From the jump, Outer Wilds already had so many of the core fundamentals in place that make the game unique. The time loop was always designed to be around 20 minutes, and the player was always meant to slowly discover information about an ancient race as they explored. Even something as small as the telescope existed in much the same way as it does today, including the ability to hone in on certain sounds.

Fascinatingly, many of the planets were already conceived of in 2012. The above video features the Hourglass Twins, Brittle Hollow & Hollow’s Lantern, Giants Deep - there's even a small glimpse of the White/Black Hole at 3:38 to 3:41.

“The loose idea for each planet was actually created before we knew the story beats,” Alex mentions. “It was a puzzle of inventing a history for an existing physical environment. For example, we decided the Nomai should crash in Dark Bramble because that just seemed like the best place for them to crash!”

Outer Wilds was very much a game of systems before it became the Big Idea narrative it holds today, though the fundamentals were in place quite early in the process. “The major story beats were mostly decided in 2012 and 2013 (Nomai arrive and crash, escape pods are launched, quantum moon discovered, orbital probe cannon and ash twin project designed, comet arrives, etc...), but a LOT of specifics were worked out later (like the Quantum Moon being the Eye's moon or the Nomai using warp cores to recreate time travel).”

While the ideas of the planets were in place very early, the more detailed clockwork design of the planets was built to suit the story Outer Wilds wants to tell. “Even though we started out by fitting the story around the planet design, the pendulum definitely swung the other way when it came to specific level design (e.g. the Hanging City was totally redesigned after the Alpha based on the story beats you find there in the final game). And of course the Nomai tone and characters didn’t exist until our writer started fleshing them out over the last four years. Not that a lot of ideas weren’t there early, but it took a lot of talented people to polish them into something actually worth playing.”

Mechanically, frictionless "Newtonian physics" modeled space flight was already built in to the game, with gravity and speed relativity already locked down. The ship’s landing camera and the players jetpack had already been prototyped.

The game’s style always had an extremely strong foundation in its concept art; from the alpine village look of Timber Hearth, to the Interploper comet and it’s frozen exterior, the entwined nature of the hourglass twins - even the islands and colours of Giant’s Deep.

Some things were similar, with ideas being tweaked to better fit the story Outer Wilds tells. As Alex mentioned in the pitch, the probe firing at the beginning of the time loop always existed - though it originally was crashing to the surface of your planet, rather than firing off into space as it does in the final build.

The demo also hints at the idea of some pieces of the environment being context sensitive in their activation - for example, a crystal on a wall needed to be activated by sunlight, which would only happen after parts of Brittle Hollow had been hit by meteors. The idea seemed intriguing, but when asked Alex laughed and noted that it was a little smoke and mirrors for the occasion.

“That crystal mechanic was a complete hail Mary for that particular presentation. We needed something to show that was time-based so we were like "uh, what if you have to wait for sunlight to hit this crystal?" There were never plans to make that a major mechanic.”