The Last Voyage of the SS Aurelia

The Last Voyage of the SS Aurelia launches on May 18.Today (May 16, Beijing time), we completed the final major update before release:🎭 Full audit of the testimony system✨ UI polish across the board📖 Final pass on narrative logic⚙️ Complete migration to Engine V8 (Dual LLM architecture)1936. The North Atlantic, shrouded in fog.Five suspects aboard the SS Aurelia.Each hiding something — only you can uncover the truth.Departing May 18.— Rungen Studio

The refactor.The original engine was a single 1500-line file. It worked — but adding anything new was getting risky. One change in the wrong place could break something three characters away.The new architecture splits it into 21 focused modules. Scoring, evidence detection, banned-word filtering, phase transitions — each lives in its own file, with its own tests. The new engine passes 87 behavioral tests from the old system, plus 250 new ones written during the refactor.The old engine stays untouched on a separate branch. If anything breaks, rollback is instant.The part you'll actually feel.Currently, each turn makes one LLM call — the character performs and scores your reasoning in the same response. That creates a 2–3 second wait before anything appears.The new system splits this into two parallel calls. The character streams their response immediately — you see them "typing" in real time. The scoring happens in the background while you read.Perceived wait time: from ~3 seconds to ~1.5 seconds.What happens next.The moment review clears, the game launches. The engine update follows shortly after — days, not weeks.This is Dev Log #2. More when there's something worth saying.

Distance to launch: a few days. Time to write the first dev log.---The bug that cost me 11 days.Steam review rejected my build three times. The error: "game won't launch." But on my own machine, everything worked perfectly.After a lot of digging, I found the culprit — one line of code: ticketObj.cancel()Steam needs a ticket to verify your identity. The AI wrote this line out of habit — "free resources after use." But canceling a Steam ticket doesn't free memory. It tells Steam's servers: this ticket is void. The server then tried to verify a cancelled ticket. Of course it failed.I had been testing successfully because a cached login token from 30 days ago was still valid. I had never actually gone through the verification step.One line. 11 days. 4 review submissions.---Evidence panel overhaul.The panel that shows collected evidence got a full redesign — Art Deco style to match the 1936 ocean liner setting.The most important change: each evidence card now shows the exact words the NPC used when they revealed it. Before, the panel might say one thing while the NPC said something slightly different. Now they always match.---This is Dev Log #1. More to come before launch.