Jitter Monthly Devlog #5: Out of the Airlock

July's headline writes itself: crew members learned to leave the ship. Open the airlock, step out, and float. Here's everything that happened this month.

We wish we could let you try all of this right now - but it's coming, and it's coming this year.

Spacewalks

The big one. We built EVA this month - right-click an airlock and a crew member steps out, sealed in a personal bubble with a thruster pack.

Out in the void, they fly where you tell them, dodge around hulls on their own, and - this is the fun part - can enter any free airlock, not just yours. That means boarding a station or a derelict without docking the ship at all. Park at a safe distance, send someone over, let them open the way from the inside.

A few things to keep in mind before you push someone out the door:

• Oxygen is a timer. The bubble carries what it grabbed from the room air on the way out - leave from a depressurized deck and you'll get a "suit charged to 40%" warning. When the ring around the bubble starts pulsing red, it's time to head home.

• You need a spacesuit. Not everyone has one. Suited crew get a small marker on their portrait, and suits can be found (or confiscated) as the story unfolds.

• Hull breaches got less lethal. If someone in a suit gets sucked out through a breach, they no longer just die in the dark - the suit holds, the bubble inflates, and you get a rescue mission instead of a funeral.

Flying feels different now

We rebuilt the ship flight model from the ground up. The current system drags the ship around like it's on an invisible spring - it works, but it fights you.

The new one controls thrust and velocity, the way a real ship would. Point somewhere and the engines push you there; let go and you coast on momentum. Unwanted spin gets actively damped instead of accumulating, heavier ships genuinely feel heavier, and the ship banks slightly into turns. Docking keeps your momentum too - no more invisible brakes the moment you connect.

Draw your formations

Ordering crew around got nicer too. Hold right-click and draw a line freehand - your selected units spread out evenly along it, with a live preview of where everyone will stand. Perfect for setting up a defensive line or covering a corridor. And right-clicking another unit now sends yours to walk up beside them.

A big sound pass

Sound got a month of love. Effects became positional - things to your left sound like they're on your left, and distant events fade with distance. Impacts and collisions got proper audio, the UI got its own set of clicks and confirmations, and we cleaned up a pile of inconsistencies across the board.

Checkpoints and Continue

The campaign got episode checkpoints. Reaching key story beats saves your progress at that stage, and the main menu's Continue drops you right back in. Less "where was I", more playing.

Locked panels and hands-on work

Control panels got access rules - some devices are locked and can't be operated remotely. Your crew will have to physically walk over and work on them by hand. Combined with spacewalks, this opens up a whole flavor of mission: get aboard, reach the panel, do the job.

Ships also learned to resupply through connected panels - energy and air flow between docked structures.

Doctors earn their keep

Doctors got a proper job. Wounded crew can be treated - the doctor walks over, patches them up with a visible healing state, and earns experience for it. A healing aura means just keeping the doctor nearby helps too. Your medic is no longer the crew member you forgot you had.

Under the hood

Saving and loading big worlds got noticeably faster - we moved the heavy map data out of the main save file and trimmed the loading path. We also built an internal robot that plays the game by itself - walking the UI, running through levels, checking that things still work after every change. You won't see it, but you'll feel it as fewer regressions sneak into builds.

Story progress

Lots of campaign work this month

two mid-game missions got their full English dialogue passes, a rescue questline around one of the key characters came together, the pirate citadel got its current layout and more scenes, and the cognitite caves kept growing.

Also

new portraits, new notes to find, and a boarding event we won't spoil.

Bug fixes

Fixed this month in the dev build: repair bots getting stranded after finishing a recycling job, deleted quests coming back after save/load, weapons aiming through walls at the sector edge, a crash in dialogue text rendering, docking near the map border pushing things out of bounds, and a texture corruption bug that could scramble graphics after long sessions.

What's next

Tuning the new flight model based on feedback, giving EVA more to do out there, and pushing further into the mid-game episodes.

See you in the next devlog!