Outpost Glacier

Co-op Crafting Survival

Primary Responsibilities

Game Design, Technical Design

I worked on Outpost Glacier for several years the small production scale required me to adopt a wide skill-set going beyond typical tech design role.

Concept

Outpost: Glacier takes place inside a massive snow storm. 

You are an engineer on an expedition gone awry. You must adapt to the cold environment and use the limited resources in the world around you to craft tools, build shelter and invent new gadgets to help find your way home.

USP

Storm & Cold

Outpost Glacier is all about surviving in the cold. You constantly battle the cold environment while trying to survive in the ever raging snowstorm.

The storm is the main antagonist of outpost glacier, a thick blizzard enveloping the entire game world.

There are two main ways the player can battle the cold:

Becoming more resilient to the weather. Crafting new gear, food, and other consumables that provide both permanent and temporary protection from the cold.

Constructing buildings and contraptions that provide shelter and help you combat the storm itself.

By fighting off the storm you uncover new parts of the world, new resources, and new challenges on your way back to safety.

Genre

Co-op Crafting Survival

The Storm

In Outpost Glacier the world is covered in a persistent storm. The storm is harsh, cold and with poor visibility. The storm is your main antagonist.

The poor visibility and intense weather makes the storm tough to survive without the proper gear.

Repelling the storm

To make the world more habitable, players can build contraptions that repel the storm, creating pockets of calm within the otherwise harsh environment.


Design challenges

Layering punishment

Naturally the storm should be dangerous and cold. This really thwarted players from exploring the storm. Reduced visibility, reduced hearing and increased heat drain are 3 different penalties stacked on player simultaneously. This made exploring inside the storm a lot more difficult.

Reduced visibility is part of the storms identity. The reduced visibility already makes the base cold more dangerous. Making sure there is proper ducking on the main sound mix allows players to still hear important gameplay cues.

Covering up the world

The aesthetics of Outpost Glacier have always been important. The large storm hides many beautiful and functional features of the landscape and environment. Limiting both natural vistas and other landmark features. In the short term, the game becomes less visually interesting. and required us to compact the game world to allow players to more easily acquire important resources with a short vision range. In the long term however, this means once you reach the technology to uncover larger parts of the world, the compacted environments become a bit more obvious. 

As you uncover the world you also gain back a lot of the natural beauty and color of the environment, this in itself turned out to give a lot of gratification due to the visual progression of the game world.

Recovery

We wanted players to rely on spatial navigation, using visual cues to navigate instead of the typical HUD compass. The storm repeller is designed to help guide the player back to their home base with a large beam that is visible through the fog. The challenge was mainly, what happens when a player dies inside the storm?

In part this could be solved by limiting what items the player drop when they die. Keeping important tools or gear that would allow them to regain their footing, while the more abundant resources would stay on the character. This was most punishing in the early game.

This was still a big problem in the early game, where players are required to play inside the storm. Dying repeatedly meant that resources became even more scarce around the spawn area taking players further from their goal of establishing a base. 

Eventually this resulted in giving players the tools necessary to make their way to the first storm repeller. Serving as an introduction to both crafting and navigation.

Design challenges

Layering punishment

The storm should be harsh, but how much harder can we make it before the storm becomes too dangerous to explore at all? 

Intuitively you would can imagine the storm to affect the player in multiple ways, more intense cold, worse visibility, the intense wind could prevent players from lighting fires. There are many possible ways to highlight that the storm is a dangerous place. We've experimented status effects and modifiers that felt like they could or should be properties of the storm itself. 

In reality, all that really happened is that we stacked penalties preventing players from exploring inside the storm.

Players always lose body heat at some rate. The rate of which was decided by the temperature in the game world and the gear you carry. Reducing the temperature further only resulted in player dying faster. Removing players ability to generate warmth inside the storm meant players were unable to make any valuable progress beyond the very edge of the safe zone.

Inherently, the thick fog and the sound of the storm weather were penalizing enough. Even if they weren't explicitly affecting the players stats and gameplay abilities. Reducing spatial awareness made finding resources and maintaining your body heat difficult enough in and of itself.

