Dead Reckoning: The Long Drift · build 23989504 · published
Pre-launch screens are on the experimental branch now, if you want to look. This is part of the roadmap announced two weeks ago, and I promised to keep things updated.
Before the crew goes into cryo, you set what the ship carries and why it left Earth — the charter, the research, the crew you wake first, the ship's fittings. It's the part I'm working on next. Fair warning: it doesn't do anything yet. You can open the screens and look around, but none of the choices are wired up. The game's still in early access, and when I started I said I'd keep posting and show the work as it happens — warts and all — so you could weigh in while things are still taking shape. This is me keeping that promise. I'd rather put it out unfinished and hear what you think than wait until it's done and find I built the wrong thing. To see it: Steam → Dead Reckoning → Properties → Betas → experimental. If you have thoughts — on the idea, the charter framing, or just how it looks — I'd like to hear them. Thanks for sticking with the in-progress version.
I'll be posting updates like this to keep the Early Access crowd involved and let them know the design decisions. I feel those who do like this game understand the kind of game I'm going for, and although I will make a final decision based on my overall vision, I do want input. If possible, I try to accommodate any playing style.
I'll be on a break from July 1st to July 5th, and I'll be off-grid so I won't be able to reply. I'll be sure to read all messages when back, but for now I thank all of you for your patience at this time; it's been an exhausting release week but I feel the ship is becoming stable.
After that, I plan on finishing up a basic pre-launch and moving on to setting up the six (6) ideology flavours and five (5) regression flavours. Very simply, here they are:
- Officer rule — the chain of command becomes the government; order over dissent, the "true crew."
- Shared rule — no hierarchy; everything pooled, the council decides together.
- Ship religion — the voyage turns sacred; the dead become ancestors, the log read as scripture.
- Engineer rule — the experts run everything; every life measured by how useful it is.
- Family rule — the crew splits into bloodline houses; berths and roles pass by descent — alliance and feud.
- Charter rule — keep faith with the original mission, to the letter, and resist any drift from it.
For regression, it's more of how they forget how to run the ship — what's left when the knowledge starts to go:
- By the manual — keep the procedure, lose the reason; the manual recited like catechism.
- Machine worship — appease what you can't repair; the reactor becomes a god.
- Hand skills — knowledge survives as craft, taught hand to hand, master to apprentice.
- Improvised repair — no theory left, only working hacks — brilliant until one isn't.
- Forbidden knowledge — rules with the reasons stripped out: "never open that hatch." Some fun society x regression combos: - Engineer rule × Machine worship — ritual technocracy
- Ship religion × Forbidden knowledge — taboo-bound theocracy
- Officer rule × By the manual — by-the-book command
- Family rule × Hand skills — hereditary craft guilds
- Shared rule × Improvised repair — make-do commune
- Charter rule × By the manual — rigid mission rule
- Officer rule × Machine worship — military theocracy
- Family rule × Forbidden knowledge — taboo-bound clans
- Ship religion × Hand skills — monastic order
- Engineer rule × Improvised repair — hand-to-mouth technocracy
- Shared rule × Forbidden knowledge — taboo-bound commune
- Charter rule × Relearning (growth) — reviving mission rule
Once these are in, it'll just be a slow process of wiring them up, reworking events to follow templates based on the above, making unique events to show each individual flavour as well as combination flavours, as well as unlocking new decisions based on the regression and ideology (like authoritarian ideology being high enough to blow dissenters out an airlock).
Anyways, it's going to be a long haul, but once those two are in, there is a solid foundation on which to build.
See you guys soon.
— Garan Lorn/Selenodrome