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tldr: I’m a 50-year-old Software Engineer who left my FAANG job on a sabbatical to build Outsider, a sci-fi narrative videogame.
I’ve always wanted to create a game.
I moved from Brazil to the US to work at Big Tech. After a successful career as an Engineering Manager, full of tireless customer focus, end-to-end mission alignment, and vibrant 360-degree feedback, I wanted to…
TRANQUILITY BASE, THE EAGLE HAS LANDED! Outsider is now available on Steam with a 15% launch discount. The game’s full price, after the 2-week discount period, is $12.99 in the US and Steam-adjusted prices for other regions (for instance, R$39.99 in Brazil).
And… Surprise, surprise! You can also purchase Outsider’s 2-hour soundtrack today, available separately for $3.99 in…
Hello Everyone!
Did “Final Update” grab your attention? :)
It’s true. With Outsider’s release about 6 weeks away, this is my final progress report. If all goes well, the next email will be the game’s release announcement. I’m aiming for November 6th, but realistically, it could happen anytime from that date to November 15th. The game is almost complete,…
Hello Everyone!
This will be a short update, as the past four weeks have been all about writing. My days have been a continuous grind of waking up, exercising, making breakfast, showering, writing, eating lunch, writing some more, making dinner, watching TV and going to bed - always in that order. This routine can be a bit mind-numbing, but it enabled me to make significant progress in the…
This update is one week late because I decided to finally take a break and go on vacation! I’ve been talking about burnout off and on, and while I still very much enjoy building the game, I was feeling really tired. A normal tech worker’s year generally includes a 2-3 week break, so there is no reason for me to do otherwise. I spent some time away from the computer, not working on the…
Outsider Playtest 6 is out! This is a private build available only to our wonderful playtesters, but it’s a major milestone because it’s the first published version with radically new content since Outsider’s 2015 release and because it has a lot of new music and graphics!
With 40K+ new words and a good deal of polish, playtesters can now experience what this game is really…
After my second full month as a novelist impersonator, I finished a little over 60% of the writing, which I now track through a detailed spreadsheet. The game is now at 66500+ words, roughly a 220-page novel, and 144 choices. It feels amazing to be past the story’s midpoint! I added choices to all chapters up to 11, so I just need a bit of polishing before we are ready for the second…
In March, I focused on writing the novel-length Outsider story and preparing for its first in-person presentation, which was scheduled as part of my panel at the Atlanta Sci-Fi & Fantasy Expo, held on March 15–16 in Atlanta. The writing went well, but the Expo was a major disappointment and a near-complete waste of my precious time.
I diligently prepared an 80-slide presentation about…
Hello all! I just wanted to write a super quick update because I’ve been so busy with the game, taxes and getting ready for the Sci-Fi and Fantasy expo that happened last weekend. The expo was a near-unmitigated disaster. After spending 10+ hours preparing a 40-minute presentation with over 80 slides, I went there to find a terrible panel room with a broken A/V system. I canceled the…
The FREE Outsider Demo is now available on Steam for immediate download! If you have a PC, you can now play it on Windows (or Linux using Proton). Playing the full Demo is one of the best ways to help Outsider succeed right now - more on that below. And if you haven’t wishlisted the game yet, that’s also a good opportunity to do it. ;-)
I “soft released” the Demo a week…
This hectic week was the most productive and important since the beginning of the project. I’ve released the Demo build to playtesters and “soft launched” it to the public, created the first real Outsider trailer (exclusively on Steam for now) and completed the remaining M5 tasks. The thrill of the upcoming demo and the possibility of getting the “secret achievement”…
This has been a hectic weekend with activities completely unrelated to Galantrix… Events to go, chores to do. So, this is going to be a quick update.
