Overland Newsletter — August 2016
Holy moly. Well, it’s Tuesday August 30th, PAX West is just around the corner, and Overland First Access is finally open again! If you want to participate in our alpha but missed previous rounds of availability, now’s your chance.
We’ve still got a long ways to go, but Build 159 is by far our most fun and most advanced build to date. Some of the new features that came together just in the last couple of weeks:
- Dogs can wear backpacks
- Survivors can trade items with each other
- Vehicle upgrades can be detached and re-attached for more customization
- 8 new character traits for more survivor variety
- Pull survivor names from your twitch viewers
- A total UI refresh
And Build 160 will feature a huge update to the look and feel of the woodlands biome that we’ve been planning for ages. Which should be out … tonight! After that we’ve still got a few more weeks of UI refinements to make but then it’s pretty much all new content for the rest of the year.
Anyways if you want to follow along and support this crazy project you can sign up for First Access right now, or whenever really, because there’s no more upper limit on the number of keys.
Current Status
The main question we get about Overland is “how far along are you?” The real answer to this is pretty complicated, because no game ever really has a percentage complete that makes any sense. For example, our UI is about 90% complete, but the number of levels we have in is only about 40% complete. But the mechanics that drive those levels are about 80% complete. But we didn’t finalize the UI skin yet, so that’s like 10%. For the sake of whatever, we consider Overland to be roughly 50% complete. Most of our major refactors and UI work are finished though, so we expect the last half of the game to progress a little faster than the first exploratory half. This still puts us at 1.0 sometime in 2017.
Another common question is whether or not the game will run on your machine or not. My development system is a late-2012 iMac with a quad-core CPU and 512MB of video RAM, and the game runs pretty well. A new player just confirmed that it runs fine even on an Intel HD 4000 which is great. It’s a little choppy if I set it to native resolution. We’ve also had trouble with our audio engine on some Linux machines, with an external SDL2 dependency that has been tricky to fix . Otherwise Overland should run like a dream. We’ll try to keep the system specs up to date on our Steam listing from now on.
Sometimes we get questions about localization. We’re not expecting to be able to support other languages until next year, but at the very least we’d like to support Simplified Chinese, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, and German. And hopefully more! But those four are our minimum spec right now.
Finally, we’ve received some questions about when the game will be out on Steam. If we do decide to run Overland on Steam Early Access it probably won’t be until next year. However, as soon as Overland is available on Steam, we can update everyone’s itch.io purchase with a Steam key. Unfortunately, even though Overland is already set up on Steam, there’s no way we can distribute keys without it also being available on Early Access, which is a step we are not quite ready for yet.
Shop Shop Shop
Finally, a quick reminder that if you’d like a pupcar shirt of your own, and maybe a few other goodies, head on over to the official Finji shop! We’re starting to run low on Men’s Mediums but we’ve still got some stock left.
Voila
That’s about all for this month. We’ll be at PAX West this weekend helping rep Night in the Woods at their PAX10 booth, and showing off the latest Overland a bit at the Intel booth on Saturday.
As usual you can follow Overland or Finji on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, and if you happen to be in the alpha already, don’t forget about the Itch.io Overland community! Thanks for reading, and I’ll somehow assemble another one of these during Fantastic Arcade.
