Demo v0.2: a new opening, worlds lit by their star, and a Windows fix

First demo update since August 20, and it is a big one. Here is everything that changed.

The opening

• The game now opens on a Portia Plays studio card, then the title emerges out of black over a living star field. Any click or key skips ahead.
• First-time players skip the card and go straight into PORTIA's boot sequence.
• Boot lines animate in properly, and skipping the boot fades instead of cutting.
• Continue only appears when there is actually a save to continue.

Light

The star has always been on screen and never lit anything. Now every world, moon, and rock is shaded from where the star actually is.

• Day and night sides, city lights on the night side, limb haze, and halos all follow the star.
• Moons fall into their planet's shadow.
• A thriving world glows with an outward halo instead of hiding behind a white disc.
• Neglect is visible. Let a colony struggle and its city grid gutters, one district at a time.

Astronomy the game had and never showed

• Kirkwood gaps in the asteroid belt, and Trojan camps riding ahead of and behind Jupiter.
• Sunspots follow the real solar cycle. They start at high latitudes and march toward the equator as the star gets active.
• The viewport carries a live scale bar in astronomical units.

Feel

• Clicking the star finally feels like something. Its breathing was running dozens of times slower than intended.
• Motion no longer depends on your frame rate. Camera easing and particles behave the same at 60 Hz and 144 Hz.
• Some of you saw the view slowly wash out to gray. That is fixed. The holo grid was painting over itself frame after frame.
• Smoother overall. A lot of drawing that was redone from scratch every frame is now cached.
• The stage-up ring stays on its planet at any zoom.

Menus and dialogs

• No more operating system popups. New Game, return to title, quit without saving, and skip tutorial now ask through in-world console panels. Escape and Enter work the way you expect.
• The pause menu, settings, PORTIA's tip cards, the achievement toast, and the stats and credits buttons all share the console's bracket language now.
• Reduced motion is respected across the ambient layer, and keyboard focus is visible everywhere.

Windows

The demo is now code-signed. If Smart App Control or SmartScreen stopped it from launching on your machine, this update fixes that.

Also

• Full music credits ship with the game (MUSIC-CREDITS.txt in the install folder), and the in-game credits link to both composers.
• The version line reads Demo v0.2.

Steam Next Fest runs October 19 to 26 and Stellar Nursery will be there. If you have played the demo, a wishlist or a review helps more than you would think. Thank you for playing.