This week, I finished Outsider “0.3.0”, a release candidate for the public Demo! Unfortunately, playtesters couldn’t yet play it because of an unexpected step in the Steam private playtesting process. I could have done it…
This week was amazingly productive, one of the best since I started development. I think I got a boost of motivation from seeing Outsider on Steam and the stream of impressions and wishlists! While my sales expectations have always been, and still remain, tempered, it is cool to see even a single potential customer. The excitement doesn’t come necessarily from the monetary gains but the idea…
This blog post contains mild spoilers for Outsider. Galantrix nonetheless believes that this content enhances the Outsider experience, even if not required for thoroughly enjoying the game. If you don’t like spoilers, don’t read this post. Also, please make sure to read the Outsider Disclaimer before moving forward.
SURPRISE! OUTSIDER IS NOW ON STEAM!
If you want to support Outsider,…
This blog post contains mild spoilers for Outsider. Galantrix nonetheless believes that this content enhances the Outsider experience, even if not required for thoroughly enjoying the game. If you don’t like spoilers, don’t read this post. Also, please make sure to read the Outsider Disclaimer before moving forward.
Let me get the report out of the way so I can talk about other fun stuff. This…
This week, I completed the “Alpha” version of Chapters 2-4, totaling close to 15K words across all branches and bringing the game close to 21K if you include the tutorial and Chapter 1. As Outsider uses branching narratives, the player will only see from 30% to 60% of the total word count on a single playthrough, depending on choices.
Outsider, like most branching narrative games,…
This blog post contains mild spoilers for Outsider. Galantrix nonetheless believes that this content enhances the Outsider experience, even if not required for thoroughly enjoying the game. If you don’t like spoilers, don’t read this post. Also, please make sure to read the Outsider Disclaimer before moving forward.
This was the first week in my new life as a “game writer” after finishing the…
Happy New Year!
In December 2024, we “shipped” the second playtest build, as promised, which enabled me to take some well-deserved vacations! I took a 2-week break over the holidays and did minimal work related to the company: talking to playtesters and fixing a bug, that’s it. Despite enjoying building Outsider, this is a real job and, most certainly, “actual…
I promised myself I wouldn’t work on the game during my break, but I also felt I should write a short update to wrap up the year. I’ll write a bigger one once I send my mailing list message next week, so I’ll stick to the playtest that happened over the past week.
The playtest went really well, and I got great feedback as in the previous one! The number of players doubled to…
Today, we’ve released Outsider’s Playtest 2 build to playtesters! If you read the past entries, you know that I’ve rewritten most of the Playtest 1 code and added a huge number of features. In fact, despite the relatively short play time (30-60 minutes), this build has almost all the features we want to ship in the game’s final release. Aside from the inevitable bugs and…
As Christmas nears, I feel increasingly confident that Galantrix will meet its 2024 goal of releasing a quality “Outsider-like” playtest build. I originally wanted to release a rough demo with a decent amount of content but, over time, I realized that it would be better to release a polished demo with a limited amount of content. And that’s what I’ll do!
The jury is…
Hello Everybody!
In November, we had our first private playtesting, and unrelated to it, there was an incredible amount of churn in the Outsider codebase. I received invaluable feedback from the players, mostly centered around usability and general interaction with the game. As I considered implementing some of the proposed changes, I decided to throw away most of the game’s code – which I…
Happy Thanksgiving!
In the past 7 days of work (this short week plus the previous week), I finished Outsider’s engine and core UI flows, which means all major game features are in place! This includes everything from before, plus the recently coded state persistence (aka Save/Load game) and the main scripting engine.
