User:PresN/wilds

Development

Outer Wilds began in late 2012 as Alex Beachum's USC Interactive Media & Games Division master's thesis. Beachum was the creative director for the project, which he developed along with other students from USC, the Laguna College of Art and Design, and Atlantic University College. Beachum had created elements that would later make it into the game in previous projects at the school, including a solar system changing over time, a planet falling apart, and trees that moved when they weren't observed, and for his thesis wanted to combine and build on these elements. His goal was a game where the player would engage in space exploration in an open system that changed over time, with the primary goal being the exploration itself rather than traditional gameplay elements like resources or conquering. The game universe was designed to not be centered on the player, in that it continued to change whether or not the player was present or performing actions. He was inspired by the "spirit of space exploration" in an uncontrollable environment in the films Apollo 13 and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and took cues from The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker's non-player characters that would tell tales of distant lands as to entice the player to explore those areas for themselves.

Initially unsure of where to start, he was encouraged by a fellow student to make an "emotional prototype" of the game he wanted to make; the result was a short sequence of the player roasting a marshmallow over a campfire while the sun explodes above them. Beachum kept this as the core of the game thereafter, representing the theme of the differences in scale between forces outside the player character's control and the small moments they could focus on instead. At the conclusion of his thesis, the game had the core gameplay mechanics of the player exploring a solar system until the sun explodes and resets the time loop, along with the central puzzle of the time loop itself and the planets that were included in the final game.

After graduation in May 2013, Beachum took a job at the newly formed Mobius Digital, founded by his classmate Loan Verneau, who had worked on Outer Wilds, and actor Masi Oka. Several other members of the development team were hired by Mobius as well, as Oka had seen the game at a USC exhibition and was impressed by their output. There, they worked on mobile games, while continuing Outer Wilds as a side project. They submitted it to the Independent Games Festival, where in early 2015 it won the Excellence in Design and Seumas McNally Grand Prize awards, as well as honorable mention for the Excellence in Narrative and Nuovo Award categories. This inspired Mobius to take the game on as a development project, with the aim of spending a year polishing it into a commercial game for Windows. Mobius launched a crowdfunding campaign for the game on Fig, the first for a video game, raising US$100,000. Beachum continued as creative director for the game, with Verneau as a designer, Logan Ver Hoef and Jeffrey Yu as programmers, and Beachum's sister Kelsey as writer. Mobius additionally hired art director Wesley Martin, who had initially seen the game at IGF.

During that year of development, Annapurna Interactive approached the studio to be the publisher, buying out the investment and rights from Fig. Annapurna, in turn, pushed for the game to be more than a polished student project, and the development timeline was pushed out from 2016 to launching in 2018. This was later delayed to 2019, with the game also releasing on the Xbox One. In exchange for additional financial support, the game was initially a timed exclusive on the Epic Games Store, delaying support for a Linux version. Outer Wilds was released on PC and Xbox One on May 28, 2019. A PlayStation 4 version was released on October 15, 2019, a PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and Series S version on September 15, 2022, and a Nintendo Switch version on December 7, 2023. A PlayStation 4 retail version was released by Limited Run Games in 2020.

Design

The game heavily employs a camping motif, reflecting Beachum's personal interest in backpacking while also emphasizing that the player-character is far from their home and alone in this galaxy. Martin combined this with his childhood in the Santa Cruz mountains to make a visual design for Timber Hearth of a redwood forest, which was expanded to give many of the planets designs based on specific areas. Timber Hearth is based on Yellowstone National Park, Sequoia National Park, and Mount Rainier; Brittle Hollow is based on Iceland and Greenland; and Giants Deep is loosely on Santa Cruz beach cliffs. To help direct players, the art design is not uniformly detailed, with less detail present where there is nothing to find. This is intended to train players not to exhaustively check every area, in turn steering them towards the paths the team wanted them to find first, not find shortcuts they'd see later or get stuck checking where nothing was.

