Welcome back, SysAI_4.27. 

Hi everyone, we have a pretty big update to talk about today. After receiving feedback on the initial prototype build we made for the GMTK 2025 game jam, we felt like we had a strong enough core gameplay loop to continue working on the game and bring it more in line with our original vision. As a result, we've spent the roughly fifty days redesigning the codebase, fixing bugs, adding new features, and giving the game a complete visual overhaul.

Items

We've worked on a lot of things since the jam deadline, but I think the best place to start is with the item box system. We initially designed an item system during the jam with powerups and coins akin to those you find in other racing games, but ultimately ran out of time to finish testing the codebase and add the pickups into the levels. As a result, one of the first things we did was finally add the following pickup items:

• Coins: If you collect enough coins, you get a boost.
• Data Surge: This provides a speed boost on demand.
• Molecular Shift: This gives you the ability to temporarily phase through ghost variants.
• Remote Override: This ability overrides the ghost variants recorded behavior temporarily and sends them flying.
• Glitchtime: This ability disrupts the evaluation software temporarily and slows down time.

Ship Movement

During the jam, we initially ran into an issue with our custom vehicle movement code due to collision issues on small bumps. After performing some research on how to address this problem, we finally decided on redesigning the majority of the movement code to allow us to simulate a realistic suspension system for our hovering ships. This feature in particular took up a great deal of development time, but the end result feels much smoother and more dynamic than the initial approach we took during the jam, which involved sliding a box collider on the ground by applying forces and torques.

Multiple Playable Ships

One feature we are very excited to announce is the addition of several new playable ships, which were relatively straightforward to add with our new movement system. Below is a list of each playable ship:

Art & Levels

Arguably one of the biggest changes that has happened over the last month and a half has been a complete overhaul of the game's visuals. Virtually every asset has been redesigned to improve the graphical appearance of the game, and a large number of new assets have been created as well. This has allowed us to substantially improve the graphical fidelity of our existing and new levels. There are currently seven total levels in the. 

We've listed five of the levels here, and encourage you to download the game and see the other two for yourself!

Sound

Many of the game's sound effects have been reworked, and a number of new ones have been created. The game also has a new music track, and we're currently considering adding even more music to the game.

Is it Out Yet?

Yes! We have uploaded the new version of the game to Itch.io.

Final Remarks

We are also happy to announce that we will be publishing builds for both Windows and Linux going forward. We originally intended to publish a build for both platforms during the game jam, but ended up running out of time due to packaging issues.