Hey Guys!
First of all: Have a great start in 2020! I want to share a couple of lines with you, reflecting on Outbuddies’ first months on Steam as well as our plans with the game this year. There’s a lot to come!
As many of you know, Outbuddies still is a project of passion made by myself mainly in the evening hours or even at night. After nearly seven years of development, I was really thrilled to finally release the game last October. Given the indie nature of the project, the whole thing was for sure a bit rough and unpolished on released and I’m really thankful so many of you gave me constructive criticism and enabled the project to grow, pointing out bugs and design flaws that kept the game from being truly outstanding.
Your encouragement and kind words gave me the energy to continue and pushing forward, despite our visibility on Steam being way too low. I was able to release seven major patches since October and I feel we’re finally approaching a great level of quality. I enjoyed it very much seeing the game being dissected and glitched by so many skilled players! With your feedback, I was able to distill the maximum potential out of the game’s core mechanics, gear, and weapon upgrades. Also, the controls were refined a lot and we got rid of some clunky input schemes and design decisions that did not quite deliver. The world-design of Outbuddies now also is much more robust to sequence breaking, while also ensuring a great and stable experience for casual players. I cannot thank you enough for this, I would never have been able to pull it off without your support.
2020 will be a very exciting year for the project. I’m teamed-up with German publisher Headup and also Japanese publisher Chorus Worldwide to bring the game to Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and PS4. The ports will be done by Clickteam, the inventor of the great Fusion game engine Outbuddies is made in. Having a perspective to release on a Nintendo system is one dream coming true for a kid of the 90s.
Our efforts to release the game on consoles will come with additional funding and new features that will, of course, be implemented for the game’s PC version too. The biggest thing will be a full localization to many additional languages, ensuring many players around the world will have a much easier time learning the game’s mechanics and enjoying the background story. I can already confirm German, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, French and Korean. We may, of course, be able to add more languages in the future, fan-translations included.
Next to localization, Outbuddies will receive a completely reworked UI and a boss rush mode very soon. We‘ll also have an option to select tutorials adjusting to PS4 and Nintendo Switch button layouts and I‘ll provide some fixes making Outbuddies 100% compliant with the the Steam Proton layer. It can already be used to play Outbuddies on Linux, but atm the movie-playback needs to be manually skipped.
Being on Steam with Outbuddies has been a great experience so far, so let’s continue this together! I wish you all a great 2020! ːsteamhappyː
Julian
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1083310