Wow, thank you! I had no idea it had such enduring appeal. You may have spent more time playing the game than I did writing it!
John Ayliff
Creator of
Recent community posts
1. Yes, the PC version is the same as the iOS version so should be equally blind accessible.
2. Unfortunately there's no way to sell an iOS app from itch.io or for itch.io to know that you've bought it from the App Store, so yes you'd have to buy it again.
3. There's no required typing. You can optionally rename your spaceship and explorers, and that involves typing in a new name, but if you choose not to do this then there's no typing.
Sorry to keep asking questions, I'm having trouble tracking this down.
Have you adjusted the zoom level in the game settings? (Or, do you have anything on your phone that increases the text size in apps?) If you go to settings and reduce the zoom, do the icons appear?
If you turn the phone sideways, does the game go into landscape mode? If so, do the icons appear then?
Every game, there are 6-8 randomly generated interstellar civilisations (including the Gatebuilders), plus a large number of non-interstellar civilisations. When you first encounter signs of an interstellar civilisation, your explorers will give it a nickname based on what they know about it at that point, from about 100 possible nicknames.
There's no way to adjust the difficulty I'm afraid. It's meant to be difficult at first and then to get easier as you master it.
There's also no way to erase records from inside the game. You could try uninstalling and reinstalling it and see if that clears all the data associated with the app. (If it works it would also erase your current saved game and any achievements.)
It sounds like there's something weird to do with the way your browser is initialising the seeded random number generator, but I don't know what could be happening or what I could do about it. Playing it in a different browser or clearing your browser's cookies might fix the issue, although you'd also lose your saved game and any high scores. Sorry I can't be of more help.
A log is a cool idea but I don't think it's practical for me to implement, I'm afraid. As well as being a lot of work to implement, it would also mean the game was storing a growing amount of information, which can cause performances issues in a Twine game like mine. A glossary with descriptions of everything you can discover was something I thought about implementing, but decided it would be too big a job for not much benefit -- I think most of the trait names are fairly self-explanatory, and if you want to know what a real space thing like a dwarf star is you can look it up elsewhere.
In the crew section you should be able to see the skill modifier for each trait, e.g. Depressed -10%. That's all the information the interface gives, there's nothing else hidden in a tooltip. All negative traits (including Depressed) get removed one level at a time when an explorer is in the hospital. There are also events that can remove the Depressed trait, but there aren't any tooltips that tell you that, it's something you're meant to discover through play.
Tooltips never give you information you can't get somewhere else. When a crew member gets injured or acquires a new trait, there's a tooltip saying what trait that was, but you can always see which traits they all have in the crew section. When the ship gets damaged there's a tooltip telling you which system was damaged, but you can always see which systems are damaged in the ship section. When you gain data there's a tooltip telling you how much data you got, but you can always see how much data you have in the status bar. So it should be possible to play without tooltips, just less convenient.
Maybe I could add an option that makes tooltipped text into links you can select to make the tooltip appear, rather than relying on mouse-over. Do you think that would work? It would mean the passage text would always be full of inline links, though, which I guess might make for a less smooth listening experience.
On another note: I uploaded a new version yesterday that adds music volume controls.
Sorry, I misunderstood your question, my bad.
Tooltip example in Beyond the Chiron Gate: Whenever a crew member's full name appears in the text, the name has a tooltip that displays their class, level, and any traits they have. An easy way to check this would be to start a new game and put a Pilot on your crew, then on the passage where you enter the Gate for the first time the pilot's name will appear saying they fire the manoeuvring thrusters.