You’re in charge of a generation ship carrying 1,000 colonists in cryo suspension. You don’t know exactly where you’re going. You won’t arrive for centuries. Your job is to keep everyone alive long enough to find somewhere worth landing.

Each year you get a report. Resources tick up or down. Events fire — some are choices, some are just things that happen to you. Factions form aboard the ship and start pulling against each other. The crew drifts — ideologically, genetically, psychologically — and the UI starts to reflect it.

There are 11 endings. Most of them are bad.

What I’m looking for:

  • How far did you get, and what killed you?
  • Did anything feel unfair vs. appropriately punishing?
  • Was there a moment where you understood what the game was actually about?

Free download, Windows/Linux. A full run is 30–60 minutes. https://garanlorn.itch.io/dead-reckoning

Any feedback appreciated. Even “It sucks”.

  • Garan LornOPEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    Ugh I thought I got the character one.

    Thank you for the feedback! Was it fun, though? Stressful? Any thoughts on gameplay?

    The bar at the top I will take care of ASAP

    • elephantium@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      Fun and stressful both! I love the tropes informing the setting. Playing through to try to get a colony going is cool.

      But the limited resources and hard decisions are stressful, too. I want my colonists to succeed! It’s hard to make that work.

      I do really want more in the gameplay. More things to do, more tweaks I can make. Some of the decisions might be nice as like policies you could tweak anytime, not just as events?

      I’m still a little unclear on the research. I’m not sure if there needs to be more help text in-game or if I just need a few more playthroughs.

      Oh, I should add - I’m playing on an older monitor, 4:3 resolution. I really appreciate when games either support that aspect ratio or have UI scaling so I’m not missing controls off the edge of the screen (yes, I know I should really replace that monitor - but it still works, and I’m loathe to just pitch it. We have too much e-waste in my country!)

      • Garan LornOPEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        Awesome stuff. Agree on the e-waste. Game should work on all screens.

        I agree on the gameplay. I’m also frustrated with the placeholder writing now. I did have two writers reach ojt, so I’m hoping at the very least I can give them some cards and start working on expanding logic.

        Unit tests went in today too, so hopefully no more surprises! Let me know if you had any ideas on what you’d like to see! I agree it needs a bit more to make it a good game. I’ll keep brainstorming.

        Thanks again for all your feedback! As this gets stale it might get lost but follow on itch and make sure to send me a message if your username is different.

        • elephantium@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          3 days ago

          Oh, I just noticed one more thing. I just got a CRYO POD FAILURE event that ends with

          The pod has been decomcallinged. The manifest has been updated.

          Is this a typo in the text file or a side effect of AI being at 84% in this run?

          • Garan LornOPEnglish
            1·
            2 days ago

            I will have to check. The AI ones were some of the first cards I wrote so I might’ve made a typo, but the UI is supposed to degrade as the game goes on. Reported and on it.

              • Garan LornOPEnglish
                1·
                2 days ago

                Well 1.26 is iterating live. Might be unstable today, but I think it’s back to working order. Busy over the weekend but next Monday I’m going to hit the ground running. People have asked for it to be on steam because of steam deck (hadn’t thought of that), so I applied today. Once there, DM me your Discord name and I’ll send you a license key.

                • elephantium@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  2·
                  2 days ago

                  From playing through again today (this time on 1.26):

                  Text is still cut off at the tops, and the ship condition view hides the “Advance Year”, etc. buttons along the bottom of the screen. The other tabs still look OK. The colonist status screen is hilariously unreadable now, partway through this journey. The ship is in pretty bad shape, highlighted by the display corruption!

                  I do have text size set to 12 px in system settings, down from 14. I haven’t noticed any difference either way.

                  I can’t figure out what the SHOW ALL button does on the ending screen.

                  I just saw the text placeholder again

                  “{they} did not make it back…”

                  I’d really like a way to speed up the text rendering.

                  First ship-born adult event comes suspiciously late. Year 43 in my current run.

                  • Garan LornOPEnglish
                    2·
                    2 days ago

                    Awesome notes. The show all should’ve been a text speed up, but Godot panels have been…difficult with me (as you can see with bugs coming back and going).

                    Going to be at it again sometime tomorrow on this. Probably early evening, but going to file on itch.io as well!