I didn't set out to make a game. I set out to expand on an idea that the game seedship planted: what would happen to a group of colonists aiming for the stars? How would they drift over time? Not a new question, but one that not many games had fleshed out.
Dead Reckoning is a colony ship simulation. The passengers are in cryo, sleeping through a voyage that spans generations. You make the system-level decisions — power allocation, resource management, who gets woken up and when. Are you the ship's intelligence? A commander operating through it? The game doesn't answer that cleanly, and that ambiguity is intentional. The distance between you and the human consequences is the whole point.
Why I built it
I work in tech. I spend a lot of time thinking about systems and knowledge architecture — how organizations store what they know and what happens when that knowledge degrades. There's something quietly terrifying about a system designed to do the right thing, operating without oversight, accumulating small errors over a long timeline. That's the game. I'd never shipped one before. Dead Reckoning started as a way to find out if I could.
Solo dev is mostly just decision fatigue
When you're the only person on a project, every decision lands on the same desk. Art direction, game feel, UI layout, save system architecture, what the font size should be on the Factions screen — all of it, all the time, with no one to sanity-check you.
The UX overhaul in v0.1.18 is a good example. The Ship Condition screen was doing too much. I knew it was wrong for weeks before I touched it — not because I didn't know how to fix it, but because fixing it meant twenty smaller decisions and I kept running out of bandwidth. When I finally split it into SYSTEMS and RESEARCH tabs, it took an afternoon. The delay wasn't technical. It was just the weight of being the only one holding the context.
What the game is missing
This is a prototype, and I've leaned on tools to move fast. The in-game writing — event text, colonist bios, the incidents that fire mid-voyage — is placeholder scaffolding. Functional, but not what the game deserves.
I'm looking for a writer to collaborate with. Small budget, revenue share on itch.io earnings. Honest caveat: we've made $6 so far. But I believe a human voice in the writing will change what the game is. If the premise interests you, reach out.
Public beta is live and free: garanlorn.itch.io/dead-reckoning