Dead Reckoning — colony ship sim where your civilization drifts across generations [beta, free]

7 months ago by Garan Lorn to c/gamedev

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

artwork 4 points 7 months ago

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!

path: 0 22718731, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 1

budakai 8 points 7 months ago

Thank you — genuinely. A $1 donation on day one from someone who's learned to be careful about AI slop means more than a blank cheque from someone who wasn't paying attention.

Stellar Terminus is a great comparison — I've been watching that project. The terminal aesthetic and the weight of the journey are things we clearly both care about. Different approaches to similar territory.

The art in Dead Reckoning is placeholder right now; it's a combination of twitch assets and vector/python. The systems and the writing are where I'm putting the craft. When the drift mechanic starts doing what it's supposed to do, I think it'll be clear this is going somewhere. I'd love to hear what civilization you end up with after a run.

path: 0 22718731 22718820, hotness: undefined, score: 8, children: 0

budakai 3 points 7 months ago

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.

path: 0 22728788, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0

Efflixi 2 points 7 months ago

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

path: 0 22726469, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 3

Efflixi 2 points 7 months ago

After playing for about 10 minutes, it pegged my CPU and then crashed silently and completely disappeared with no errors at all.

path: 0 22726469 22726671, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 2

budakai 1 point 7 months ago

Both issues are fixed in v0.1.7, just pushed. The settings clip was a layout bug -- the panel was centre-anchored with no height constraint, so at 1440p it silently overflowed off-screen. It now scrolls and fits any resolution.

The crash was two things: a status bar update that was running on every frame at 60fps even when nothing had changed, and an event log that grew without limit across a long session. Both are gone. Should be stable through a full run now. Sorry you hit both in one sitting.

path: 0 22726469 22726671 22728726, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

budakai 1 point 7 months ago

Ugh. I found this last night as well after a couple of runs. Will investigate. My apologies.

path: 0 22726469 22726671 22728077, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

budakai 2 points 7 months ago

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.

path: 0 22741585, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 3

Efflixi 1 point 7 months 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.

path: 0 22741585 22747006, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 2

budakai 1 point 7 months 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.

path: 0 22741585 22747006 22748059, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

budakai 1 point 7 months ago

Bug Reports & Feedback — 3.19.2026

DR-01 | Bug | High

{character} placeholder text is still rendering in the latest build. Template variables aren't being substituted before display.

DR-02 | Bug | Medium

When arriving at a new system with two planets, you can only probe one — and once you do, the other is locked out permanently. You either land on the probed planet or skip the system entirely. The second planet is effectively invisible to the player with no explanation given.

DR-03 | Bug | High

The "merge with second ship" event outcome isn't reflected on the landing screen. If the player chose to colonize together, the arrival stats should account for the combined population and resources — currently they don't.

DR-04 | UX | Low

Event log entries like "22 deaths — critical, must be investigated" imply the player can take action, but there's nothing to interact with. If these are flavor/log entries, the wording should make that clear so players don't feel stuck.

Community Feedback (elephantium via Lemmy)

Agricultural collapse at year 21 felt too early given the multi-year journey out of the solar system — food security feels like it should hold longer at the start. Player noted they did spend food on early research, so it may be partly self-inflicted. Also confirmed the text cutoff bug reported by tomiant (tab-dependent in the left pane).

path: 0 22741585 22747006 22748109, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

budakai 2 points 7 months ago

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.

path: 0 22734751, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 1

Efflixi 1 point 7 months ago

Thank you so much for addressing these issues. This is a great little game and I honestly enjoying it more than I expected when it simply stopped working. I just paid you for this because most games like this are simply made in a day or two, posted on itch.io and then never thought about again. You clearly are working through this and I want to help.

path: 0 22734751 22739445, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

budakai 1 point 7 months ago

Just an update: As of 1.7 the crash bug is still there. Sucks as I've traced it back to something I implemented before being ready for playtesting. Trying to retrace my steps with my old events and weed out the bug.

