Hello and welcome to our campaign during which we raise funds to finish a game that has every feature necessary to fulfil dreams of a great open world, first-person perspective survival!

They wrote about us

The studio

We are a group of highly-skilled IT programmers, graphic designers and architects able to lead teams in big companies and provide best solutions to every project - but that's during office hours. At home we are a bunch of hardcore gamers playing almost everything that reacts to mouse, keyboard or pads. Now, united under Space Boat Studios we would like to present you Out of reach - the project that we are completely devoted to since the beginning of 2014 and which has the potential to provide everything that other similar productions can't!

The game

As gamers like you, we want to pay once and enjoy a game for as long as possible. That's why every idea we come up with is set to prolong the experience and avoid monotony. Here are the main points that describe our project best:

No AI or storyline can replace competing or cooperating with other real-life players so we want to create a constantly changing, varied environment available for dozens of gamers playing together in the same place at the same time.

As we establish connection between players through our servers, we put our main emphasis to protect them against cheaters and abusers that already ruined several of really promising titles. As we keep full control of the game and constantly upgrade the code, you can be sure to start your journey at the same point as others and have the same chances to rule the islands as all survivors!
 

Freedom of choices and lack of obstacles is what makes MMO-games great. In Out of reach you begin the journey as a castaway on one of the archipelago's island with worn-out shorts and sand in mouth - the rest is up to you. Apart from surviving in the wild you will need to explore the land of plains, deserts, caves and rainforests looking for food, shelter and fire. Decide whether to stay, build a home and make nature your servant or try to escape by boat to other, more friendly islands with different weather and environmental conditions. 

Items and windows

One of several functions that we wanted to include from the very beginning was a nice and neat-looking, intuitive character interface, which would be just cool to use. Variety of items of different size and usage, real-life view of characters wearing every sort of armour, player statistics determined by gear - these are the things that we love to see in games since the first RPGs and these are the things that are already implemented in Out of reach. 

Crafting, Upgrading, Salvaging in different workshops

Another big part of the character customisation and search for builds that suit players needs best are crafting and upgrading facilities. Basically every part of equipment must be firstly crafted to be then upgraded in different ways in order to improve its stats. To do so, players will have to find or build a proper workshop, which could be used only with the right ingredients and resources. All these actions make the road to obtain the best gear really bumpy but very satisfying at the end. 

If that's not enough, we currently make efforts to develop an achievement system to make gameplay even more rewarding and diverse. It's going to be fully based on the actions undertaken by the player. How good of a lumberjack, miner, hunter or assassin you are, depends only on the amount of personal devotion you commit to the task. Developing a character in specific areas allows players to use new skills - both active like 'charge' (that can completely change the style of fighting) and passive like 'trapper' which greatly improves the way one moves in the wild.

One of the most advanced features of Out of reach is our intuitive and easy to learn building system. Having gathered necessary resources such as wood, stone or flax you become able to build in just a few clicks a small shelter with bonfire for the night or a great, multi-storey stronghold along with defensive structures, a variety of workshops and separate rooms for your group.

Trying to put up with wild animals in changing environment, constantly looking for supplies and a better place to stay overnight is already hard. Doing so with other castaways in the neighbourhood is even harder. Making bad decisions and enemies can result in being hunted down even behind thick walls.
A five-level stronghold with bay windows, watch towers and double gates are great against scavengers and barbarians but what about war machines?

In Out of reach we give you an opportunity to construct fully-interactive and upgradable siege engines such as trebuchets, ballistae, battering rams or siege towers! Every single part of such constructions must be firstly put together in a war zone, loaded, aimed properly, drawn and fired.
Being combined with melee and range weapons, the ability to build structures with both defensive and offensive features makes every single battle a challenge and an event to remember!

Development stage

While typing these words, we are already doing some serious load tests on our home-based servers. Friends who agreed to be our testers are checking how every feature of the game works, homepage and changelog are being constantly updated and our team devotes yet another evening and weekend to make Out of reach alive.

A proper name of our currently developed built is probably "Pre-Alpha", but since we've all seen dozens of "early-access-pre-alpha" games on Steam that never made it even to "pre-beta" we are far from naming our project that way. We treat our potential players seriously. That is why we came out with Out of Reach, when we were sure that our game is at such stage that it won't be a waste of time for the players to read this text. We have the same approach towards Out of Reach public release. It will happen once we are sure that our product is of a good quality and ensures a great gameplay for hundreds of hours.

What you see in the first trailer and pitch video of this page is our Internal Release 1. Scenes are taken from real in-game footage and every feature of the game works exactly as shown above. Nevertheless, there's still a lot to do till our first Steam release and sadly in most cases that means spending money. Although the passion for Out of reach raises in us with every day, that's not enough to cover costs of new necessary software licences, work stations, servers and company's monthly payments.  Here is where you can step in, dear readers. If you feel like we do - that this game can provide a lot of fun for many days and months and you don't want to wait for it till the next summer, you are more than welcome to help us buy new computers, hire several great artists and pay grocery bills for those of us who can't afford quitting so called "normal jobs" to work full-time on Out of reach.

