Risk management in software is about trying to remove unknowns. Estimating work you’re very familiar with is easy; doing the same for something you’ve never done before is hard. And projects are delayed because of too many “this wasn’t as easy as I thought.” Because of that, I plan to keep a round-robin rotation among all tasks throughout development to detect roadblocks as early as possible; hopefully, this will also help me release a short playable version early.

This week, I had to go deep into two areas I hadn’t worked on much until now: writing and graphics. I talked about writing before, but now was the first time I went really deep, leading me to write around 11K words - mostly completing the outline of an adaptation of the classic 2015 Outsider story and prototyping the gameplay for the first game chapter. Alex and I also “roleplayed” the game using what I wrote and were very happy with the result; Alex thought it was more fun than he initially thought, which I still don’t know if it’s a good thing (the game is fun) or a bad thing (he thought it wouldn’t be fun)!

After all this writing, I needed to change gears and went to work on graphics for the first time since the project started. We can all keep saying that it sucks that players today care so much about graphics and that people should pay more attention to gameplay instead. But since the beginning of the game industry, nothing sold games better than graphics. All other things equal, a game with better graphics is a better game; at least, that’s what the market tells us over and over.

Outsider won’t have a lot of graphics; it’s a story-based game, first and foremost. However, I want all the graphics in the game to be top-notch. I know this is hard to say, as we all know how expensive graphics work is, but I have a trick up my sleeve. And it’s not AI - I will do all the graphics myself, despite occasional help from commercial assets and plugins. Outsider will make heavy use of prerendered 3D graphics using the latest photorealistic rendering techniques. While this isn’t the same as great real-time 3D graphics, it does give the game a modern look. I won’t spoil how this will work quite yet, but I can say that the gameplay was designed around this technique, so things will hopefully fit nicely together.

With no further ado, here is our first in-game screenshot:

If this looks puzzling, you are on the right track :). However, don’t spend too much time looking at it; some critical pieces are missing, and they make a world of difference…