Covering up the world

The aesthetics of Outpost Glacier have always been important. The large storm hides many beautiful and functional features of the landscape and environment.

Limiting both natural vistas and other landmark features. In the short term, the game becomes less visually interesting. and required us to compact the game world to allow players to more easily acquire important resources, even with a short vision range. In the long term however, this means once you reach the technology to uncover larger parts of the world, the compacted environments become more obvious and less aesthetically pleasing. 

As you uncover the world you also gain back a lot of the natural beauty and color of the environment, this in itself turned out to give a lot of gratification due to the visual progression of the game world, the world regains a lot of it's color and players finally get to "peek behind the curtain".

Knowing what the world can look like can be hampering, you so desperately want players to see the beautiful world that you forget they don't even know what it looks like, that you may be enticed to give them the tools to get there faster.

Let players uncover the world and find beauty at their own pace. If you start in an "ugly" place, the more beauty you uncover, the more you highlight the impact of your progression.

Recovery

Dying is key to the survival aspect of the game. What happens when you die, do you drop your items, lose progress? How do you recover being worse off than you were a moment ago?

We wanted players to rely on spatial navigation, using visual cues to navigate instead of the typical HUD compass. The storm repeller is designed to help guide the player back to their home base with a large beam that is visible through the fog. The challenge was mainly, what happens when a player dies inside the storm?

In part this could be solved by limiting what items the player drop when they die. Keeping important tools or gear that would allow them to regain their footing, while the more abundant resources would stay where the character died. This was especially punishing in the early game.

When required to hunt for resource inside the storm, dying repeatedly meant that resources became even more scarce in the areas around where you died. Making it harder to recover your items as well as gathering new materials to better improve your abilities to progress.

In the early game this kept players from their goal of establishing a base of operation.

Eventually this required multiple solutions:

giving players the tools necessary to make their way to the first storm repeller. Serving as an introduction to both crafting and navigation. Re-spawning certain materials. Also limiting the items dropped on death. We gauged that recovering lost items were not a fun part of the storm gameplay.

World Generation

Procedural Voxel World

The world of Outpost Glacier is built using a combination of procedural generation and hand crafted points of interest.

Outpost Glacier uses the Voxel Plugin for world generation.

Noise algorithms generate Signed Distance Fields, which make up the base geometry of the world.

The same noise defines different biomes, each with its own set of rules to generate foliage, resources, and points of interest that players explore to progress through the game. 


Terrain Generation

SDF based terrain

The world is generated using SDF graphs that come with the Voxel Plugin. These graphs are deterministic rule sets that take seeded noise to process world coordinates according to specific rulesets. The terrain generation is deterministic ensuring consistency between networked clients.

Defining Solids

Negative values are solid, positive values are empty. This is what happens if you base your graph on the world Z value.

Noise

Introducing noise to offset the height map. This is a cross section of a 3-dimensional graph meaning this noise is actually 3 dimensional.

Height Map

Height map defines the biome definition. Instead of using this graph to define terrain formation. This height map can be used to generate another layer of noise which is used to generate biome specific terrain heights.

Biomes

The world is divided into several biomes using a rule set based both world coordinates and noise to generate terrain features. These commonly consist of:

Sub-biomes & Foliage

The building blocks of a biome:

Noise Masking

Noise functions are used to define the boundaries of both biomes, and biomes within biomes.

Coordinate Based Masking

Coordinate based rules are also used to create masks and boundaries for biome and foliage generation.

Generators

Generators are rule based spawners. When creating a biome, foliage generators are used to manage the placement of foliage and environment actors.

Foliage Generators:

Generators are collections of foliage and environment pieces that have their own rule set for spawning actors in the level. The actors are spawned as HISMs and swapped for gameplay actors when interacted with. 

Example: Combining Generators

Spawn Rules

Density: How close two instances of the same foliage type can spawn.

Probability: For each sample point, of an instance spawning at a sample point. A high density with low probability can create natural looking clusters.

Elevation range: At what height range foliage can spawn. 

Angle range: At what angle range foliage can spawn.

Trees

Trunks

Logs

Masking

Noise based masking

Noise is used to define both the level geometry and the biome boundaries.

