The Making of Outer Wilds - Documentary

2.5M views · 6 years ago · documentary · evergreen

A /noclip documentary on the making of Outer Wilds, the space exploration game from Mobius Digital. It follows the developers through the game's design and the engineering behind its small, hand-built solar system. Spoilers for the game are included.

HN people cite it for the technical side of Outer Wilds, such as the player staying at the origin while the world moves, and as evidence of how the game was built.

“In Outer Wilds, the player stays at 0,0,0 while everything else moves around them.”

5 comments from Hacker News

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@lordfrikk2020 · in “Fixing Mass Effect black blobs on modern AMD CPUs”
Seconded. Outer Wilds was absolutely wonderful. The gameplay is lacking in places but after watching the making of documentary [1] my mind is still kind of blown by the technical side, even if it didn't transfer 100% smoothly to the player's experience. [1] ▶ this video
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@doppp2020 · in “The Making of Outer Wilds”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
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@mcdrake2025 · in “The Big Oops: Anatomy of a Thirty-Five-Year Mistake [video]”
Outer Wilds is a Unity game, though: ▶ this video
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@OnionBlender2023 · in “Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'”
In Outer Wilds, the player stays at 0,0,0 while everything else moves around them. ▶ this video
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@KronisLV2023 · in “E3 Has Been Canceled”
For anyone curious: Lucas Pope, Wikipedia: link > He is best known for experimental indie games, notably Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn, both of which won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize alongside other awards. Papers, Please was a really nice concept, executed well. It even inspired a few other games, like Contraband Police, which recently came out and is pretty okay (like a 3D spiritual successor, sort of). Toby Fox, Wikipedia: link > He is known for developing the role-playing video games Undertale and Deltarune for which the former garnered acclaim and he received nominations for a British Academy Game Award, three Game Awards and D.I.C.E. Awards, the latter known as the video game equivalent of the Academy Awards. Both Undertale and Deltarune didn't seem too impressive on a technical level (e.g. not going for flashy graphics like many modern titles), but the world building, the gameplay mechanics, the character writing and everything else just felt really, really nice and on point. I guess both of those devs are a good example that projects with a good concept and even better execution are still likely to be quite successful. Personally, I'd definitely also throw the Outer Wilds game on top of this pile as well: link Here's a documentary about its making: ▶ this video (spoilers) However, such success won't be likely for the majority of the developers out there, which is to be expected. Not that people shouldn't make games that they are passionate about, just that they should set their own expectations accordingly.
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