PlanetQuest: Outposts Preview, Master Plan & Greenlight Process

The floodgates are open.

We have a veritable avalanche of updates for you, everybody! The title says it all — today, we are proud to open the floodgates on the first preview for PlanetQuest: Outposts, our outpost building and management game! Alongside that, we are pulling the curtain back on what is planned for the future of the PlanetQuest universe with our brand new community greenlight process. All of that is contained within this article, so let’s get into it!

PlanetQuest: Outposts — everything you need to know

If you’ve read our Mega Update, you’ll know what PQ: Outposts is. In case you missed it, quick refresher — Outposts is a game focused on planet management, wherein you build up your outposts, bolstering and expanding them with resources. At the same time, you’re exploring your own planets, as well as nearby celestial bodies, to mine resources that allow for better upgrades.

For this preview, Outposts will be available on desktops, as well as mobile devices! (Note: wallet login is currently not available on mobile).

We were inspired by (and have taken elements from) classic space-colonization board games and 4X titles (such as Pax Imperia), but we’re striving to make the final gameplay short, sweet and rewarding, perfect for when you have a moment to spare to tend to your burgeoning settlements.

Before we get into the explanation proper, we have some high level details to go over.

This first PQ: Outposts preview is available to everyone, but we’re doing a soft launch for you, our community, before we let the rest of the world know it is live (keep an eye out for an IMX and newsletter announcement early next week!). This is so that we can iron out any kinks as they come up before the proverbial floodgates really open up.

As we mentioned above, the gameplay in this early version of the game is designed to be very palatable in short bursts, with the main intention here being to get your feedback so we can implement it in further previews and, ultimately, the final release. As this is the first preview, we expect the pacing of the gameplay and the general user experience to still need some serious work, but no doubt giving you a chance to try it in its early form will get us a lot of additional feedback!

Additionally, we have some prizes lined up for those of you who really get into the game. Upon reaching a certain reputation level (develop your planet, build drones, and send them out on missions to gain reputation), you’ll automatically be entered into our planet giveaway! We’ll be awarding 3 players with their very own common planets, so rest assured that your hard work has a chance to pay off!

To get started with PQ: Outposts, simply follow this link, connect your wallet (or if you don’t have one handy, sign up with your e-mail), and you’re good to go! Read on for a deeper dive into the game proper.

Starting point

Before we begin, it’s important to mention that, this being a preview of Outposts, your progress will not carry over to the full release (or any subsequent previews). This will allow us to replace buildings and add and rebalance mechanics as the game improves. There will, however, be a permanent achievement added to your account for reaching reputation level 10 during the preview!

Planet Owners can log in with their wallet and immediately gain access to their full array of (Sovereign) Planets. That doesn’t mean new Explorers are left out, however! Everyone joining the PQ: Outposts preview will immediately be granted a complimentary Dwarf Planet for the duration of the preview. Dwarf Planets are free-to-play planets that are tied to your account rather than held by you in a wallet (as our Sovereign Planets are); they will serve as your personal playground to familiarize yourself with the game’s mechanics. Even if you already own planets, you get one of these, so feel free to experiment as much as you like!

For those wanting to expand their planet collection, our marketplace offers the opportunity to pick up your very own Sovereign Planet, which you will be able to play with in every preview as well as the full release of PQ: Outposts. To top it all off, additional Dwarf Planets can be unlocked in-game as well by reaching specific reputation levels.

Your mission is to transform your planets into thriving outposts. This isn’t just about placing a few buildings here and there. It’s about strategic planning, executing actions, and establishing a formidable presence in the universe. And that happens through our gameplay loop, propped up by the game’s mechanics.

Mechanics

There are many elements to PQ: Outposts, so let’s break them down. Do keep in mind that more mechanics are being planned for the future, so this list is by no means final.

At the heart of your outpost are the buildings. There are three categories of building — generation, drone, and utility.

Generation buildings are the lifeblood of your outpost, ensuring a steady flow of resources to support expansion and prosperity.

• Quantum Extractor: Harness the miraculous substance, passively generating Raw Quantum, which earns you credits every day.
• Construction Matrix: A hub of activity, churning out Materials to support your building endeavors.
• Energy Generator: Powering your outpost, this facility ensures a constant supply of Energy.
• Quantum Refinery: A marvel of technology, improves the yield of processing your Raw Quantum, earning you more Credits per unit of Raw Quantum produced.

Drone buildings are where you construct the worker bees of your empire.

