Stellar Nursery

The clearest thing people told us about the demo was that there was too much on screen too early. A station console, a tape deck, a puzzle shelf and a panel of systems, all at once, before you had lit anything. So the demo has been rebuilt around the first hour. THE DEMO, UPDATED TODAYAll of this is playable right now, free. The console introduces itself one piece at a timeA new save no longer opens with every system out. Each one arrives the first time it means something. The radio turns up when you take Venus, so it appears once there is a reason for one. Station Systems appear the first time something is falling toward a world you own. The tone strip appears when you have tones worth trying. The desk toys, the piano and the rest, wait until your first star has died. You still end up with the whole console. You just are not handed it in the first minute. A save with real progress on it skips all of this and shows everything at once, as before. It looks betterSharp rendering on high resolution displays. On a Retina or 4K screen the star, the worlds and every label are properly crisp instead of softly upscaled. An all new title screen. Every piece of it is the game rendering itself: that is the real star, its real beam array and the real star field behind it, not a painting of them. Shooting stars have real trails now, tapering and fading behind the head, instead of white lines drawn on the glass. Captions and small text raised to a genuine contrast ratio throughout, so the quiet text is still readable. The tone strip along the bottom recolors the entire console, and the Settings panel finally matches the rest of the interface. The recovered photographs in PORTIA's notebook were redrawn. And it runs twice as fastOn the Windows laptop we test on, the demo went from 30 frames per second to 60. Not a tweak, a doubling, and you do not have to turn anything on to get it.A reduced effects mode on top of that, for anyone on integrated graphics who wants more headroom still...

Two days after the big one, a patch. Most of it came from watching people play the last build. Mac players: please try again If you played the demo on a Mac through Steam this past week, it ran at about 20 frames per second, and that was our bug, not your machine. The Steam overlay helper we ship for Windows was also running on Mac, where the overlay has never worked, and it was costing more than half the frame rate. It is off on Mac now. On the same MacBook the demo went from 22 fps to 165. If it felt sluggish before, it will not now. The opening The game starts in fullscreen on first launch. Leaving fullscreen is remembered. The tutorial no longer snaps from step to step. Cards dim and fade between steps, the check mark holds a beat, and panels open a moment after the card that introduces them. When the tutorial ends, PORTIA names your next world and its price instead of going quiet. Buying Venus points you at Earth. Buying Earth points you at Seed Life. The tutorial explains that stars drifting into the Sun feed it, and that catching them yourself pays more. It used to teach you to click the Sun and leave it at that. The beam step says how long to hold, shows a charge ring at your cursor that turns gold when a release will fire, and its asteroid now spawns where you can see it on smaller screens. Also The color question and both Reignite prompts share the title screen's corner brackets. Windows: the overlay now runs without a forced full repaint every frame. On integrated graphics it made little difference, so if the demo runs in the 30s on a low-end laptop, that is the machine, and a reduced-effects option is on the list for launch. Windows builds are code-signed and Mac builds are notarized, so neither platform should warn you about the download anymore. Thank you to everyone who has played and to the two people who told us the opening felt like whiplash. It did. Steam Next Fest is October 19 to 26.

First demo update since August 20, and it is a big one. Here is everything that changed. The opening The game now opens on a Portia Plays studio card, then the title emerges out of black over a living star field. Any click or key skips ahead. First-time players skip the card and go straight into PORTIA's boot sequence. Boot lines animate in properly, and skipping the boot fades instead of cutting. Continue only appears when there is actually a save to continue. Light The star has always been on screen and never lit anything. Now every world, moon, and rock is shaded from where the star actually is. Day and night sides, city lights on the night side, limb haze, and halos all follow the star. Moons fall into their planet's shadow. A thriving world glows with an outward halo instead of hiding behind a white disc. Neglect is visible. Let a colony struggle and its city grid gutters, one district at a time. Astronomy the game had and never showed Kirkwood gaps in the asteroid belt, and Trojan camps riding ahead of and behind Jupiter. Sunspots follow the real solar cycle. They start at high latitudes and march toward the equator as the star gets active. The viewport carries a live scale bar in astronomical units. Feel Clicking the star finally feels like something. Its breathing was running dozens of times slower than intended. Motion no longer depends on your frame rate. Camera easing and particles behave the same at 60 Hz and 144 Hz. Some of you saw the view slowly wash out to gray. That is fixed. The holo grid was painting over itself frame after frame. Smoother overall. A lot of drawing that was redone from scratch every frame is now cached. The stage-up ring stays on its planet at any zoom. Menus and dialogs No more operating system popups. New Game, return to title, quit without saving, and skip tutorial now ask through in-world console panels. Escape and Enter work the way you expect. The pause menu, settings, PORTIA's tip cards, the achievement toast, and the stats...