Week 15 — Getting to Know Your Passengers

The passenger logbook now remembers who has boarded your ship and reveals their food preferences as they eat.

What changed

• A little less guesswork at dinner. Passengers start as unknown faces in the logbook. Once they board, you can see their name and portrait, and serving meals reveals their preferences as star ratings. Those discoveries stay available between trips, helping you decide what to keep cooking for returning guests.
• Familiar faces on any journey. Jellyfer, Barrba, and Paul can now appear on short, average, or long trips. Choosing a trip length no longer rules out particular passengers, so even a quick journey can bring a different combination of personalities aboard.
• Messages you can revisit. A new message history window lets you catch up on recent messages after they leave the screen. The upper menu brings the ship controls, message history, and passenger logbook together, with tooltips to help you find your way around.
• A clearer view of the ship. Doors are now translucent, messages are easier to read, and upgraded sofas, dining tables, and bunk beds have their own appearance. Facility upgrades also arrive with a puff of smoke, giving those purchases a visible finishing touch.
• More help and a fuller soundtrack. Optional tutorial messages offer camera guidance and low-budget warnings. Music now has its own volume control, and the playlist shuffles for new sessions. The ship also has power-up and power-down sounds, while fixes keep Paul’s panic from interrupting the background music incorrectly.

Behind the scenes

The second playtest happened last Saturday, after I had already published the previous devlog. That means last week’s entry missed it by a few hours!

This week continued the work of turning playtest feedback into improvements, alongside the new logbook and presentation updates. There was no particular standout gameplay moment to share this time; most of the progress was in making the everyday business of running the ship easier to follow.

Next week

• Finish the remaining fixes from the playtests.
• Prepare to release Space Liner 77 on itch.io on Friday, October 23.