It's a Bug Hunt: Dead Reckoning Devlog

The three big things since cameras

1. The colony landing phase: the game keeps going after you land

For most of development, "you land" was the end of the game. Now it's a hinge. You pick a descent protocol, the CRT latches over to a warm amber palette and never goes back, there's a short storm cinematic with the hull-strain warnings scrolling past (DESCENT INITIATED → ATMOSPHERE INTERFACE → HULL STRAIN -- NOMINAL → TOUCHDOWN IMMINENT), and then the ship tabs you've stared at all game quietly retire. SHIP CONDITION / CRYO BAY / CAMERAS slide out; COLONY MAP and COLONY STATUS take their place.

The simulation doesn't stop at touchdown anymore. It keeps rolling a dedicated colony-event pool (first harvest, first dispute, the long winter, founders' passing, a memorial wall, a covenant breach) until the colony either closes out its archive or dies. The same backend resources get reframed on the ground: food becomes food stores, power becomes the generator grid, hull integrity becomes shelter. Even the ship-side event text runs through a translation pass: "the reactor" becomes "the generators," "the bridge" becomes "the council chamber," so an event written for transit still reads correctly on dirt.

2. The new star chart: a real two-layer map

The star chart used to be one flat interstellar view from year zero. Now it's two layers in one tab. From launch until you cross the heliopause (~year 11-13), you're looking at a top-down schematic of the solar system: Sun in the middle, the nine planets on compressed orbital rings, asteroid and Kuiper belts as speckled bands, your traced trajectory riding past Mars, the Belt, Jupiter, Saturn. The moment you cross the heliopause it flips, permanently, to the deep interstellar scope: real stars by spectral class, deep-sky objects, galaxy beacons at the rim, and clickable course selection when a nav window opens.

The ship is now anchored to its actual position in space instead of being welded to screen-center, so when you pan the chart, the view slides and the ship stays put out in the dark where it really is. That sounds like a small thing. It was not a small thing (see below).

3. New decisions, and the consequences that chase them

This is the connective tissue. A handful of separate threads all landed in this window:

• The founding sequence grew from 2 decisions to 6. The choices you make in the first season now actually establish a disposition for the colony.

• 14 planet-specific crisis chains (volcanic vent rotation, toxic filtration order, ice-shelter rationing, and so on), where a landing vote becomes a thing the colony remembers a hundred years later.

• You name the planet now. A first-season event lets the founders pick a name from a per-biome themed pool (Volcanic → EMBER / FORGE / CALDERA, Ice → WINTERFALL…), and that name threads through every epilogue paragraph.

• Watch Order: at the heliopause you choose long-watch, rotation, or short-watch, and it pays off in a Watch Roster coda at the end.

• Crew morale ("will to continue"), distinct from cultural regression, surfaced as CREW WILL in SHIP CONDITION, and it's the thing that actually drives why you finally decide to land.

You can see the shape of it in the star-chart shot above: that EVENTS & DIRECTIVES panel on the right (PERMIT IT / EXPAND / RECLAIM) is the new directive format, and the choices carry tagged costs that feed the same disposition the ending will read back to you.

The pixel-art endings, and the honest caveat

The settled ("100 years later") endings got a top-to-bottom rewrite, in two halves.

The prose (v3) now traces back to what you actually did: the founding disposition rides through to the closing frame, decision consequences are written in pairs (the vote at year X became the colony's shape), resource scarcity turns into culture ("the children grew up smaller than the founders intended"), and habitability stopped being a percentage in the narration: it's smell, breath, sky, and work-hours now. The sensors panel still shows you the number; the story doesn't talk like a spreadsheet.

The art is where I want to set expectations honestly. Every procedural polygon on the horizon (the triangle mesas, the cone volcanoes with circle ash-plumes, the stilt-platform rectangles) got ripped out and replaced with hand-authored pixel-art sprites: buttes with real strata bands and caprock overhangs, stratovolcanoes with glowing craters and lava streaks, tree lines, ice crystals, kelp. There's one clean shared horizon now (it used to draw a photo backdrop behind a separate procedural ground plane at a different height, which left a crooked second horizon line cutting straight through the rock formations, the infamous "line through the buttes"). And the sealed habitat domes are back, reading as a thin lit rim instead of a green haze washed across the rooftops.

