Reflecting on 2024 so far...

Now that things have settled down after Final Outpost 1.5, we thought it a good time to take a look ahead at what’s in the pipeline.

It’s now been two months since the release of Final Outpost 1.5 and what a release it was! We introduced new community-requested features like turrets and the return of the guard. It was also a major rework of the game’s progression so the update required a huge amount of testing and balancing before it was ready to go, which alone took us three weeks to get right. But the result is a game that feels much more satisfying to play through, at least to us, and this was a bit of a blind spot before.

Similar to 1.4, the release was almost bug-free but it wasn’t without issue: there were some existing players for whom the migration into the new difficulty progression was jarring to say the least and in some cases led to the collapse of some large Outposts. As we had been laser-focused on balancing the new progression, we hadn’t properly considered the impact of migrating an old save into the new update. However, we addressed this within a few days and the feedback on this update was largely positive and our post-update ratings are clearly improved.

The 1.5.3 performance update was also critical for us. For the first time in Final Outpost’s development, we dedicated time to performance, battery life and FPS and found that there was a lot to be done. Over two weeks our lead developer, Ben, took a close look at where our performance issues were coming from and, through a lot of staring at the Unity profiler, made incremental changes to the codebase to iron out every inefficiency. These inefficiencies really added up in the end because by the release of 1.5.3 he had reduced the number of devices experiencing sub-30 FPS by 5x. We don’t have the data for this, but 1.5.3 likely also dramatically improved battery life on all devices and in cases of overheating eradicated the worst of it.

So, what’s next?

Well, 1.6 of course. Final Outpost 1.6 is primarily a visual overhaul. We are completely revamping the UI, improving our pixel art, screen size scaling and text legibility. We are hoping that the whole game will be easier to understand and digest. And we are doing this by reworking menu layouts, adding more information where it makes sense and improving visual consistency throughout the UI. It’s been a wonderful process so far and we can’t wait to share it with you.

The 1.6 update will also include a new menu, which will allow players to manage their defences in interesting ways, like being able to deploy knife fighters to specific walls from one place, and selecting the firing mode of turrets and snipers. This will bring a new level of management to the defence aspect of the game. 

Until now our translations have been community-driven, which has been an amazing process to witness and coordinate, but we want to take this further. So 1.6 will also come with improved localisation done by professional translators and add two new languages to the roster, taking us to 13 global languages in total!

Something we’ve been thinking about for a while now is with all of these improvements and features we are adding to the game, does Final Outpost feel different than it used to? Does it really still feel like it needs to be a freemium game? Does it still feel like a mobile game?

So we are developing something called the Definitive Edition. This will be Final Outpost, but without in-app purchases, with new features and content, available on Mac, PC, Android and iOS. What might these new features be? We haven’t decided on everything yet, but we know there will be difficulty modes, a trading system, a checkpoint system to replace the restart/continue on game over, and a prestige system which will add replayability. The Definitive Edition will be a better game with more to do, and the Steam page should be visible next month.

We’ll be back with more on all this soon.

In the meantime, you can stay up to date with our roadmap for 1.6 and beyond: https://trello.com/b/fULzM1su/final-outpost-roadmap

- Sam