Under 3 weeks from launch; Some thoughts from a solo developer — Dead Reckoning: The Long Drift Steam update #93260

A quick definition, because the game is named after it. Dead reckoning is how you navigate when you've lost your fix. No stars, no landmark, no signal from outside, just your last known position, your heading, and your speed. You estimate where you are from where you were. It works. It gets ships across oceans. But every hour without an outside reference, the error compounds, quietly, and you can be certain of a position that's drifted miles from the truth. I want to talk about that, because it's also what making this game solo has felt like, and I'd rather you go into launch knowing exactly what kind of ship you're boarding. I am the entire QA department There's no test team here. There's me, and there's a pile of scripts I wrote to test the thing I wrote. When you read that Dead Reckoning ran through thousands of simulated playthroughs hunting for events that fired at the wrong year or...