The Wild Outback news & patch notes

Greetings! Hope you've been having a nice 2026! Steam achievements have officially been added to The Wild Outback! More achievements will be added in the future!

The Wild Outback v1.0.6.2 is now live! This is a minor update that makes the game less frustrating to play through. It also adds some quality of life improvements. Player Changes: - Added XP Bar with levels. - Added UI showing which weapon is currently in use, with clickable buttons. - Healing from Health pickups doubled. - Scaled down Player projectile and enemy health point numbers for consistency. Certain player projectiles that were weak are now more effective while other stronger projectiles are more balanced. - Jules's throwing knives have a much lower chance of spawning lightning bolts when striking enemies. - Player lightning bolts deal far more damage. - Dust Destructor powerup now follows the player. - Removed damage bonus for Harley's Baseball and Water Gun. - Alien Robot Ally lifetime reduced to 15 seconds (Was 45 seconds). - Increased projectile speed for all of Colin's weapons. Enemy Changes: - All enemy projectile damage has been reduced for better Player survivability. - All Enemy projectiles have been slowed down. - Enemy projectile damage against other enemies has been reduced to 1. - Alien robot enemies have reduced fire rate. - Reduced powerup star spawn chance from all enemies. - Reduced Level 1 Boss movement speed and acceleration. - Level 1 Boss Lazers are far less aggressive. - Level 2 Boss is slower and fire rate reduced. - Phase Two screen graphic removed for Level 1 and 3 bosses. - Reduced Level 3 Boss movement speed and acceleration. - Level 3 Boss Lazers are far less aggressive. - Reduced Charlie Gang movement speed and acceleration. - Every Charlie Gang member now has the same max health. - 'Healthy Smite' powerup renamed to 'Thunderstorm' - Grim reaper enemy movement speed greatly reduced. Miscellaneous Changes: - The distance between the Level camera has been slightly lowered to the ground and is now consistent throughout all levels. (You can still right click to toggle wide cam) - Reduced enemy spawn rates in levels 1 - 4. - Level 2 enemy spawns stop at 4 minutes instead of 5. - Level 4 completion timer shortened to 4 minutes from 6 minutes.

Hello and Happy New Year! Here’s a small update that fixes a few oversights and increases the quality of the game experience. - All levels now have a quit to title button in the losing screen. - Changed the losing screen's big red text. - Lessened the intensity of rotating texts in the Title and Level Selection screen. - Lowered the frequency of random spooky sounds. - Mission titles no longer rotate. - Moved a couple invisible barriers in the Title screen. - In the Level Selection screen, all buttons will now disappear whenever one of them is pressed. This will prevent the player from pressing multiple level buttons before the loading screen animation, which would cause the game to unnecessarily load multiple levels in sequence. - All "Leave" buttons in levels will now take you to the Title screen instead of the Level Selection screen. This will help remove unnecessary wait time from loading if you just wanted to go back to the Title screen.

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45341879/3708dc58a80196ed0f07c43a86121daa54964be8.png LONG STORY SHORT This game started as a high school project in the Spring of 2018, with a team of three people. Later down the line, it would be worked on solo. In late 2024, a lot of polishing was done for the project to create the best possible experience. This final product has no intention of earning profit. The purpose of creating this game was to have fun with it, and to attempt at recreating the feeling of how video games used to be back in the day; an homage to a simpler time. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45341879/b42721fad30bcdea1eaf2ce153abfb4a85a41e0b.png BEGINNING OF DEVELOPMENT The game is set in the Wild West, but this game could’ve been set anywhere. As high school devs there’s a limit to what could be used when it comes to 3D assets, but luckily there were a few free Wild West assets in the asset store. The original idea was to create a tower defense game in a futuristic setting, but there were no futuristic assets we could use at the time, so we stuck with the Wild West theme, and that’s when the genre was changed to arcade top-down shooter. At the end of the Spring 2018 semester, everyone got to play with each other’s projects. The Wild Outback was an easy A, and it turned out to be one of the best projects the teacher had ever seen in the whole class. This motivated further development later on. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45341879/d1bb0c6eed319fddaa2c1c20b1d8f8cde6224c17.png POST PROJECT ERA Development on this game post 2020 was a trip to hell and back, so many things were changed, added and removed. Lots of experimentation was done in order to create simple and fun gameplay. This game is not very long, but the random, fast-paced, difficult feel of this game gives it the potential for endless replayability. This project serves as an example of the creator’s ambitions and self-improvement. Lots of testing was performed to eliminate as many bugs and glitches as possible. The game was also optimized out of necessity thanks to its chaotic nature, lagging and stuttering should never happen normally. CONTROLS This game can be played with keyboard + mouse or xbox controller. If you want smoother movement, play with an xbox controller. If you want improved cursor aim, use keyboard + mouse. During gameplay, you can switch between using keyboard + mouse and using a controller freely. CHEATS This game has cheat codes that you can type in during gameplay. Most of these cheats will give you a negative score, causing you to never be able to update your high score. Restarting a level, or switching levels gets rid of the cheats and you can update your high score again. The list of cheat codes will be displayed in a separate post. If you’re going to cheat, do it responsibly as these cheats may cause game breaking side effects, and can cause the game to crash. CONCLUSION In the end, this game was made completely just for fun. Just having this game put up on Steam is a dream come true for the creator. This is pretty much the final build of the game, and there are no plans for updates. Of course, if there are bugs and glitches that hinder the experience, they might be accounted for in small patches. Thank you very much for your time. Enjoy the game! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45341879/cce924a2df4e2be55238287cd3b23d27745e86d3.png