to 100-200 pages of material collected over 15 years.

In the early 2010s, realizing the difficulty of starting a game development journey with any of my ideas, I spent some time thinking about a ‘minimum viable game’; that would be a small game that I could develop in 6 months to 1 year while, at the same time, bringing something new to the industry. Having been interested in games with strong narratives since I was a kid, I sketched a science fiction story that could serve as a basis for a text-heavy, story-centric game that could work on personal computers, tablets, phones, and even consoles.

That was the first sketch of a game I then called Outsider. Given the demands of the high-tech industry, parenting, and numerous address changes, I never really had the time or energy to turn this sketch into an actual game. After I got a job at an actual game company 10 years ago, I had to stop the game development idea due to the obvious conflict of interest. However, with the original story in mind, I released a non-interact ‘video novella’ – essentially the Outsider story told through a video – that strongly resembled what is called a ‘Kinect novel’ in the Japanese game market (no relation to the XBOX Kinect accessory).

Despite the limited release of the original Outsider novella, I got some exceptional feedback from friends and random strangers which indicated that I was on to something. I took my novella offline and decided the story would one day serve as the basis for an actual game as I had originally planned.

Due to events that I’ll keep secret for now to avoid spoilers, Outsider became much bigger than I originally envisioned, turning itself into something else entirely – something that is a much better fit for a regular videogame than the original story ever was. I decided that I’d then reuse the Outsider name for this evolution of the original story, which is captured in the teaser published on our YouTube channel. The original novella, under this plan, would be released as an add-on/DLC.

However, upon introspection, I recently started feeling that releasing the novella afterward wouldn’t be like eating the dessert after a meal, but like eating the appetizer after a meal. The novella is technically a prequel to the main act, but the stories are nonetheless fairly independent. Think of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, two full, self-contained stories that share a few characters.

All of this said, Outsider Zero will be a game adaptation of a reworked version of the original novella, while the full Outsider game will be released later – assuming Outsider Zero gains enough traction. To avoid further confusion, I’ll soon hide the teaser and will change our promotional material to focus entirely on Outsider Zero.

Due to its smaller scope, Outsider Zero is planned for full release in early 2025 and should be hopefully available (in some form) to testers in late October or early November this year. I haven’t yet settled the plans on pricing, but I’m considering releasing it entirely for free, at least for some time. I’m sorry for the lengthy update, but once I start talking about Outsider, it’s hard for me to stop 😊.

Welcome to the Galantrix universe and thank you for the amazing support!