I just put Dead Reckoning into public beta. It’s a turn-based colony ship sim built in Godot 4, and the central mechanic is Drift — the slow, invisible erosion of your civilization’s values across generations.

You start with 1000 colonists, five resource bars, and five drift meters all sitting at 0%. By the time you arrive at a new world, those meters tell a story you didn’t mean to write.

What’s in the beta: — 20-minute runs — Five interlocking drift paths (genetic, ideological, AI takeover, generational regression, class stratification) — Terminal-aesthetic UI — no HUD outside the fiction — Ten hard-coded events to validate the decision feel — One ending that tells you what civilization you built

It’s rough. That’s intentional. Looking for people who want to play it and tell me what broke, what landed, and what civilization they ended up with.

Free to play, Windows + Linux: https://garanlorn.itch.io/dead-reckoning

#godot4 #indiedev #gamedev

  • Garan Lorn@lemmy.caOP
    1·
    23 days ago

    I played through an entire session this morning and here’s a few notes.

    The {character} placeholders are still showing on the latest version for me.
I didn’t mention it previously but it bugged me and I wanted clarification. When you get to a new system you’re presented with two planets but you can only ever choose to probe one and you can’t go back and probe the other. Once you probe one planet, you’re done. You either land on that planet or leave the system entirely. Ignoring the other planet entirely.
When you DO land on a planet none of the stats (seemingly) take into account the event where you meet up with the second ship and choose to merge with them. The directive from that event says that both ships will colonize the planet together (if you chose that route) but when you actually land, it’s not reflected at all.
The event log will show something like “22 deaths, critical must be looked into” (I don’t remember the exact wording) but you can’t do anything about it or investigate or do anything else. It’s just text. If this is just flavor text then maybe it needs to be slightly tweaked so that the player doesn’t feel like they are supposed to do something and can’t.

    On it. Will work through these today. The {character} placeholders I didn’t have time to verify. I thought a on_colonist_update() was the culprit, but it seems I was wrong.

    Will write bug report and feedback shortly.