This might sound like the game is closer to completion than I had…
I will summarize this week in one sentence: 2 weeks in 2 days
The plan for the week was to implement the “production” gameplay graphics based on the mock I created last week. I already knew that this would require a complete rewrite of the game’s high-level rendering routines so I could get rid of “development” graphics. My initial estimate for that was 2-3 weeks,…
Last weekend, we had our first real Outsider playtest from 5 brave (and/or curious) souls who were willing to deal with an ugly development version and write thoughtful feedback about it. I sent a list of questions to the playtesters and got a lot of value from their thoughts… I have already fixed some of the most pressing issues and added tasks for a later part of the project. With that…
Last month, I opened the update with “What a difference a month makes…”. Interestingly, this is exactly what I had in mind for this one until I realized I’d be repeating myself! This month was full of downs and ups, starting with a project near-death experience when I realized the gameplay was going in a very bad direction and ending with a Rocky Balboa comeback, leading…
As I’ve announced in the Discord server, I will start writing updates on the weekends as part of my “package” of efficiency improvements for Galantrix. At the same time, I won’t write a weekly update on the weeks I send the email to the mailing list; I’ll be instead consolidating the weekly reports with the monthly emails. I’m not getting tired of updates.…
This will be a short update because I’m exhausted. This was a long and productive week, but it was also pretty intense. The last two weeks were probably the hardest since the project began.
Last week, I was hopefully clear about how hard it was to write Chapter 1. What I omitted was that I then suspected that some key gameplay principles the game relied on were irreparably broken.…
I will not lie; this was a tough week, perhaps the hardest since development started.
Last week, I mentioned that writing is hard, and now I say that writing a branching narrative is really, really hard. So hard, at times I wondered if Outsider is even feasible. To fully understand why, you will have to read more about branching narratives.
Outsider is not a traditional “Choose your…
What a difference a month makes… I’ve read my last update, and everything I describe there feels like pre-history. I did real work in August, but I started coding the game in September. I did a 2-week mad focus on coding and built nearly 50% of the final game code in that stretch. As I mentioned to the Discord members, I must have coded the equivalent of 3-6 months of output from the…
After the highly productive last week, I knew that completing M2 was a matter of “time and code”, as I say: a couple of days of coding tasks in areas I was already fairly comfortable with. M2 then ends, leaving the game in a playable state with full UI theming support, scalable fonts across the board, and most of the bells and whistles I wanted in the gameplay engine.
For those…
I had reserved 7-8 days to work on “Art” in M2, which includes Outsider’s second soundtrack song and the Steam “capsule” image, which might also be reused for the game’s opening screen. Due to unexpectedly high output, particularly with the capsule, I finished the whole thing this week… Freeing time for completing the milestone early - likely by Tuesday…
Today, I’m celebrating two things: having built, last Wednesday, the very first version of Outsider, which is actually playable and finishing my 47th day of game development in a row. Yes, I have worked every single day, Saturdays and Sundays included, since I started developing the game on August 5th. Weekends are lighter, usually 3-6 hours of work, but weekdays are full 7-10 hour work…
Today I’ve reached the first major Outsider milestone - 2 days before my planned deadline! I’ve used numbers to represent milestones for years, so the first milestone is named “M1”, the second is named “M2,” and so forth. Now that the game is further along, I’m ready to start sharing plans and tentative (no promises) ETAs all the way to the first public…
I’ve done quite a bit of coding in the past weeks, but it was all for experiments, research, and prototypes. I hadn’t written a single line of actual Outsider game code in all of these months! Well, that changed this week. Coding officially started on September 3rd, 2024. I haven’t seen any time travelers trying to kill me, so I think the game won’t evolve into a self-aware General Artificial…
Happy Labor Day!
I can’t believe it has been a whole month already… As they say, time flies when you are having fun! Speaking of that, I delayed starting this company for so many years because I wasn’t sure I would enjoy building games as much as I enjoy playing them. Making games, at least solo, is about whether you like writing, composing music, doing graphics,…
Risk management in software is about trying to remove unknowns. Estimating work you’re very familiar with is easy; doing the same for something you’ve never done before is hard. And projects are delayed because of too many “this wasn’t as easy as I thought.” Because of that, I plan to keep a round-robin rotation among all tasks throughout development to detect…
Last week, I said I would stop slacking on the audio/music part of the game; I think I delivered on the promise by releasing a rough mix of the very first song of the official Outsider soundtrack, Blue.