The writing of the game was designed by Kelsey Beachum to take the player on the same journey that the Nomai had taken, with the branching writing based on her own note-taking style. In order to incentivize players to read the text, she used strongly defined personalities having a conversation, and made sure to never have background "lore" be given in text so that players understood that it was all valuable, important content. As players could find writings out of linear order, each "conversation" needed to hint to the player where previous conversations could be found, as well as what the writers planned to do next and where.

The music of the game was composed by Andrew Prahlow. The central motif of the music was based on sitting around a campfire, coming from Beachum's emotional core of the game. Prahlow, who had worked with Beachum previously, joined the project in 2012 and began with a simple melody on a banjo as a "campfire song", and expanded the music from there. Based on the description of the other Outer Wilds explorers, Prahlow gave each of them an instrument based on their personalities with the concept that they were all playing the same song apart but still together. The music was written alongside the game's story, allowing it to grow and change as the story was refined, resulting in a unified theme about the joy of life and its bittersweet journey. Prahlow did not write more general background music, so that it would only play when the player was in a location where it would be noticeable and meaningful. The title theme was both the first and last song written, as Prahlow recorded himself playing banjo music at the beginning of development and again at the very end to symbolize the growth and change over the course of the game's creation. A soundtrack album for the game, Outer Wilds, was released on June 1, 2019, with a vinyl version, Signals From The Outer Wilds, released in 2020.

Echoes of the Eye

Mobius began working on the Echoes of the Eye expansion shortly before finishing the original game. The team quickly came up with the central concept for the story, that another race, acting as a foil to the Nomai, had reached the eye of the universe first and, afraid of what they had found, blocked the signal. This necessitated making a small change to the base game before it was released, to ensure that the Nomai did not report detecting the signal at all once they warped into the system. When developing the base game, the team had created the concepts of the planets before writing the story, but in Echoes they did the opposite, designing the game world around the story. They came up with a central motif of light and darkness, with the concept that the truth was hidden in the darkness to be found, but might be scary or unpleasant. This in turn meant that Echoes would be more of a horror game, with more frightening elements; the original summary pitch to Annapurna was exploring ancient alien ruins only to discover that the aliens were still alive.

The team had previously considered the idea of having an invisible planet, including it as a stretch goal in the original Fig campaign, and returned to the concept in Echoes as an invisible artificial structure. The structure was originally going to be a flat circle or "coin" of swampland with one side light and the other side dark, with the aliens in a computer world while their ghosts wandered the dark side of the coin. The player would traverse the coin with a raft, occasionally chased by a water monster. After initial prototyping, the coin world was scrapped in favor of the ringworld of the final version, with the raft retained but the water monster replaced with the dam breaking. The ending of the story also changed: originally, the Prisoner would be met early in the story, and they and the player would unhide the eye of the universe at the end and journey there. This was removed after Beachum and Verneau decided that they did not want Echoes to change the game path of the original game. The elements of "breaking" the simulation were added to replace the three locks on the Prisoner's cage, as the designers could not justify why the aliens would have kept the codes written down when they destroyed so much else.

The slide reels were added to the game to tell the story because the player character couldn't understand the alien language so it had to be conveyed visually, and in turn that needed to be both linear and under the player's control so that it would be clear. The art direction for the ringworld combined Pacific Northwest Native American, Louisiana swamp, and Egyptian elements. Unlike with the Nomai, the player interacts with the aliens to add to the horror elements. Their design was changed iteratively throughout development to be frightening while still human enough to visually emote in the slide reel images. Prahlow returned as the composer for the expansion, incorporating new instruments into the tracks to give the impression of stepping into somewhere new and scary but still anchored to where the player character came from. Echoes of the Eye was released as downloadable content for all platforms supported by the game on September 28, 2021. A soundtrack album, Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye Original Game Soundtrack, was released the same day, and an expanded version, Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye (The Lost Reels), was published the following year.