Hi everyone! ✨
It's time for another update!
Cooking Minigames
As you know, we have a lot of recipes (around 200+) so we needed to find the overarching categories of minigames we'll need to make. There will be 19 different minigame "templates" (e.g. Tea, Oils, Tinctures, Salves, Soups, Quiche, Lemonades, Syrups, Smoothies etc) - that's a significant amount of work for us. But it's progressing nicely!
In these minigames, you are following the real-world cooking steps. So you'll learn how to make the recipe by playing. We're excited about the added learning, the juicy cooking sounds and the beautiful kitchen scenes that come with it!
Photo Quests!
We just finished implementing the photo quest feature - at the 1.0 release you will be able to use your camera to snap photos of quest objectives. This will add a small puzzle element to the game and make the quests more varied. You can see a video of a photo quest below.
We revisited all Spring and Summer quests - those that felt to "fetchy" and weren't fun we replaced with a photo quest. Here is an example of how we planned them. Credits to our amazing intern Ethan who helped us with this!
This means that once the 1.0 drops, we will encourage you to start a new game, since you can then experience the new tutorial story (which we shortened & improved) and the new photo quests.
Autumn Story
We're hard at work implementing the last chapter of the Story: Autumn. As part of this chapter, you will finally meet Riley!
A big part of this chapter will be about nature accessibility and the restauration of The Bell. We're excited about this final chapter and hope that you are too 😊
Player House
We're also working on the player house, your own little domain of decoration. Since we only have 1 programmer who is swamped with tasks, we sadly can't make a fancy decorating system 🥺 But we will create a cozy room where you can swap out the furniture pieces to fit your style.
-> As part of this, we'd love to hear what kind of furniture you think would be essential for your Witch/herbalist/cottagecore fantasy. Tell me in the comments 🙏 you can also share pictures on Discord.
1.0 Release Date
We're currently looking at early October for the 1.0 Release. Our timeline has shifted since cooking was a lot more work than expected. We can't 100% confirm a date yet, but we'll be working towards getting a clearer picture of when we can launch.
After launch, you can expect us to push a few more updates & improvements, as well as new plant DLCs (some of them free!) and larger paid DLCs with new areas/plants/NPCs/features will follow after that. It is our hope that we can grow Out and About into the largest nature game of the world, but do to so we'll need your help.
Thank you all for your support! We hope you like the improvements!
Elena & the Yaldi team ❤️