In September we finally did something we'd been putting off for too long: sat down and played Jitter from the first minute to the last one we have. Three times.
None of this is in the Early Access build yet - it all comes with 1.0 this year.
The home stretch
The Early Access version is the first chapter of the story, about an hour and a half long. The current build takes around six hours to play through, judging by our recordings, and we're still adding to it. On top of that, 1.0 has four more episodes, new crew members, reworked flight, docking and combat, and a lot more going on between missions.
Each playtest ended with a long list of notes. Most of it is fixed by now. One story location got rebuilt almost from scratch after the third run. We also rewrote saving, because a loaded game sometimes didn't quite match what you saved.
Pilots and gunners
The crew got actual jobs this month. Vega, the ship's AI, can keep the ship in place on her own, but long flights need a pilot: you put a marker on the map, and the ship finds its way there through tunnels and around rocks. Same with guns. A crew member standing next to a turret fires it automatically, and a better gunner hits more often. Without them, it's all on you.
Something a bit different: we built a racing prototype with up to ten AI pilots on a track. Some of them drive aggressively, some carefully. For now it lives in a separate menu, later the races will move into the main world.
Between missions
The asteroid belt got busier. There's a lost batch of drones that went haywire (a hundred of them, and an achievement if you get them all), distress signals that pull you far from home, survivors to bring back, and relays you hack by guessing a code. Some stations can also plate your hull with a rare alloy. Bullets and explosions don't get through it, lasers do.
Music, settings, performance
Each area of the belt has its own music, and fights have their own tracks. We redesigned the settings screen and added a couple of visual filters, including an old CRT monitor look. A good part of the month went into performance: big levels load faster, and the game no longer slows down after a few hours.
What's next
Fixing what the playtests found, finishing the last episodes and balancing. We're also preparing a closed playtest, details are on our Discord.
See you in the next devlog!