DEVLOG #1: First Steam public playtest!

What we’ve been cooking

Since the “Lift off” update back in August, we’ve been gathering some amazing feedback, bug reports, and saw players find some truly creative ways to break our physics.

We honestly are incredibly grateful to receive such levels of engagement from our currently small, but dedicated, community!

We’ve been hard at work crafting the upcoming update, with which the vision of what we want this game to be becomes much more real:

• Player-controlled characters (we call them "Junkonauts") and EVA

• Player-owned agencies, bases, and outposts

• Pressurizable habitats and cabins

• Life support and survival

• Looting, crafting and building

• Resource production

• Game saving and loading

• New soundtrack and sound effects

• Mod support. The base game is a mod itself now. More to come (from you, hopefully)!

• Settings screen for configuring input, video, audio and mods

• Redesigned main menu, in-game UI, and logo

• ... lots of bugs fixed (and new bugs added for fixing later)

That’s a lot. And we decided we can’t keep (creep?) features anymore, and must get them out to the players. Raw, buggy, unbalanced, sure.

But if we want to shape the game into something that you, players, would genuinely enjoy, we’ve got to include you in the feedback loop.

That’s why we codenamed this version MaxQ. For our game it is truly a pivotal moment, in which we’ll stress test the very foundational ideas and vision.

For this, we need to expand the player reach and gather as much feedback as possible.

Junkyard Space Agency playtests land on Steam!

We learned our lesson to avoid staying in our Discord cave for half a year before getting the stuff out to the players. From now on, update cycles will be much shorter, promise.

So after a few thousand hours of development, fixes and tweaks, we’re excited to announce the first public playtest of Junkyard Space Agency, here on Steam!

We'll be giving access to the builds starting from this Sunday, February 8th!

• You can Request Access on game’s Steam page.

• There will be a limited number of keys, hurry up!

• Join the live Discord event on Sunday, Feb 8, 17:00 UTC!

• Follow the game on Steam to get notified about this and future playtests.

What we’re going to playtest?

In this first round we’ll focus on the surviving, crafting, and production mechanics, for which we created a special scenario.

You start crash-landed near an abandoned outpost, with just 15 minutes of oxygen reserve. Your goal is to survive, and eventually make it into orbit. For that, you’ll need ingenuity, basic physics knowledge, and intuition. And if you make it into space, well, there’s Newton to fight.

Here's a teaser to wet your appetite:

Some "disclaimers" worth mentioning:

• This is a development build. Things will break. Ships will explode. Krakens will tear the fabric of space-time and catch you. That’s exactly why we need your involvement and feedback.

• Some functionality is disabled for this particular playtest, like multiplayer and player agencies creation. Don’t worry, we’ll get to them in the playtests to follow, stay tuned!

• Pro-tip: Save the game often, now that we have this feature! And there are non-zero crash chances too...

Thank you!

We cannot be any more grateful to everyone who played, tested, or followed the project.

Thank you.

If you want to help shape Junkyard Space Agency, play the game, share feedback, report bugs, or rendezvous in our Discord just to say “hi”!

— Ivan & Marta