Here's the caveat: this art is still being iterated, and right now it can read as mixed. Some biomes are clearly further along than others. A clean temperate settlement (above) looks the way I want; a FAILING volcanic colony at night (below) is doing a lot with a little, and the hand-drawn sprites don't always sit in the same visual register as the older pieces around them yet. I'd rather show you the in-between than quietly hold the post until it's perfect, so consider the endings a work-in-progress you're watching evolve, not a finished gallery.

Steam post image

The unglamorous half: polish, plumbing, and "it's a bug hunt"

This is the part that doesn't screenshot well but is most of the actual work. When you add a colony phase after the ship phase, and a settled ending after the colony phase, you suddenly have three discrete handovers of game state that all have to be airtight, and every one of them was a bug farm for a while.

• Alarms that wouldn't shut up. The condition-warning sirens (food/power/hull critical) own their own audio players and self-loop while a resource is in the red. They didn't know the game had ended, so on a game-over the warning siren kept re-firing through the entire "100 YEARS LATER" ending crawl. There's now a hard silence_alarms() that kills the tweens, stops both players, and latches a flag so the re-loop is a no-op, called for every ending reason (settled / failed landing / extinction / cargo cult). Quiet endings, at last. (bug-703)

• Clean state handoffs. Landing now flows through explicit latches: landing_initiated (amber CRT + descent cinematic) → colony_founded (tab swap, colony events begin) → game_over with a typed reason (settled / extinction / failed_landing). The settled-ending pipeline catches the reason and renders the right closing frame. No more state leaking across the boundary.

• FixedOther triggered endings still fire correctly through that same pipelinea catastrophic landing (90%+ loss) ends the run as a failed landing; pop hitting zero ends it as extinction; the signal/paradigm endings gate on the right conditions (the Signal ending was firing 31% too often on one path alone, that gate's fixed now).

• You can actually select a planet on first arrival again. The candidate-world buttons had a stale March label still advertising an old probe cost, and were stuck disabled waiting on a typewriter callback that never fires on that screen. (bug-698)

• The restart button stopped crashing the game (bug-697), the save format got type-safe accessors so a corrupted save can't take the loader down with it, and a name-pool shuffle that was leaking into the main RNG (and quietly breaking run-to-run determinism) got isolated.

And the honest meta-lesson from all of it: both of the release-blockers above slipped through my headless QA because nothing in my test suite clicks the actual built executable. That's the next piece of infrastructure: a scripted smoke test that drives Start → first arrival → each decision button in the real build. A bug hunt teaches you where your net has holes.

Still on the workbench

Out in the open, the things I know still need refinement:

• Ending art register isn't uniform across all ten biomes yet (above).

• A few ship-only scripted events still leak into the colony phase where the text substitution can't fully rescue them.

• The colony-phase epilogue prose is still a little generic about the years you just played on the ground.

• Watch rotation currently behaves a lot like long-watch in the numbers, and it needs an explicit forced-cycle cadence to feel distinct.

• The assets/cameras/ GLBs are heavy; a decimation + HDR-downsize pass is queued to shrink the build.

Demos are updated

Because I'd rather you see the seams than read about them: the demo builds are refreshed on both Steam (App 4602130) and itch.io, across Linux / Windows / macOS, tracking the current v0.2.x line: colony phase, new star chart, new decisions, and the in-progress pixel-art endings all included. If you hit something broken, that's genuinely useful; file it, or come yell about it in the Discord:

https://discord.gg/p2xrKcQ7nD

Next up is that real smoke test, smoothing the ending art register across biomes, and giving watch-rotation its own teeth. More soon. Hood stays up.

Garan Lorn / Selenodrome