As the song was composed and recorded by me, it is technically part of the repertoire of my one-man music collective, Aesthetic Indifference, which, up to this day, had only released…
The week started slowly due to random chores, but I still got a ton done. I had a good deal of coding setup to do, like setting up adequate repos on Github and configuring my environment for sane standards. One good thing about not having to get an agreement among a large group of coders is that I can avoid annoying configurations like “Tabs for indentation” and “80-character lines”!
I spent a…
This was my first full-time week working on Galantrix and I was impressed with how much stuff one can get done when there are no interruptions! You can set up a productivity-focused development workflow without nitpicking code feedback, long build framework delays, and all the overhead you deal with in AAA tech. I felt that I could do more in one day than sometimes I would do in a full week back…
Hello everybody!
Thank you for subscribing to our mailing list and hanging in there despite our lengthy silence. I had to do a lot before being ready to send an update, but I’m happy to announce that the Galantrix journey begins today!
Firstly, I’ll use this very first message to make a special announcement: our first game won’t be Outsider, the game teased in our first marketing video,…
This will be a small update because I spent this entire week wrapping up my work at my employer. It is not quite over because I’m now burning through my vacation balance and will formally end my employment on September 4th. I had 1:1 meetings with over a dozen people throughout the week while helping ramp up the person we hired to replace me. This means that I’m exhausted but simultaneously…
I thought I wouldn’t be able to get much done this week due to my limited free time, but that wasn’t the case as I unexpectedly solved ‘Problem B’ last weekend after my traditional multi-hour ‘ultra-focus’ session. Instead of spending weeks on the problem as I initially feared, I took care of it in 2 days and fully unblocked the game’s development. There is still a lot more…
This was a particularly busy week at my job, as well as with family matters—especially parenting and ‘husbandry.’ As I’m still having to work on Outsider in the few hours before my job starts, I can’t really do much if these hours get consumed by other priorities. This situation won’t last too long, so I’d like to ask our future players to please be patient with…
After releasing an updated teaser with improved music, I made one final push to get the site ready for a broader announcement to friends and coworkers. One thing I noticed is that while many people enjoy the Discord experience, others don’t – at all. Contrary to my earlier expectations, a lot of folks still rely on email for communication. As a result, I had to update my static site script…
Happy 4th of July! My employer gives everyone a 2-day break for the holiday, which means I had more time to work on Outsider (until I can go full-time, that is). I dedicated 15-20 hours to the game and made significant progress as the day I’ll announce the game to more coworkers nears. I aimed to wrap up many loose ends from the previous weeks, resulting in improvements across the board.
This week I had to work around a pretty busy schedule - a lot of things to wrap up at my employer, as I still have a full-time job, and random things that prevented me from having a good block of quality time to work on Outsider. In cases like this, the best is to try to do things that don’t require a lot of time continuous time. After getting the trailer out, I went back to work on the…
Hello everybody, this is the first of what I hope to be weekly updates on Galantrix projects, in particular our first game, “Outsider”. We will use the general channel for random chat while I’ll be using this one to communicate the game’s evolution. I’ll later create a channel for actual “formal” announcements, but it’s too early for that. If you…
About Us
At Galantrix, a father-and-son game company from beautiful Atlanta, we believe that computers are the ultimate medium for building alternate realities.
Yet, many opportunities remain unexplored.
Can a computer make you cry? Can a video game change the world? We aim to revive the idealism of gaming pioneers while creating new ways to deliver great experiences to players…
Outsider Disclaimer
The 'Outsider' video game, related blog posts, emails and promotional material do not represent or claim that the events, situations, or characters depicted are truthful or factual accounts. Any resemblance to actual events, situations, extraterrestrial beings, or humans, living or deceased, is purely coincidental and unintentional.
In other words, we are not saying you…