Here is how we would like to distribute the money that we get thanks to your generous contribution. As you can see, the costs of renting the servers and purchasing  most important assets are the biggest chunks of the cake. In our situation, the complete network infrastructure capable of handling first players must be ready and tested before the release of the game. That's why the most of our initial goal money is going to be spent on solid equipment that won't let you (and us!) down.

Prices of machines, licences and "pro versions" combined with their taxes are fixed and unchangeable, so the only place to look for savings is our office and remuneration. That's why we agreed to keep it at 15% which will be enough to speed up our production considerably and still keep financial assets to support the most important matter - game servers for everyone who contribute to our campaign.  

Risks & Challenges

At current stage of development we've already overcome many obstacles on our road that give us power and optimism to face any other challenge. We've built a stable foundation for a multiplayer game that is ready to take it to the next level.

Quality assurance

What we see now in the team is such a huge overload of ideas on how to extend Out of Reach that chasing after half of them would possibly absorb us too much to save any time for a quality assurance. 

We know about it very well from our own experience and we've already started to take steps to mitigate this risk by establishing priorities for new features and grouping them into "Internal Releases".

Before each "Internal Release" we focus 100% on the quality assurance until both our team and friends who test Out of Reach are convinced that we reached the goal. That's the time we start working on a new group of features and that's the way we maintain a decent pace and method of the project. 

Other ways of helping

Although every licence, program and toll costs money nowadays, they don't guarantee success by themselves. Spreading a good word about our project would be, besides contributing on Indiegogo, the best way to help us achieve our goal of making a big game to play for months!  A small yet great community that we have now, already encouraged us to push Out of Reach forward to the points we've never thought of before. We can only imagine what your feedback, comments or sharing could do.
If you like the idea of the game we presented, please visit our Website to tell us about it, share our Facebook page with your friends or vote for us on Steam Greenlight! 

FAQ

1. What distinguishes Out of Reach from other survival projects?

• In Out of Reach, you will develop your equipment step by step by the evolution from the stone age, through the bronze age and so on until medieval (at this moment we are beginning works on the bronze age, but as you could see in the trailer we already have some advanced siege weapons).
• Players that will be on a higher progress level will move to other islands chasing for resources required for further development. This will increase new players chances to survive (we have also ideas how to discourage players from returning to the first island - we will describe this feature when we start working on it).
• Fight for the fortresses with siege weapons and burning them to the ground.
• We are focused on the close combat. We do not plan to add guns.

2. When do you plan to release it and what about Early – access?

We work hard every night and weekend to make Out of Reach a great product to play for months. What we can say now is that it will come when it’s ready. To push it forward, we can only encourage you guys to contribute to our Indiegogo campaign – lack of funds for buying most necessary equipment and impossibility for some of us to quit so called “normal jobs” is currently our only obstacle.
Like most of you, we are also not satisfied with Early – access games nowadays and we probably wouldn’t decide to do that with ours.
We will do the release when it’s fully stable and playable with all the features and assets we are announcing. Then we will start to push it to the next levels by uploading great add-ons.

3. Can I join the team and be a part of the testers?

If you would like to help us test the game before it’s released you can join a group of testers after contributing to our Indiegogo campaign. We are preparing almost 1 hundred places for those who want to settle the archipelago first and point out what they want us to change.
Letting every one of you test the not finished game would make us just one of “those” producers with infamous early – access editions.

4. Why Indiegogo?

The policy of making our first game great from the beginning forces us to ask generous contributors for help with purchasing most necessary assets and servers because of the limited funds we can gather on our own. But, since that’s the only disadvantage of being an indie producer we are sure our cooperation with community will turn into a great product!

5. Will we have the option to host our own server or pay a third party to host it?

We want to ensure our players the most favourable conditions. That's why we decided that the game will be available only on the dedicated servers that will be rented and maintained by us.
Due to such an approach, we will be able to deeply analyse if and how players try to cheat. This is a first step for an implementation of improvements preventing from such activities.

6. What are you currently working on?

• Trees optimisation - it will significantly improve fps taking into account their amount.
• Extending the list of items from the stone age
• Bronze age
• Workshops (one for upgrading leather armors and another related to the bronze age)
• Swimming (It doesn't sound like great feature but it is a step forward to add a water transport)
• Burning of captured buildings (almost ready what is presented in the trailer)

7. How many gamers can play in each room on the Out of Reach server?

We did bandwidth and server cost estimations for 100 players in each room on the server. At this moment, this is the most probable number of players.
We will increase the maximum number of players when we find out it's possible.

8. Is it full loot pvp, partial loot, or no loot?

Currently, we have implemented full loot pvp model. Due to the gameplay economical issues, the only one change that we consider is introduction of slight probability for each of equipped item that it will be damaged/destroyed with a character's death.

9. What game engine do you use?

We currently run on Unity 3D 4.5 and make ourselves ready for Unity 5 Pro which is already in functional Beta. Once it’s released, we will switch to it.

10. Other languages?

Yes, we definitively plan to do the translation to other most popular languages on Steam. Nonetheless when you get to know how to play Out of Reach you won’t have to read too much ;)