Garan Lorn
Solo dev and content engineer based in Montreal.
Building Dead Reckoning — a generation ship sim where you make system-level decisions for a crew that’s been asleep for decades. In development in Godot, available in public beta on itch.io.
Day job is knowledge architecture and documentation systems. Nights are spaceships.
Sci-fi reader. Linux user. Interested in the overlap between how systems store knowledge and how games tell stories. garanlorn.itch.io/dead-reckoning
- 18 Posts
- 48 Comments
Garan Lorn@lemmy.caOPtoGamedev@lemmy.world•I've been building a generation ship sim as a solo developer. Here's what that's actually been like.English
1·3 months agoAwesome stuff! I’ll definitely add it. Difficulty will be one thing that will have to be fleshed out before release. Thanks for the feedback!
Garan Lorn@lemmy.caOPto
Indie Gaming@lemmy.world•Dead Reckoning — Free colony ship sim, looking for feedbackEnglish
2·3 months agoAwesome notes. The show all should’ve been a text speed up, but Godot panels have been…difficult with me (as you can see with bugs coming back and going).
Going to be at it again sometime tomorrow on this. Probably early evening, but going to file on itch.io as well!
Garan Lorn@lemmy.caOPto
Indie Gaming@lemmy.world•Dead Reckoning — Free colony ship sim, looking for feedbackEnglish
3·3 months agoThank you, thank you, thank you! This is the gameplay data I needed! Incoroprating all of this. Putting it on the itch profile so I don’t lose track of it! Thank you so much.
Garan Lorn@lemmy.caOPto
Indie Gaming@lemmy.world•Dead Reckoning — Free colony ship sim, looking for feedbackEnglish
1·3 months agoWell 1.26 is iterating live. Might be unstable today, but I think it’s back to working order. Busy over the weekend but next Monday I’m going to hit the ground running. People have asked for it to be on steam because of steam deck (hadn’t thought of that), so I applied today. Once there, DM me your Discord name and I’ll send you a license key.
Garan Lorn@lemmy.caOPtoGame Development@lemmy.ml•Dead Reckoning — colony ship sim where your civilization drifts across generations [beta, free]
1·3 months agoFixed in 1.26! My apologies Efflixi! I need to stop big change pushes before bed.
Garan Lorn@lemmy.caOPto
Indie Gaming@lemmy.world•Dead Reckoning — Free colony ship sim, looking for feedbackEnglish
1·3 months agoI will have to check. The AI ones were some of the first cards I wrote so I might’ve made a typo, but the UI is supposed to degrade as the game goes on. Reported and on it.
Garan Lorn@lemmy.caOPto
Indie Gaming@lemmy.world•Dead Reckoning — Free colony ship sim, looking for feedbackEnglish
1·3 months agoI would be totally down! Send me a DM and any samples! The bar to help is low, so if you want to be involved I’d be happy to involve you!
Garan Lorn@lemmy.caOPtoGame Development@lemmy.ml•Dead Reckoning — colony ship sim where your civilization drifts across generations [beta, free]
1·3 months agoYep. I broke the game last night going to bed. Fixing it ASAP!
Garan Lorn@lemmy.caOPto
Indie Gaming@lemmy.world•Dead Reckoning — Free colony ship sim, looking for feedbackEnglish
1·3 months agoAwesome stuff. Agree on the e-waste. Game should work on all screens.
I agree on the gameplay. I’m also frustrated with the placeholder writing now. I did have two writers reach ojt, so I’m hoping at the very least I can give them some cards and start working on expanding logic.
Unit tests went in today too, so hopefully no more surprises! Let me know if you had any ideas on what you’d like to see! I agree it needs a bit more to make it a good game. I’ll keep brainstorming.
Thanks again for all your feedback! As this gets stale it might get lost but follow on itch and make sure to send me a message if your username is different.
Garan Lorn@lemmy.caOPto
Indie Gaming@lemmy.world•Dead Reckoning — Free colony ship sim, looking for feedbackEnglish
1·3 months agoUgh I thought I got the character one.
Thank you for the feedback! Was it fun, though? Stressful? Any thoughts on gameplay?
The bar at the top I will take care of ASAP
Garan Lorn@lemmy.caOPtoGamedev@lemmy.world•I've been building a generation ship sim as a solo developer. Here's what that's actually been like.English
2·3 months agoOh for sure. For any new systems I’m going to make sure I have the coverage. Any tips for QA as a solo Dev?
Garan Lorn@lemmy.caOPtoGamedev@lemmy.world•I've been building a generation ship sim as a solo developer. Here's what that's actually been like.English
2·3 months agoAs a shoutout I also highly recommend playing Seedship on mobile to see the inspiration!
Garan Lorn@lemmy.caOPtoGamedev@lemmy.world•I've been building a generation ship sim as a solo developer. Here's what that's actually been like.English
1·3 months agoThank you! Please feel free to leave any feedback!
Garan Lorn@lemmy.caOPtoGamedev@lemmy.world•I've been building a generation ship sim as a solo developer. Here's what that's actually been like.English
2·3 months agoYes. Also I’m learning to get one system down pat before expanding elsewhere. Right now I know the star chart is too linear, but I need to do a flow chart to make sure that it doesn’t break anything else. For example — I added coloinist genders and search and it ended up making a game-breaking bug 15 min after I released. I stubbornly searched for 12 hours before finding the culprit and not rolling it back because I was stubborn — a good lesson.
