I’ve done quite a bit of coding in the past weeks, but it was all for experiments, research, and prototypes. I hadn’t written a single line of actual Outsider game code in all of these months! Well, that changed this week. Coding officially started on September 3rd, 2024. I haven’t seen any time travelers trying to kill me, so I think the game won’t evolve into a self-aware General Artificial Intelligence.

I spent most of my coding hours in the text rendering subsystem, which will likely be the most complex and nuanced part of the codebase. If this makes you cringe over the thought that Outsider will involve a ton of reading… Go ahead because the gameplay will involve a ton of reading.

Who likes a game that has a ton of reading? And why not release a book instead? One of my big bets on this game is that reading on video games sucks because game companies spend more time writing words than making reading pleasant. For instance, some Japanese Visual Novels contain hundreds of thousands of words – and even over a million isn’t unheard of – without an option for changing text color, font type, or font size! Can you imagine reading 1 million words using a cheesy 1990s font, black over white? I can’t either; that’s why I’ve never done it.

Outsider won’t be that big; I expect between 20 and 30 thousand words on the first playthrough so that the average person will spend 2-3 hours of that reading. There will be much more to the game than plain reading, but trust me – I will do everything possible to make the overall experience a joy. I don’t want to say much more so I don’t spoil the surprise. If everything goes according to my plan, reading Outsider will be much more pleasant and engaging – assuming you like the story – than most other text-heavy games or Kindle e-books.

You might have noticed that I stopped referring to the game as “Outsider Zero” and instead just called the game “Outsider”. Oh well, for boring marketing reasons, I decided to go back on the name change I announced last month.

This reminds me of a manager I had many years ago who told me that “the team needs a 360-degree change in direction”, which I efficiently delivered within seconds! So here I am doing a 360-degree change in direction again.

I’m in great company in this flip-flopping; Grand Theft Auto was at one point called Race’n’Chase before it was released as the GTA you know and love. Bioshock Infinite had not only two but three different names throughout development. Internally, I’m still calling the name “zero”, but from now on, all marketing materials are back to calling the game Outsider. If this sounds confusing, just remember this: our first game will be called Outsider and this is the same game I’ve been building for the past several weeks.

Beyond that, I spent some time rebuilding the Blender pipeline so it is less manual, and I can build all 3D graphical assets from the command line. I always dedicate around 10% of my week to making my work more automated and efficient, so that’s what I picked this time.