Outpost

Inspiration

Catan meets the flood. I wanted a hex-board strategy game you can finish one-handed on a phone in ten to fifteen minutes, where the pressure comes from the board itself rather than from an opponent. Outpost is an original game and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to CATAN or CATAN GmbH.

What it does

You drop a colony onto a procedurally generated hex world that is already dying. The blight is a spreading rot that advances a few hexes every turn, deterministically, and eats the ground under you. Suppressors only delay it. Every turn asks the same question harder: reach for richer ore, or consolidate what you can still defend? Ship your quota and you get out. Lose the landing site and the run is over. There's no turn limit, because the blight is the clock.

• Six buildings. Ore is the currency and power caps throughput, so overbuild and you'll watch something go dark.
• Seeded sectors. One seed reproduces a world exactly.
• Three charters, each a different opening rather than a strictly better one.
• Upgrades carry between runs, so even a loss moves you forward.
• A daily sector chosen by the date, so everyone plays the same ground with no account and no server.

How I built it

It's a pnpm monorepo with strict boundaries between packages:

• sim: hex grid, blight, economy and turn resolution in pure TypeScript, with no React or three.js
• render: a three.js/WebGPU sector view that owns no game logic
• economy: meta progression and entitlements
• juice: turns sim events into sound, haptics, screen shake and pops
• mobile: the Expo app, which handles UI, input, navigation and RevenueCat

Every balance number was measured, not guessed. A headless harness plays a thousand seeded runs against a reference bot, and the win rates are asserted in the test suite. That's how the blight rate, the quota curve and each charter's cost were set.

Challenges

I shipped one codebase to three stores: the App Store, Google Play and the Samsung Galaxy Store. Play and Galaxy share the same Android package, so the storefront is baked in at build time to point RevenueCat at the right store. The game also had to stay fully playable with no store at all, whether offline or with no offerings. On Galaxy foldables, the layout adapts to Flex (laptop) mode: the board sits on the top half and the controls on the bottom.

What's next

New sector types and levels, plus user-generated content so players can build and share their own sectors.

Built With

• expo.io
• pnpm
• react-native
• revenuecat
• three.js
• typescript
• webgpu