Garan Lorn@lemmy.caOPtoGamedev@lemmy.world•I've been building a generation ship sim as a solo developer. Here's what that's actually been like.English
2·3 months agoYes there is! https://garanlorn.itch.io/dead-reckoning Any comments there will be read and included in the next bug report/update. I also track names so feel free to post or send a DM as well. I hope to reward playtesters at the end of all this.
Garan Lorn@lemmy.caOPtoGame Development@lemmy.ml•Dead Reckoning — colony ship sim where your civilization drifts across generations [beta, free]
1·3 months agoBug Reports & Feedback — 3.19.2026
DR-01 | Bug | High
{character} placeholder text is still rendering in the latest build. Template variables aren’t being substituted before display.
DR-02 | Bug | Medium
When arriving at a new system with two planets, you can only probe one — and once you do, the other is locked out permanently. You either land on the probed planet or skip the system entirely. The second planet is effectively invisible to the player with no explanation given.
DR-03 | Bug | High
The “merge with second ship” event outcome isn’t reflected on the landing screen. If the player chose to colonize together, the arrival stats should account for the combined population and resources — currently they don’t.
DR-04 | UX | Low
Event log entries like “22 deaths — critical, must be investigated” imply the player can take action, but there’s nothing to interact with. If these are flavor/log entries, the wording should make that clear so players don’t feel stuck.
Community Feedback (elephantium via Lemmy)
Agricultural collapse at year 21 felt too early given the multi-year journey out of the solar system — food security feels like it should hold longer at the start. Player noted they did spend food on early research, so it may be partly self-inflicted. Also confirmed the text cutoff bug reported by tomiant (tab-dependent in the left pane).
Garan Lorn@lemmy.caOPto
Indie Gaming@lemmy.world•Dead Reckoning — Free colony ship sim, looking for feedbackEnglish
1·3 months agoAwesome stuff. Have incorporated feedback here:
Bug Reports & Feedback — 3.19.2026 DR-01 | Bug | High {character} placeholder text is still rendering in the latest build. Template variables aren’t being substituted before display. DR-02 | Bug | Medium When arriving at a new system with two planets, you can only probe one — and once you do, the other is locked out permanently. You either land on the probed planet or skip the system entirely. The second planet is effectively invisible to the player with no explanation given. DR-03 | Bug | High The “merge with second ship” event outcome isn’t reflected on the landing screen. If the player chose to colonize together, the arrival stats should account for the combined population and resources — currently they don’t. DR-04 | UX | Low Event log entries like “22 deaths — critical, must be investigated” imply the player can take action, but there’s nothing to interact with. If these are flavor/log entries, the wording should make that clear so players don’t feel stuck.
Community Feedback (elephantium via Lemmy) Agricultural collapse at year 21 felt too early given the multi-year journey out of the solar system — food security feels like it should hold longer at the start. Player noted they did spend food on early research, so it may be partly self-inflicted. Also confirmed the text cutoff bug reported by tomiant (tab-dependent in the left pane).
Garan Lorn@lemmy.caOPtoGame Development@lemmy.ml•Dead Reckoning — colony ship sim where your civilization drifts across generations [beta, free]
1·3 months agoI played through an entire session this morning and here’s a few notes.
The {character} placeholders are still showing on the latest version for me. I didn’t mention it previously but it bugged me and I wanted clarification. When you get to a new system you’re presented with two planets but you can only ever choose to probe one and you can’t go back and probe the other. Once you probe one planet, you’re done. You either land on that planet or leave the system entirely. Ignoring the other planet entirely. When you DO land on a planet none of the stats (seemingly) take into account the event where you meet up with the second ship and choose to merge with them. The directive from that event says that both ships will colonize the planet together (if you chose that route) but when you actually land, it’s not reflected at all. The event log will show something like “22 deaths, critical must be looked into” (I don’t remember the exact wording) but you can’t do anything about it or investigate or do anything else. It’s just text. If this is just flavor text then maybe it needs to be slightly tweaked so that the player doesn’t feel like they are supposed to do something and can’t.On it. Will work through these today. The {character} placeholders I didn’t have time to verify. I thought a on_colonist_update() was the culprit, but it seems I was wrong.
Will write bug report and feedback shortly.
Garan Lorn@lemmy.cato
PC Gaming@lemmy.ca•Developers Were Left in the Dark About DLSS 5English
9·3 months agoWhat a bone-headed move. I guess we’re in the “Benevolent dictator” portion of the AI Boom - Gaming relationship. I feel like we’re at such a disconnect now that gamers are looking elsewhere.
Hot take: I think these decisions will drive gamers back to simplicity, community, and y’know…gameplay rather than flash and boom.
It’s no surprise that smaller studios are profiting while the big ones are languishing.
Then again people keep buying NHL, NFL, and FIFA 26, so what do I know.















Thanks! That’s exactly what I was going for. It’s a big loveletter to movies and games of the late 80s/early 90s.