Sorry everyone. I hope to get this fixed ASAP.

path: 0 22731711, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

TachyonTele 1 point 7 months ago

Is it gamepad friendly? It sounds great.

path: 0 22720715, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 3

budakai 4 points 7 months ago

You know what? I haven't even tested that. Let me find out. I did keyboard mouse but haven't had a chance to look at accessibility. I'm going to look at it tonight.

path: 0 22720715 22720903, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 0

budakai 3 points 7 months ago

Just pushed 1.6. Tried to add gamepad support. You can be the guinea pig if you like

https://garanlorn.itch.io/...

path: 0 22720715 22721366, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 1

TachyonTele 1 point 7 months ago

I will try!

path: 0 22720715 22721366 22722671, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

waterSticksToMyBalls 1 point 7 months ago

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

path: 0 22721321, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 3

budakai 2 points 7 months ago

I just pushed 1.6 - Please give feedback on the forum section, or just tell me it sucks here and I'll take it to heart hahah

https://garanlorn.itch.io/...

path: 0 22721321 22721346, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 2

waterSticksToMyBalls 1 point 7 months ago

It works great on the deck with the trackpad, I'll update after I ruin this run.

The text is a bit small and setting it to max font size cuts off the drift monitor (no scroll bar appears) and the menu gets cut off to the point were you can't see what the bottom button says (the button under credits, there may be more I can't see)

Gives scifi the king is dead vibes, digging it so far

path: 0 22721321 22721346 22722130, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 1

budakai 3 points 7 months ago

I've been learning the little ticks in Godot and the number one thing I've been struggling with is display issues. Thank you so much for the feedback. I'll try and incorporate this feedback by end of week.

path: 0 22721321 22721346 22722130 22722168, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0

GreenCrunch 1 point 7 months ago

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

path: 0 22722675, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 1

budakai 2 points 7 months ago

This was the inspiration! Was a fav of mine and I'm trying to reach back to its level.

path: 0 22722675 22723615, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0

dethedrus 1 point 7 months ago

Looks seriously interesting! I'll give it a shot tomorrow!

path: 0 22723269, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

Efflixi 1 point 7 months ago

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.

path: 0 22766107, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 2

budakai 1 point 7 months ago

Fixed in 1.26! My apologies Efflixi! I need to stop big change pushes before bed.

path: 0 22766107 22767358, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

budakai 1 point 7 months ago

Yep. I broke the game last night going to bed. Fixing it ASAP!

path: 0 22766107 22766946, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

Efflixi 1 point 7 months ago

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.

path: 0 22739565, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 3

budakai 1 point 7 months ago

Thanks again. Will add it to the laundry list. Should have a bug fix by tomorrow eve (1800) EST.

path: 0 22739565 22740065, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

Efflixi 1 point 7 months ago

In addition to this, i just got my first directive that has enough text to scroll and i can't scroll to see the rest of the text at 1440p. There's no scroll bars, mouse wheel isn't doing anything, i can't drag the text or use page up/down or arrow keys.

path: 0 22739565 22739692, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 1

budakai 1 point 7 months ago

Added. I'm sorry it wasn't scrolling. The ui panels were not my forte. Once again will have it fixed by tomorrow.

path: 0 22739565 22739692 22740774, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

budakai 1 point 7 months ago

v0.1.10 — Bug fixes, tutorial overhaul, Mac build

Thanks to everyone who filed reports and played through the early builds. This is a combined bug fix and feature update based on that feedback.

Bug fixes

Event log clipped silently. The Events & Directives column was cutting off text at the bottom with no scroll. In at least one case this hid a decision option entirely. Fixed.

Emergency interventions fired on single click. One-time-use buttons (Emergency Repair, Power Surge, etc.) committed immediately with no confirmation. They now require a second click — the button shows CONFIRM? and you click again to commit, or anything else to cancel.

Cryo Bay death count didn't match the mission log. These are different counts: the log tracks all population deaths, the Cryo Bay tracks only the 300 named colonists individually. The labels now make this clear.

Character name showed as {character} in the mission log after loading a save. Fixed.

Tutorial

The year 0 briefing is now a pre-launch checklist. It opens with your live hull/power/food readout and walks you through what to do before advancing — which research to consider, what power allocation does, what drift will cost you. First-time players get a real orientation.

The solar system events (Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) no longer have tutorial tips bolted on. Those moved to year 0 where they belong. The events are now pure narrative.

Fast Transit

Returning players can skip years 1–15 at the pre-launch screen. The skip runs all real simulation math — mortality, drift, resource decay, the asteroid belt decision, the last Earth signal — then drops you at year 15. A research reminder fires before you confirm.

macOS

Universal binary, native on Intel and Apple Silicon. Unsigned — on first launch, right-click → Open to get past Gatekeeper. Standard for itch.io games without an Apple Developer account.

path: 0 22741966, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

@lemmy.ml

login for more options

go to feed...

@lemmy.ml

login for more options

go to feed...