• Recon Center: The birthplace of Recon Drones, the eyes and ears of your outpost.
• Combat Control: Build Combat Drones, ensuring your outpost’s safety and dominance.
• Cargo Port: Create Transport Drones, the diligent gatherers of resources.

Utility buildings represent the core of your outpost’s governance, defense, and storage capabilities.

• Command Center: The nerve center of your outpost, dictating the maximum level attainable by other structures.
• Research Center: A beacon of innovation, passively accumulating Research Progress.
• Defense Network: A formidable weapons system, deterring adversaries from pillaging your hard-earned resources.
• Storage: The repository of your outpost, allowing you to stockpile vast amounts of resources.

Although these buildings are mainly exciting in terms of the value they add to your planet, our art team could not pass on the chance to visualize them in true PQ fashion.

Construction Matrix, Combat Control, and Defense Network, respectively.

Speaking of resources, they are separated into two types — basic (Materials and Energy) and semi-premium (Raw Quantum and Credits). The former are self-explanatory — you need something to build the outpost with and something to power it once it’s up and running. The latter is where things get interesting. Raw Quantum, once generated, will be converted into Credits every day. The conversion rate hinges on its availability and any upgrades you’ve implemented. Credits are our universal in-game currency and can be used (alongside Materials and Energy) to upgrade and build out your Planets. Once the full game and our $PQX Token are live, you will also be able to refine Raw Quantum into $PQX and use $PQX to purchase additional Credits. Naturally, any $PQX interactions may be subject to local regulation and our ability to reasonably and economically offer them based on those (sorry, someone from legal just stole my keyboard; hey, give that back!).

You receive resources through generation buildings, actions, and reputation rewards.

So, you know what you’re building, and you know what you’re looking for. What can you actually do to achieve your goals?

Simple — you task your drones to execute actions. In carrying them out, they help you grow and protect your structures. These actions can bring in resources, boost your reputation, or even uncover special items. There are two types of actions — exploration and steal, with each having the chance to run into a complication.

• Exploration actions send your drones to other planets to see what they can find. They might come back with some resources, netting you reputation in the process.
• Steal actions let you take resources from other planets, hinting at the bigger battles and challenges coming in the full game.

Of course, nothing can truly go as planned. Your drones might run into some complications:

• Special Finds: For example, an emergency beacon that leads to an interesting event.
• Challenges: Things like meteor storms or equipment problems, to name a few. How you handle these depends on the drones you have and a bit of luck.

The most notable planned mechanic that is already shown as a disabled button, but not available during this preview, is the Faction menu. We’ll leave what will be there to your imagination for now.

Those are the important systems in a nutshell. Still, it’s good to remember that every frontier, no matter how grand, is built brick by brick, with the process being anything but easy.

Difficulty scaling

At the heart of PQ: Outposts lies our commitment to a balanced and enjoyable experience for every player, regardless of the size or type of planet they own.

The Scaling Factor ensures that gameplay remains engaging and rewarding for everyone. Here’s how it works:

Adaptive Gameplay: Whether you own a Sovereign Planet or are using a provided Dwarf Planet, the game adapts. Generations, costs, and other in-game metrics are adjusted based on the scaling factor tied to your planet type.

Resource Advantages: Naturally, higher tier and Sovereign Planets produce vastly larger quantities of Materials, Energy, and Raw Quantum, but building on them and upgrading their production is similarly more expensive.

Inclusive Experience: This means that whether you’re building out a Dwarf Common Planet or a Sovereign Legendary Planet, the gameplay remains captivating and fulfilling. Every player, irrespective of their planet’s classification, can dive deep into the game and enjoy the full experience. You’ll just be producing resources and interacting with players that own planets at a similar level to you (sure, it may sound fun to have your Dwarf Planet pick a fight with a Sovereign Planet, but once you realize it can easily produce a drone fleet 2,000x the size of what you have to work with, you’ll be happy you’re competing with players managing fellow Dwarf Planets).

This way, we ensure that PQ Outposts remains a universe where every player can participate and potentially make their way, one Planet Tier at a time, from managing a few Dwarf Planets to running an intergalactic collection of Sovereign Planets and competing and cooperating with the top players in the world.

The Greenlight System

As we move further along with the development of PlanetQuest in its multiple forms, we’ve realized that our previous approaches to attempting to roadmap the development had some fundamental issues. One of the main ones was that working with a roughly estimated roadmap, where some elements were best estimates and might even be affected by external conditions, and others were more secure, was a difficult thing to communicate well to anyone who might just skim the visual. At least as importantly, as we saw with the Multiplayer Preview of our old planetside gameplay, our previous, rather simplistic, approach to roadmaps didn’t take into account the results and feedback from previews and other greenlight moments and their impact on the development process and direction.

