I’ve been busy on the path towards a vertical slice because Null Band Games will be exhibiting the game at the Lake George Games Expo on Sunday, July 26, 2026, at the Fort William Henry Conference Center! I hope to have everything playable on both of my Steam Decks in time. This will be the first time I have ever exhibited as my own vendor, not on behalf of someone else or showing off a non-commercial project. I’m thinking about making buttons (I already have the materials) and ordering some stickers so folks can have something tangible.

I had left off with a number of individual pieces that needed to be glued together. I’ve been heads down correcting some architectural sins that I had made, which opened the door to saving the game. You can now coherently progress:

There are a few things here; I didn’t show the new game flow (it does exist), but you start on a point, engage in a conflict, and then can experience encounters.

Ever have a conversation with a sentient factory? With YarnSpinner for GDScript, you can!

There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s take a step back.

I had the skeleton of a game, but not the connective tissue; the pieces existed, but there wasn’t a cohesive experience, a sense of moving from A to B. I’ve been working at adding persistence, which has taken some rearchitecture.

I’ve implemented working Outposts, where you can buy and sell things, repair your ship, and more. It’s been in various stages of working for almost two weeks. However, I haven’t shared it yet because “it’s not ready.”

At an Outpost, you can:

• Repair your hull
• Buy Schematics, which are permanent cross-run upgrades that allow you to craft devices
• Craft Devices from a Schematic (For a cost)
• Sell Devices (at a loss)
• Buy Devices
• Chat with the Outpost AI
• Attack the Outpost, although this is a bad idea
• Just leave

I had to make several new data types, build user interfaces, implement state machines, and write some music (my eldest daughter asked for something like Digital Circus). There’s even a little display screen in the lower-left that shows contextual text about each action. It’s not a mockup, it all works. So, why didn’t I show it off?

I worked on map generation over a month ago, then set it aside; I was spinning wheels on rendering and prioritized the conflict loop instead. It’s back and more robust.

My implementation is a directed acyclic graph; you start from the root node and have a series of choices about where you can go, eventually narrowing down to a single terminal node. Traversal works (disabling nodes you can’t visit), and since the nodes are practically buttons, I got controller navigation for free (ish).