Our final week was dedicated to polishing up content, and finishing some things we have had on the docket for quite some time.
Our first major implementation this week is the last touch on our control and building system, allowing users to rotate blocks before they spawn them, and visually see the orientation right by their hands while building. We also realized that we are very quickly running out of buttons, and as such had to revamp our control scheme to include everything. We hope that this new scheme is more intuitive to new users and easier to grasp quickly so that our showcase goes smoothly and future users can get the most out of our creation as quickly as possible. Especially for children we recognize that being able to understand controls quickly is essential to holding their attention and allowing them to most efficiently immerse themselves and start building and growing their creativity and imagination.
On a similar note we added more robust vehicles. Specifically a car, where any object with a seat block can be steered and driven. This is the last feature we have implemented before the finished release and are very happy with how it turned out, and hope you will be too when you all finally get a chance to check out our work. We feel that this feature is a great way to expand the space of creations.
To go along with the car and rocket engines we figured we should add somewhere to drive them to. With this note we have added outdoor environments where players can drive, build, explore, and create. We have gaps that need to be built (or flown) across, as a way to introduce problems to solve and start creative juices flowing. With these areas the outside in OutsideIn finally becomes obvious, and while it's not perfectly inline with a pure sandbox, having some native problems to solve will give beginning users some potentially needed direction.
Unfortunately we have had to scrap our idea for multiplayer, after some difficulty in implementation this last week and we felt that further attempts would not yield as much as the time would cost, especially with how close to launch we are this week. We intend to add this as a feature post launch.
With that concludes our final additions and polishing for OutsideIn pre-launch! We are thrilled to have everyone try our game in about an hour and can't wait to hear your feedback!
Thank you so much,
The OutsideIn Team.
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