Final Outpost is Coming Soon on Steam!

We are excited to announce that Final Outpost: Definitive Edition is coming soon to PC/Mac/Linux.

That’s right, it’s a Definitive Edition. That means we’ll be taking the original popular mobile strategy game to a new level with more features, content, and replayability as we wrap up our creative journey into a complete premium game without microtransactions. The game will be available in 16 languages across 5 platforms (PC, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS).

New features we know will be in the Definitive Edition:

• Trading system

• More gameplay and replayability

• Difficulty modes

• New leaderboards and achievements

• All premium features included

• More features TBC...

Wishlist the game now to get news on new feature announcements in our monthly devlog!

In the meantime, Final Outpost is available on Android and iOS, with over 1M downloads since its release in 2020. The core gameplay is there so you can give that a download to see if you like the game, as a sort of early demo. If you like how it plays, you will almost certainly love Final Outpost: Definitive Edition!

The release of our Steam page coincides with the launch of Final Outpost 1.6 on mobile, an anticipated UI redesign that brings high quality polish to the base game. The update will ship with a cutscene that introduces lore to the game for the first time as well as a new menu where you can manage your Outpost's defences and control the behaviour of your turrets and snipers.

- Sam & the Final Outpost team

Devlog #1: The UI Update

Dear players,

Wow, what a trailer launch! The response on YouTube and Discord has been really positive - you guys seem to love the look of our new user interface (UI) design!

I’m very glad to hear it, too, since we’ve been working on this update for nearly three months. In fact, we did our first concept art for a UI redesign over two years ago. We started again almost from scratch twice before creating this update.

On the first occasion, we were initially happy with our new UI but the doubts slowly grew. It was a little too chunky, the textures weren’t right and we didn’t have enough coherence in our design.

A year after creating this concept, we threw it out.

Then, last year, we began work on a new design which looked really nice. Then we tested it with screenshots on our store pages. Feedback was mixed. To the point where a good chunk of our long-time players were telling us that the UI was just not conveying the feel of the game. The opposite feel in fact; the design was colourful and even a little cute, the characters didn’t look like they were living through an apocalypse.

Back to the drawing board.

We wanted to get our UI updated once and for all, so we salvaged as much of the previous UI iteration as possible but reskinned it and gave it a new identity. An identity that matched the feeling you always had when playing Final Outpost. That feeling is moody. Satisfaction from the last upgrade tempered by the inevitable undead that threaten your progress. There is fast-paced action, and there is gradual resource accumulation.

So we decided to honour the traditional greyness of the UI that the game has always had by creating a more intentional stone theme and building on it with elements of metal and overgrowth. We reworked the UI scaling to make it pixel-perfect, introduced slick animations and improved clarity throughout by replacing words with icons, clutter with clean and showing more critical information to the player.

In addition to a total UI redesign, in Final Outpost 1.6 we are introducing the new defence menu. This menu offers an overview of all your defences and the ability to distribute your knife fighters across your walls however you like from one place. New in 1.6 is the ability to control the behaviour of your turrets and snipers. Go silent to avoid attracting more zombies, target specific zombies, or mow down everything in sight. Your call.

Something we have kept under wraps until now is the all-new cutscene. Discover the first chapter of lore in Final Outpost and see the backstory behind your very own Outpost - with your Outpost’s name!

We are really happy with how the update turned out and are excited for you to experience it on the 4th August!

As always, thank you for supporting our game over the last 4 years.

- Sam & the Final Outpost team

What's Coming Next?

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