Outer Wilds Patch Notes — August 6, 2018
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
(this is a crosspost)
Hello everyone!
We’re making our way to Brittle Hollow in this week’s developer update.
Meaningful Play
Our writer Kelsey Beachum will be presenting a talk at Meaningful Play this year, October 11 - 13th. This talk will address the challenges of writing for an open-world game and in telling a linear story through a nonlinear delivery. This would be an excellent talk to listen to for those who are interested in writing for video games!
Details about the event can be found here.
Brittle Hollow
Brittle Hollow is one of the most alien locations in Outer Wilds. From the outside, it appears to be a rocky planet with glacial poles, orbited by a volcanic moon known as Hollow’s Lantern.
The fragile geode, Brittle Hollow.
As time passes, however, it is revealed to be a planet-sized geode that crumbles to pieces as it is bombarded by meteors ejected from its moon. When a chunk of the planet’s crust takes enough damage, it falls into a black hole at the planet’s core. The interior of the crust is covered in striking crystal formations and a variety of Nomai structures.
Most of Brittle Hollow’s fragments destroyed.
Brittle Hollow’s geode crust is made almost entirely from an extensive rock kit. The rock kit is composed of seven different sets, each defined by its size, and within each set there are around eight variations of the rocks, totaling over 50 pieces. All of these pieces add up to a highly adaptable kit that works to support the hand crafted level design.
Top and bottom of one of Brittle Hollow’s fragments.
The crystalline portion of the crust uses the same custom BRDF shader we talked about in our previous update, which allows us to give it a unique lighting model that appears to refract and scatter light in unusual ways.
Under the crust of Brittle Hollow.
Other than the modular rock kit that is unique to Brittle Hollow, this planet’s poles are capped with snow. The glacial poles also contain many modular ice chunks, combined with a lot of custom work to carve out their interiors. Using Brittle Hollow’s unique rock and ice kits the team was able to support the complex nature of the planet’s level design.
PAX West 2018
Just another reminder that Outer Wilds will be at PAX West! More details in the coming weeks!
PAX West is August 31st through till September 3rd 2018 in Seattle, WA.
That’s the End of This Update
Join us in another two weeks for another development update. Have a great weekend everyone!
Cheers,
Mobius