To solve these issues and also make internal and community checkpoints a more key and visible element in our process and communication, we’re introducing our new Master Plan and Greenlight System, which, at a glance, looks like this:

As you can see, each Product in the PQ Multiverse that’s currently in development has gotten its own little “swim lane” in the Master Plan. These swim lanes show the status and result of the most recent greenlight moments, as well as upcoming greenlight moments and events. It also shows the timing of the next greenlight event for each product (or indicates that the next event is live right now). Eventually, we expect this Master Plan to receive its own live version on our website.

This new approach gives a better insight into the order and dependency of key checkpoints as we roll out all the parts of the PlanetQuest Multiverse. Including the books and games, as well as a surprise entry (which has actually been stealthily worked on for a while), the first PlanetQuest Graphic Novel (amongst others, created by the amazing Benjamin Jackendoff, known for his work on such comics as Deadly Neighborhood Spiderman, Edge of the Spiderverse, Daredevil & Echo and Werewolf by Night).

The more detailed progression of greenlight moments also shows what’s ahead for Outposts and, in its case, what greenlights are needed to get to the public launch, which will be preceded by the minting of Planet Rewards to ensure everyone is ready to rush the gates on day one. Once Outposts is launched, we’ll also have the first pillar of the live economy running, setting us up for the public launch of $PQX.

As this Outposts Preview is the first time we’ll be doing a direct community greenlight, we’ll delve into the details of how the greenlight process works. Typically, during any greenlight event, you’ll get a chance to experience and test a piece of the PlanetQuest experience, in this case, the first version of Outposts gameplay. At the end of your experience, we’ll ask you to provide us with feedback and answer a number of questions to let us know if you believe this preview met its objectives and what you believe needs to be improved. At the same time, the team will do a technical greenlight based on elements such as performance metrics and technical issues.

If both of these result in a greenlight, the team will be cleared to continue to the next greenlight moment. If not, the team will plan a new date for a “do-over”, make improvements based on the feedback, and you’ll once again get the chance to experience the updates and provide your greenlight based on those.

In case of a technical red-light, but the experience itself receiving a greenlight, the team will decide whether a full “do-over” is needed to ensure the issues are fixed, or if there is a way for them to test the improvements without a re-running the preview.

Objectives for this Greenlight

That being said, it’s very important to the process that everyone knows what the objectives for the first community greenlight of PlanetQuest: Outposts are, so let’s run through them in detail:

Experience (community)

Demonstrate the functionality of the following features:

• Constructing and upgrading buildings.
• Building your fleet of drones.
• Engaging in actions (sending drones on missions).
• Researching additional capabilities.
• Gaining reputation and unlocking new perks.

Providing at a bare minimum:

• A relatively clean gameplay experience.
  - We accept pacing and scaling may still be off.
• Compatibility with a variety of devices and screen sizes.
  - Due to some IMX wallet issues, mobile play with wallets will not be a thing, but a responsive mobile friendly interface should be working well.
• An experience that you as the community feel holds enough potential to be truly fun once polished and expanded upon.

Technology (team)

Demonstrate a relatively stable main architecture:

• No major game breaking bugs that show deeper flaws in systems.
  - We expect there to be some game breaking bugs, but these should be easy to fix, not fundamental.
• Fast and reliable tracking of ownership, planet and account data and details.
  - Client side data display bugs are fine; this is about server side data integrity.

Prove initial scalability on the current lightweight infrastructure:

• Handle at least several 100 simultaneously active players.
  - We will not be hard limiting initially, so performance may degrade if players rush in, this will however provide us with valuable data.
  - If loads cause serious issues stopping players from testing for a longer period of time, we may introduce an active player limit once we’ve gathered enough data.

We hope this provides you with all the information you need to give educated greenlight feedback, which you can provide via this all-important link! Naturally, while playing, you may also run into bugs. There’s a special form for reporting these here. Our team will be rolling out updates even during the preview, so we’ll try to squish as many bugs as possible along the way.

This has been a massive update, Explorers! Thank you for sticking until the end. You are now free to go play Outposts. Should you have any questions, comments, or anything in between, feel free to engage with us on our socials.

The PQ: Outposts preview is live from now until the 12th of October. If you know somebody who would like to join you in your quest to colonize the stars, don’t hesitate to send them a link.

See you in the preview!