Devlog
How The Outer Line gets built. Design decisions, trade-offs, honest progress updates, and the occasional mistake.
Every Ship Counts
Why The Outer Line keeps fleets small on purpose
There's a moment in most space RTS games where your fleet hits a certain size and the individual ships stop mattering. You've got a hundred and fifty units selected, you right-clic...
The Ship That Builds Ships
Your base is a capital ship, and that changes everything
In most RTS games, your base is a building. You put it down, you produce stuff from it, and if the situation gets bad you build another one somewhere else. In The Outer Line, your...
Between the Stars
Every jump is a bet
The distance between two Gravity Wells is a decision, not a number. Your ships travel between Gravity Wells using the Jump Drive. It's not a warp button. It's a process with three...
Hit Them Where It Hurts
How hardpoint targeting turns every battle into a puzzle
In most space RTS games, you kill enemy ships by shooting them until their health bar reaches zero. You focus fire, you burn them down, you move on. It works, but it always felt fl...
The Pause That Wins Wars
Why a real-time strategy game lets you stop time
This is probably the most polarizing design decision in the game. The Outer Line is a real-time strategy game with a pause button. It's not a slow-motion mode, not a speed toggle....
Three Flags, One Frontier
Three factions, three ways to lose a Destroyer
Three factions. Three ways to build a fleet. None of them is wrong. One of the first things I decided about The Outer Line is that I didn't want a villain faction. No "evil empire...
Feeding the Fleet
One resource, zero excuses
Your fleet costs more than your economy can sustain. That's the point. The Outer Line has one resource: Supply. You earn it from asteroids. You spend it on ships, structures, modu...
Power Management
Every ship has a reactor. It's never big enough.
Here's the thing about giving every ship multiple abilities: if they can all be active at once, they will be. And then there's no decision, just buttons you press on cooldown. I ne...
Evasive Maneuvers
Eleven abilities, four per ship, never enough energy for all of them
Every ship in The Outer Line has four abilities. I talked about the energy pool in the last devlog, how the reactor forces you to pick and choose. This time I want to talk about th...
The Pause That Wins Wars
Decisions, not reflexes
In the middle of a firefight, you hit spacebar. Everything stops. Every ship, every projectile, every charging Jump Drive. Now think. The Outer Line is a real-time strategy game w...
Teaching Machines to Fight
The AI plays by the same rules you do
The AI doesn't cheat. It scouts, it plans, it panics when you destroy its supply line. That sentence is the design goal. Whether I've fully achieved it is a longer conversation....
Your Shipyard, Your Rules
The most important ship in your fleet doesn't have guns
The Mobile Shipyard is the single most important thing you own. It builds your ships. It defines what your fleet can do. It's a capital ship that moves with you across the map, jum...
Gravity Wells
Islands in the dark
The map is not a flat grid. It's a network of islands in the dark. Every match in The Outer Line takes place across a cluster of Gravity Wells, circular zones around planets, dwar...
One Map To Rule Them All
The war is fought in Gravity Wells
The Outer Line takes place on the frontier of human space. A cluster of Gravity Wells, each one a circular zone around a planet or celestial body, separated by vast stretches of em...
Building an Empire
One slot, three paths, no going back
Every Gravity Well asks you the same question: what do you need here? Taking a Gravity Well is the easy part. A fleet jumps in, clears out resistance, and for a moment the space i...
Jump
Every jump is a decision you can't take back
In the last devlog I talked about Gravity Wells, the zones where everything happens. This one is about the thing that connects them: the Jump Drive. The Jump Drive is how your shi...
Building an Empire
What you build matters. Where you build it matters more.
Taking a Gravity Well is the easy part. A fleet jumps in, clears out whatever resistance is there, and for a moment the space is yours. But empty space doesn't win wars. What you d...
The Fog Between Stars
What you don't know will get your fleet killed
You're staring at the map. Three Gravity Wells under your control, two more visible through Listening Posts, and the rest is grey. Somewhere in that grey space, the enemy has a fle...
Feeding the Fleet
One resource. That's it.
Most RTS games have multiple resources. Credits, metal, crystal, energy, food, influence, research points. You juggle them, optimize conversion rates between them, and eventually y...
Choose Your Ground
Every Gravity Well gets an identity. You pick which one.
You take a Gravity Well. You clear it out, plant Supply Nodes on the asteroids, set up a Listening Post on the rim. And then comes the question that defines everything that happens...
Holding the Line
Not every structure shoots back. That's the point.
How do you defend a Gravity Well? It's a question I've been circling for a while. In previous devlogs I talked about the Major Structure Slot and how every Gravity Well becomes a...