Hi everyone! 🌈

I hope you all had a restful festive season and a good start into the new year! 2025 will be our most exciting year so we're really looking forward to it!

As you know, we want to release Out and About into Early Access on PC in Spring! We can't yet tell you when exactly (it's still a secret) 😉 but it won't be too long!

So let's look at some of the things we worked on in January!

New Music Direction
We hadn't been able to invest in music in a long time, but last year we finally got to create a few more pieces. However, the direction of the music changed because the game itself had grown and changed. Now, the focus is much more on relaxation and nature. Have a listen to this sample of the forest music and tell us what you think!

New Sea Shader
Our artist Niko recently reworked our water shader and blew us away with the result. It's hard to remember our old water now that we have seen this beautiful shader in action. It's almost like our minds forcefully forgot it - we'll have to find some old videos to compare them one day! 🤣

Filler NPCs for a more lively world
If you played our demo, you know that our beautiful little town feels a bit like a ghost town - but now we created a wide range of characters that we can place in the world to make it feel more lively. Since this is our first game, there is lots to learn about NPC navigation (and performance relating to that), so we'll have to start with the basics. But we're sure that this will already have an enormous effect on the liveliness of the world, so we're very excited to implement them!

Barbara's Farm
Barbara is your foraging teacher, but her family also owned a farm outside town. Now Barbara wants to restore it, and combine traditional farming with Paludiculture (= productive land use of wet and rewetted peatlands). We're excited to integrate this into the game and shed some light on this topic. Here are some concept sketches of the farm and the colored version we chose!
As you can see, we went for a combination of Nr 3 and 1. Which number of the concept art would you have chosen?


That's it for this month's update! Take care and have a good week everyone!

Jen & Elena💖