A biome has a sub set of masks (sub-biomes) that are used to define it's features.

Some base assumptions can help start the generation process, For example defining Z=0 as the water level.

Noise Based Masking

Noise is used to define the world geometry.

Z = 0 is water level. Areas above 0 are defined by another noise layer.

Height Based Masking

Coordinate based masking. Elevation is a great way to mask out shorelines for example.

In this case Z < 1 defines the shoreline. 

Assigning Generators

This noise defines the boundary of where assets can spawn.

These noises can be feathered to create a soft transition between generators.

Combined Generators

Combining several generators make for more interesting biomes.

Points of Interest

Points of interest(POIs) are fundamental to create landmarks and gameplay relevant locations of varying frequency. These can be anything from important resource spawns, lore relevant building remnants, and important progress gating locations.

Important Resources

Rarer resource actors that serve important gameplay functions, that can't be limited by the foliage spawn rules.

Large Natural Formations

Landmark locations that can serve as decoration to give the landscape more identifiable features.

Bespoke structures

POIs are built in separate level assets and loaded into the level on the fly.

Story Locations

Important story locations, progress gates or one-offs are marked as important spawns.

Spawn Rules

POIs have their own rules to spawn.

Some POIs are set to spawn within a certain radius of the game start, to ensure a new player will be able to reach it.

Important locations have priority over common and recurring POIs. Some POIs are restricted to only spawn in certain biomes.

Rules

Dynamic Placement vs. POI in a box

A point of interest is only as interesting as the things it provides for the player. If the player can predict the contents of a location before exploring it, the location is more or less expended. While it can still provide challenges, the exploration goal or aspect is may be gone.

POI in a box

Is what I would attribute to be a location that is self contained, think a "dungeon" in other open world titles. A self contained POI doesn't interact with the surrounding world. Giving you a lot more granular control when designing interactions and challenges.

This is a double edged sword.

The drawback being, once player feel they've gathered what they need from this type of POI they no longer provide any meaningful game interaction, meaning this part of the game is expended.

This type of POI works well when dealing with important places that have a limited or one-off use. Also, Locations that are rigid by design. Manufactured locations like module houses or compounds.

Dynamic POI

Dynamic POIs conform to the game world. This doesn't mean it has to be complex. Rather, it could be a collection of smaller assets that spawn within a set distance of each other. 

This has the potential to result in more dynamic game scenarios where the environment creates challenges inside the POI or the opposite. When a POI spills out into the surrounding environment new emergent events and behaviors can occur.

While I do prefer this type of POI, the difficulty of "solving" a location is at the mercy of the PCG. Spawning an important resource next to a dangerous enemy can impede progression.

Good/Bad PCG

Asset requirements

Both generators and assets need to be adapted for dynamic placement.

Poorly structured assets, can cause situations where their shape and design create a visual eye sore when placed in off locations. This can limit their usability in generators. 

These things should be considered when creating a model or assets, to ensure that it can afford being placed in a multitude of locations.


Generators Define The Game

Poorly structured generators can have negative effect on the critical path, creating scenarios where important resources are too hard, or even impossible to reach.

In other cases where generators have too narrow rule sets, the likelihood of a terrain scenario where the asset can spawn becomes limited.

From a design perspective, you lose a lot of control when spawning resources. This usually means resources become too scarce or too abundant.


True exploration

Procedurally generated levels create true exploration even for you as a developer. Finding a resource leaves you at the mercy of the PCG system, as opposed to bespoke levels or POIs that can only be explored once.

While adding to the development time, the gameplay experience is elevated even for developers.

Progressing through technology

Create high tech gadgets from sticks and stones. You are in essence McGyver trapped in the snow. Working your way through primitive technology to more advanced survival gear.

And much much more...

Outpost Glacier has been a full time project developed in a small team, the amount of tasks, systems and tech developed goes beyond what is seen here. Here are some of the other mayor systems I've worked on during the development of Outpost Glacier. I might cover some of these in the future.


All of these systems and their surrounding pipelines have been a collaborative development and learning experience, made possible thanks to the other talented people at Doomlord Interactive.