![]() We've just been stupidly lucky, repeatedly." "It's funny, Outer Wilds is full of like shit that says, 'Sometimes just random natural disasters happen', like the comet that kills the Nomai," Beachum says. Combined with money from Oka, the team of six had enough funding to work on the game for around nine months and wrap up Outer Wilds' development. In August 2015, when crowdfunding platform Fig launched, Outer Wilds was the first project it promoted. The $30,000 in prize money helped, but winning also opened doors. Off the back of its success at the IGF, Beachum and Loan brought the project to Oka who agreed they should make it as Mobius' next project, bringing the rest of the team to work on the game and turning it into a commercial product. ![]() In March 2015 it won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. In his spare time, Beachum continued to work on the Outer Wilds prototype they'd developed at USC and submitted it to the IGF. Shortly after Verneau founded the company, Beachum was offered a job at Mobius to work on mobile games. Meanwhile his friend and collaborator on Outer Wilds at USC, Loan Verneau, co-founded Mobius Digital with Masi Oka, who may be best known for playing Hiro Nakamura in Heroes, but originally trained as a visual effects artist and worked at Industrial Light & Magic on the Star Wars prequels. Knowledge is powerĪfter graduating from USC, Beachum went to work at Microsoft as a designer on what became Project Spark. Much like the cobbled-together spaceship you fly in the game, put together by the natives of Timber Hearth, who so wish to see the stars they'll slap rocket boosters on a barely airtight tin can and call it a spaceship, the next few years for Outer Wilds are an example of just-in-time funding and opportunities. It still had "literal greyboxes," Beachum says. The student team built a working version of Outer Wilds, one that was enough to fulfil the requirements of a Masters thesis, but it was still far from a complete game. How the search for truth and meaning in Outer Wilds turns a simple space adventure into a religious experience (opens in new tab) After the team had settled on the Curiosities and the secrets to accessing them, they mapped out the solar system on a whiteboard and distributed clues on the different planets. Players can only get to the core by flying into the one tornado on the planet that is rotating anti-clockwise, something they learn in an observatory on another planet – a planet which itself is a puzzle to enter. The planet is a gas giant with tornadoes raging around the surface. One example is the coral forest at the core of Giant's Deep. "The idea was everything else in the game was going to be a clue that would tell you about the existence of the super-secret mystery," Beachum explains. These were major hidden locations in the game that players could only reach when they had acquired the knowledge to access them. The team structured Outer Wilds around what it called 'Curiosities'. Unlike other exploration games, where you gain abilities that let you access new areas, the team wanted the player to only "collect knowledge about the world they're exploring". He and a team of other students pooled prototypes they had been developing and "gradually duct-taped" them together to make a game about exploration. "Very specifically, a world that's governed by natural forces that you can't really do anything about, but as you learn about them you can understand it enough to not immediately die."īeachum began work on Outer Wilds at the University Of Southern California as part of the Interactive Media programme. "The goal from the outset was to make a game that felt like we're going off and exploring the unknown," Outer Wilds' creative director Alex Beachum says. At each stage it has been remade, but the developer has stuck strictly to its initial concept. ![]() Over the years it has won awards and launched crowdfunding platforms, before picking up a publisher. This arresting game has been nearly a decade in the making, beginning life as a Masters thesis back in 2012. Whether you're in space to meet the destructive wave or stayed on the planet where you woke, toasting a marshmallow on the firepit, the blast kills you and begins the loop anew. Perhaps the greatest wonder, though, is that you have only 22 minutes to explore it all before the yellow sun at the centre of the solar system shivers and shrinks, turning blue and exploding outwards in an all-consuming supernova. (opens in new tab)Ī third, Dark Bramble, is a nest of thorny vines wrapped in fog, and hiding within its cloud are whale-sized anglerfish that will eat your ship whole. If you want more great long-form games journalism like this every month, delivered straight to your doorstop or your inbox, why not subscribe to Edge here. This feature first appeared in Edge Magazine.
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