Welcome back and Happy Holidays Chasers! Here we are, looking ahead to a new year, and we’re continuing to make progress on some of the things we need to complete before setting our sights to our next round, and biggest round of playtesting yet! The unfortunate timing of having a server machine go down did stagnate some progress, and of course was not kind to the pocketbooks, but we’re moving ahead once again. [b] Before The Next Playtest[/b] We’ve just wrapped up troubleshooting and implementing a new and improved tool to make populating vegetation (trees, grass, bushes, etc) a much more quick and efficient process. Doing so has allowed us to move ahead in beginning to paint the environment and also generate the new vegetation we’ve been showing in the last few newsletters. We’ve already gotten a few world cells completed! Here is a screenshot showing the new ground textures and vegetation in the Outbrk world. [u]Keep in mind the screenshot was taken in the game editor and not representative of the final product :[/u] You can follow the work on this task on our [url= https://trello.com/c/IsHyTGLT/446-world-terrain-painting-vegetation-generation]Trello board[/url]. [b]The Next Playtest[/b] As we look ahead to the next playtest, we’re not able to pin the date down as of today, but we do know what it will look like. Our first kickstarter backers playtest consisted of 50 players. We’ll be reaching out to those players again to schedule an initial round of playtesting with just players who have previously had an opportunity to play the game. We took feedback from our earlier playtests into heavy consideration as we’ve made many of the adjustments during our latest stretch of development. A second round of playtest sessions will be scheduled around the same period for an additional 50 players that haven’t played the game yet! We’ll first prioritize Kickstarter Backers that were unable to participate in our playtest of last March, and fill up with a few randomly selected members of our discord community. More information on this second playtest and how to participate will come soon. [b]Here’s a quick summary:[/b]

• 2 nights of playtest sessions
• 50 players maximum in each “pool” of players
• Approximately 8-10 players per server as scheduled
• First round for those who have previously playtested
• Second round extended to community members
• We will prioritize Kickstarter Backers that missed the first playtest for the second round

If you missed the highlights from the first Kickstarter backers playtests we did back in March 2022, check this video out! [previewyoutube=8vaf92lLPWg;full][/previewyoutube] [b]Scenario Selection[/b] We recently had a channel active in our [url=https://discord.gg/PbgmksM]Discord[/url] for community members to suggest different iconic weather events that we should consider bringing to life in-game. We’ve taken some time to evaluate recommendations and have a short-list that we’re taking a deeper look into. While we won’t quite share it, we will tease some information about the next scenario type we’re looking to bring to the game. Our current scenario in-game (bonus points to whoever knows it!) is what storm chasers would call “HP” or “high precipitation”. There’s heavy rain and an embedded hail core, nasty stuff! We’re looking at potential elevated “LP” (low precipitation) storms for our next scenario and have some great suggestions from the recommendations of our Discord Community! We’ll have additional updates on timelines in the future, but we’re excited to share that we’ve made significant progress and essentially have completed all components of the Unity upgrade to once again have the game in end-to-end playable state for our next playtest! Happy New Year, Chasers! - The OUTBRK Team