Game Development

Awesome! I donated just a single $1 this time at ItchIO, since I have already encountered generated effortless AI slop, and am very careful, and I am very sorry if it's not...

It's worth to mention that this project reminded me of Stellar Terminus (Tumblr) I am also waiting for, and now, I am looking forward for the developer and artist of this project to express their worldview in their artwork, to leave the artprint in the infinitely magnificent Universe of miracles, imagination, and purpose!

I wish the artist success, prosperity, and peace!

Is it gamepad friendly? It sounds great.

I'm loading it up on the steam deck for science

I must give this a try! The premise reminds me of Seedship, a text-based mobile game, and I'm excited to try this!

The options screen is cut off on my install of Linux. Linux Mint 22 w/ Cinnamon 1440p

v0.1.7

Thank you so, so much for the feedback!

Just pushed a patch this morning that fixes the two issues reported in this thread, plus a couple of things I caught while investigating.

Settings screen clipped on 1440p / Steam Deck max font

The panel was centre-anchored with no height constraint. On anything taller than 720p, or with a larger font, it silently overflowed off the bottom of the screen. The bottom buttons — including CHANGELOG and RESUME — were unreachable. It's now constrained to 94% of the viewport and scrolls internally. Should be fully accessible at any resolution and font size.

CPU spike and silent crash after ~10 minutes Two things, both embarrassing in retrospect. First, the status bar was rebuilding a BBCode string and pushing it to a RichTextLabel on every single frame — 3,600 parses per minute for no reason, since the values only change once per turn. Second, the event log had no size limit and just grew forever. Combined, they were enough to eventually spike the CPU and get the process killed with no error. Both are gone.

ESC in the intro now exits cleanly rather than skipping to the fade.

Thanks to @Efflixi@lemmy.world and @waterSticksToMyBalls@lemmy.world for the specific reports — they made both fixes straightforward to find. If anything else surfaces, the bug report link on the itch page goes straight to me.

v0.1.9 — Crash Fix

FINALLY!

If you hit a silent freeze or crash between years 18–24, this update is for you.

What was happening

The event log panel used a RichTextLabel with fit_content = true. That sounds innocuous, but it meant every character the typewriter animation drew triggered update_minimum_size(), which cascaded up through the entire UI tree — scroll container, events panel, main layout, all five tab panels, 200+ nodes. At 60 FPS in watch mode, that's roughly 30 full-tree layout recalculations per year. Over a 20-year run, the engine's internal message queue filled up and died with Container::_sort_children — Message queue out of memory.

A secondary culprit: the drift threshold glitch effect was calling add_theme_stylebox_override() with varying content margins, which kicked off the same cascade 8 more times per threshold event.

What was fixed

fit_content = false on the event log label. Text changes now call queue_redraw() — a cheap repaint with no layout impact. The label fills its container via size flags instead.
Glitch effect rewritten to use modulate tinting only. No style overrides, no margin changes, no cascade.
Choice button removal is now properly deferred. The previous free() call was causing signal-emission crashes during decision handling.
Message queue ceiling raised to 256MB as a secondary safety net.

Minor layout change

The decision choices panel now sits below the event log rather than scrolling inside it. Choices are always visible without scrolling — which is an improvement regardless.

Thanks to Efflixi and waterSticksToMyBalls for the reports.

Found a small bug after resuming my game. There's a placeholder tag for a character name that isn't filled in for some reason.

Dead Reckoning — Bug Report & Feedback Log

Last updated: March 18, 2026

Known Bugs

[HIGH] Text clips in "Events & Directives" column — no scroll Reported by: tomiant (Linux, windowed)

Content cuts off at the bottom of the column with no way to scroll. In at least one case this hides available encounter options, so only 2 of 3 choices are visible. Reported twice in the same session. Direct impact on decision-making — fixing this is a priority.

[MEDIUM] Mission log death count doesn't match cryo bay tab Reported by: tomiant

Mission log shows 3 deaths recorded; cryo bay tab shows 0 deceased. Figures should be consistent, or the discrepancy needs a clear explanation.

[MEDIUM] Emergency interventions can't be deselected after clicking Reported by: tomiant

Clicking an intervention to inspect it locks it as selected with no way to cancel. Players should be able to browse without committing, or there should be an explicit confirm step.

[MEDIUM] Placeholder tag visible for character name on game resume Reported by: Developer

After resuming a save, a raw placeholder token appears where a character name should be. Variable substitution likely only fires on new game init, not on load.

[LOW] Jupiter encounter triggers on year 6 at sub-light speeds Reported by: tomiant

Jupiter appears as an encounter on year 6, which doesn't track at sub-light travel — the ship would be well past the solar system by then. Likely a placeholder event with a wrong trigger year. Immersion-breaking but not a blocker.

Feedback & Design Notes

Encounter options feel too limited — Comet encounter only offers harvest or partial harvest, no option to ignore and pass. A pass option should probably always be available. May also be partially masked by the text clipping bug.

Factions tab shows critical tension from turn 1 — "Social tensions critical" fires before the player has made any decisions, and while most of the crew is in cryo. Either needs a design justification or a later trigger — risks undermining the Drift system's "invisible until it isn't" pillar.

Tutorial text repeats on every run — Instructions appear in the normal game cycle, so returning players re-read them each run. A one-time flag or skip option would help.

Music loops too quickly — Track is short enough to feel repetitive. A longer or seamlessly looping track would help with immersion. Audio/FX balance was also flagged, though the player found the volume sliders on their own.

Writing is placeholder — Flagged as AI-generated. Developer has confirmed this is known and a writer is being sought.

How to Report a Bug

Leave a comment with what you were doing, what you expected, what actually happened, and your OS / windowed or fullscreen / browser or downloaded. Every report helps — thanks for playing.

New bug in 1.24.

The very first directive I got on a new game I couldn't select anything (there were no buttons) and I simply had to quit to menu.