Under 3 weeks from launch; Some thoughts from a solo developer

A quick definition, because the game is named after it. Dead reckoning is how you navigate when you've lost your fix. No stars, no landmark, no signal from outside, just your last known position, your heading, and your speed. You estimate where you are from where you were. It works. It gets ships across oceans. But every hour without an outside reference, the error compounds, quietly, and you can be certain of a position that's drifted miles from the truth. I want to talk about that, because it's also what making this game solo has felt like, and I'd rather you go into launch knowing exactly what kind of ship you're boarding.

I am the entire QA department

There's no test team here. There's me, and there's a pile of scripts I wrote to test the thing I wrote. When you read that Dead Reckoning ran through thousands of simulated playthroughs hunting for events that fired at the wrong year or endings whose prose contradicted the run, that's real, and it caught hundreds of problems. I'm proud of that net. But here's the honest part: the net has holes shaped exactly like my own blind spots. A few weeks ago, two release-blocking bugs sailed straight through all that automated QA. The restart button crashed the game, and you literally couldn't select a planet on first arrival, because nothing in my test suite clicks the actual built executable. My sims tested the simulation. They never tested the button. I'd been so busy proving the math was right that I never checked whether a human could press the thing that runs the math. That's dead reckoning. The instruments all read green while the real position drifts.

You go nose-blind to your own game

This is the one that actually scares me, and it's the thing the title keeps reminding me of. When you've run your own game hundreds of times (and I have, both by hand and by script), you stop reading it. The opening lines I once agonized over a word at a time are now a wall I click through to get to the part I'm debugging. I cannot tell you anymore whether the first ten minutes are gripping or a slog, because I haven't experienced the first ten minutes in months. I've only inspected them. You lose your fix on your own work. Typos hide in plain sight because your eye fills in what it expects. A confusing screen reads as obvious because you built the mental model it assumes. A joke stops being funny on the four-hundredth pass and you can't tell if it was ever funny or if you've just worn the humor off it like a coin. The author is, eventually, the single worst-qualified person to judge whether their own game is any good. I've drifted miles from the player's position and I can't always feel it.

Which is why playtesters are worth their weight in stars

A fresh pair of eyes is the outside reference. It's the fix. It's the star you take a sighting on to find out how far you've actually drifted, and for a solo dev, getting that fix is hard. I'm not a studio with a research budget. I'm one person asking strangers to spend an evening on an unfinished thing and then tell me the unflattering truth about it. The handful who've done it have been genuinely priceless. Every one of them saw something I'd gone blind to: a research tooltip multiplying a number by a hundred, landing text that assumed you were Earth-born when your colonists were three generations into the dark, a screen I thought was self-explanatory that nobody could parse. None of that came from the thousands of automated runs. All of it came from someone playing it once, fresh, the way you will.

So if there's one thing this post is actually asking for: I need more of those sightings. The demo's on Steam right now. If you play it and something feels wrong (confusing, slow, broken, dumb), that reaction is the most valuable thing you can give me, and the Discord door is open for you to come say it to my face.

The unglamorous truth about the rest

I'll be straight about the shape of solo development, because "solo dev" gets romanticized and it shouldn't be. There is no one to hand a problem to at 1 a.m. There's no second opinion in the room. The arguments about whether a system is good happen entirely inside my own head, and some of them get loud. There are bugs I've fixed three times that came back a fourth, features I've torn out and rebuilt because the first version was quietly wrong, and whole nights lost to a single misplaced state flag. Every programming wall in this project, I walked into alone, and I had to be the one who got back up and tried the next thing.

I'm not saying that for sympathy. I'm saying it because you deserve to know that what you're about to play was made by one set of hands, with all the strangeness and rough edges and stubborn personality that implies, and none of the smoothing-over that a team provides. The seams are there. I've left the hood up on purpose this whole time so you could see them.

Launch is, itself, a colony ending

If you've played to the end, you know Dead Reckoning doesn't grade your century on a pass/fail. It reads what actually happened and sorts you onto a ladder: No Survivors, Critical Remnant, Struggling Outpost, Pyrrhic Foothold, Colony Established. A thousand people left Earth and the game just tells you, honestly, what became of them. Launching this thing is the same ramp coming down on the same uncertain ground. I genuinely don't know which ending I'm walking into. It could be a Colony Established: people find it, it lands, it means something. It could be a Pyrrhic Foothold: it gets out the door, some folks love it, but it costs me more than it gives back. It could, honestly, be No Survivors: a thing I poured years into that the world simply walks past.

And I'm landing the ship anyway.

That's the whole spirit of the game and it's the spirit I'm trying to launch in. You don't make this kind of journey because landfall is guaranteed. You make it because the alternative is never leaving orbit, and a Pyrrhic foothold on a real world still beats a perfect ship that never dares the atmosphere. So: this is a solo project. It is made with everything I've got and it is not made by a team, and both of those things will show. I've lost my fix on it more than once. I'm asking you to be the stars I navigate by from here. The ramp's coming down. Whatever's out there, I'm honored you're on the ship for it.