Hey there!

It’s quite a long time ago, since we last posted some news here. But don’t worry…we are still there and are currently working on the first in-game region “Okasankaar”. As we are still in the concept phase at the moment, we decided to give you an artistic insight in the form of an “Artbook” on how Okasankaar looks in the minds of our concept artists.

The Artbook features drawings from all our concept artists and shows as well landscapes, flora & fauna and even some talan sketches directly out of Okasankaar. The artists were able to write a short comment to their pictures and in addition, the Artbook is being produced in high-quality to give you the possibility to print it out and enjoy it on real paper also

Use the link below to download the Artbook!

DOWNLOAD ARTBOOK

See you guys in the next news release!

The artists of ooc

The myth about gamedesign

If you ask 100 gamers about gamedevelopment and what position they would like to have if they would work in gamedevelopment, 99 of them will say:”Gamedesigner”. What is the reason about that? I personally think it is still the common prejudice that being a gamedesigner means that you can play games the whole day and only have to do with the funny parts of gamedesign.

“Coding? No, let the coder-gnomes do that. 3D Art? Yeah…sure…Sound? No way…! I’m now going to write some fancy ideas and do some brainstormings about cool features in the game and afterwards I play other games to have a reference…”

I’m really sorry to destroy all your dreams, guys. But the reality looks somewhat different. Gamedesign is hard work. Gamedesign is about trying to think, how the player will react. Gamedesign is about psychology. About the human thinking and about predicting, what the player is now going to do if you give him that particular quest. As a gamedesigner, you will WRITE a lot. Word processors  and applications like Excel will be your best friends. Oh, did I mentioned the writing? You are the responsible guy for keeping the game together. To make sure, that everything fits. And not that you have some “Beaming”-features in a mediaval role playing game. Know what I mean?

But how does that look in oOC? What are the tasks of a gamedesigner there?

In oOC, I’m the responsible guy for the gamedesign document. The bible of the game. This is where all the features are described. How stuff works. Or how it is intended to work. It’s more from a player’s perspective and not from a technical one. That’s the job of the coders after I wrote my stuff. They take all my spacey features and try to put it into something useable. Also my job is to hold the guys back from having too much ideas. Often it happens, that during the design process, the feature fixing, a thousand ideas come to your mind. And you want to tell the team ALL of them. This is okay, since no idea is bad and could at least give some inspiration for other ideas. BUT, the big issue in a lot of mod project out there is, that they start to have too much features.

To be honest, everyone can think of some nice features and ideas. The point is, that writing those ideas down in the gamedesign doc is not the whole work. It’s not even 50% of it. The real work has to be done afterwards. Assets need to be created, logic has to be coded and levels have to be designed. Making a game is not writing the gamedesign document. It’s a part of it, but it’s not the whole work.

To go more into the oOC project now, currently we are in the feature finding and fixing process. We are discussing about features, that we think have to be in the game. During this process, a lot of really hard discussions happen because everybody has different views on certain things. And that’s a very good thing. This way, you are able to see a problem from ten different perspectives and that gives you the possibility to decide the right thing. We are doing this in our boards and the process looks like this…

1. Having an idea
2. Discuss about it
3. Vote about the decision
4. Include it in the feature catalogue

All in all it’s quite a creative process. But in the end, it’s a whole bunch of administrative work to do. Moderate the whole discussions, keep the concept together, kick unwanted ideas out and in the end decide about the features and document them in the design doc. Huhh…

To finish this article now…I want to make clear, that I don’t want to complain about my job. I’m in a team of really talented guys here and it’s a pleasure to work with all of them. My job is fun! Gamedesign is fun! And hey, I wanted to be a gamedesigner since I played my first game. Just like the other 98. So you want to be a gamedesigner? Then go out and try it!

Write me an eMail or comment this article below…

madcybi@openoutcast.org

Best regards,
madcybi

May the yods be silent! Welcome to the new home of open Outcast!

After long and hard work from all of…wait…again…after long hard work from s87 and some little work from the rest of the team, we are now able to present you our new and fresh oOC site. *fanfare*

Yeah, lets go a bit into the details about the reasons for this switch of homepage. That’s quite easy, it was just because the old page was really terrible to update. No CMS or anything in place, just plain html. Not that we are not competent enough to make updates in HTML – we are – but we somehow just didn’t have time in the last month. As you all know we had something else to do

Okay, but now the new site is live and several things are going to change now:

• More regular news updates on the page
• Weekly developer’s blogs
• More content – Videos & Pictures, maybe some music even
• A lot more activity in the boards

But wait, that’s all? Nothing else?

No, not even close to something like “nothing else”. Lets see…

• We now have a finished OASIS – check
• We received a lot of good and enthusiastic feedback – check
• We all look as good as David Beckham – che…wait.

Okay, maybe not. But at least, we have a plan. And it seems, that it is a good plan. In theory…

But I really should stop talking nonsense now and come to the real important points. One of them seems to be how we are planning to proceed now after Oasis? Releasing other demos? Going the episodic way? Going on holiday with the dev-team? No not at all. We had a long and exhausting developer’s chat the other week and nailed down our masterplan to finish and successfully release oOC. And this is the direction we want to go to:

Four milestones

• Gandha – Pre-Alpha
• Eluee – Alpha
• Ka – Beta
• Fae – Final / Release

Don’t expect us to write any of the release dates down. They are kept internally until we are sure that we can publish something that will hold the pressure. Oh, and by the way…There won’t be any new demo releases for the next milestones.

“D’oh! But why not”, will some of you now ask us.
It’s easy, we want to finish oOC in an acceptable time span. And if we release demos between the milestones, it will last 100 years and when we release it then you are all dead. And that would be a quite unfortunate situation as you could imagine.

So we decided to kick out the new demo releases and just concentrate on the big game.

…
…
…

Okay okay, you are right. Something has to be release anyway to keep you interested. We know that. “Bread and Circuses” as the old romans would have said!
To get serious again…we are planning to release regular update packs for the OASIS demo.

This means the following. If we finished a package of new interesting features (like a new HUD, the quest system, the conversation system, climbing on the walls, camera etc.) we are implementing them into the OASIS demo and release a patch. And you can try out those features right away. Okay, you won’t get anything really new in terms of game assets and quests – at least not in every patch – but hey…there has to be at least some last good reason that you will stay with us to play the final game, right?

We are expecting a lot of feedback about those features from your side and because of that, you are an important part of our developer team. You guys are the one’s we are making this game for and that is why we want to integrate you as much as possible. Tell us your ideas, critics and feedbacks as soon as a new patch comes out. Of course there will be some separate boards for this – just like the OASIS one – where you can post everything you get out of the new version of OASIS.

Yeap, so far so good. That seems to be all for the moment.
*turns around and shouts in direction of the developer’s jacuzzi*
“Okay guys? Did I forgot something?”…
…*blubb*…*blubb*…

Believe us, there will be A LOT more action on the site and the boards, than it was before and even than it was EVER. So stay tuned, guys! The adventure of getting serious in creating oOC has started right now with the release of this news post and you will be a part of this voyage. We are counting you in. Lets rock!

“Even the longest way starts with a single step…”

Best regards,
Eternal Outcasts