Home on Galantrix

tldr: I’m a 50-year-old Software Engineer who left my FAANG job on a sabbatical to build Outsider, a sci-fi narrative videogame.

TRANQUILITY BASE, THE EAGLE HAS LANDED!

Hello Everyone!

Hello Everyone!

This update is one week late because I decided to finally take a break and go on vacation!

Outsider Playtest 6 is out!

After my second full month as a novelist impersonator, I finished a little over 60% of the writing, which I now track through a detailed spreadsheet.

In March, I focused on writing the novel-length Outsider story and preparing for its first in-person presentation, which was scheduled as part of my panel at the Atlanta Sci-Fi & Fantasy Expo, held on March 15–16 in Atlanta.

Hello all!

The FREE Outsider Demo is now available on Steam for immediate download!

This hectic week was the most productive and important since the beginning of the project.

This has been a hectic weekend with activities completely unrelated to Galantrix… Events to go, chores to do.

This week was amazingly productive, one of the best since I started development.

This blog post contains mild spoilers for Outsider.

This blog post contains mild spoilers for Outsider.

This week, I completed the “Alpha” version of Chapters 2-4, totaling close to 15K words across all branches and bringing the game close to 21K if you include the tutorial and Chapter 1.

This blog post contains mild spoilers for Outsider.

Happy New Year!

I promised myself I wouldn’t work on the game during my break, but I also felt I should write a short update to wrap up the year.

Today, we’ve released Outsider’s Playtest 2 build to playtesters!

As Christmas nears, I feel increasingly confident that Galantrix will meet its 2024 goal of releasing a quality “Outsider-like” playtest build.

Hello Everybody!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I will summarize this week in one sentence: 2 weeks in 2 days The plan for the week was to implement the “production” gameplay graphics based on the mock I created last week.

Last weekend, we had our first real Outsider playtest from 5 brave (and/or curious) souls who were willing to deal with an ugly development version and write thoughtful feedback about it.

Last month, I opened the update with “What a difference a month makes…”.

As I’ve announced in the Discord server, I will start writing updates on the weekends as part of my “package” of efficiency improvements for Galantrix.

This will be a short update because I’m exhausted.

I will not lie; this was a tough week, perhaps the hardest since development started.

What a difference a month makes… I’ve read my last update, and everything I describe there feels like pre-history.

After the highly productive last week, I knew that completing M2 was a matter of “time and code”, as I say: a couple of days of coding tasks in areas I was already fairly comfortable with.

I had reserved 7-8 days to work on “Art” in M2, which includes Outsider’s second soundtrack song and the Steam “capsule” image, which might also be reused for the game’s opening screen.

Today, I’m celebrating two things: having built, last Wednesday, the very first version of Outsider, which is actually playable and finishing my 47th day of game development in a row.

Today I’ve reached the first major Outsider milestone - 2 days before my planned deadline!

I’ve done quite a bit of coding in the past weeks, but it was all for experiments, research, and prototypes.

Happy Labor Day!

Risk management in software is about trying to remove unknowns.

Last week, I said I would stop slacking on the audio/music part of the game; I think I delivered on the promise by releasing a rough mix of the very first song of the official Outsider soundtrack, Blue.

The week started slowly due to random chores, but I still got a ton done.

This was my first full-time week working on Galantrix and I was impressed with how much stuff one can get done when there are no interruptions!

Hello everybody!

This will be a small update because I spent this entire week wrapping up my work at my employer.

I thought I wouldn’t be able to get much done this week due to my limited free time, but that wasn’t the case as I unexpectedly solved ‘Problem B’ last weekend after my traditional multi-hour ‘ultra-focus’ session.

This was a particularly busy week at my job, as well as with family matters—especially parenting and ‘husbandry.’

After releasing an updated teaser with improved music, I made one final push to get the site ready for a broader announcement to friends and coworkers.

Happy 4th of July!

This week I had to work around a pretty busy schedule - a lot of things to wrap up at my employer, as I still have a full-time job, and random things that prevented me from having a good block of quality time to work on Outsider.

Hello everybody, this is the first of what I hope to be weekly updates on Galantrix projects, in particular our first game, “Outsider”.