Lifeship in 2026

Hello out there in Lifeship enjoyer-land. It’s me, Chris,with a game update. Okay, I’ll stop writing like that (Even I have my limits!)It’s 2026, and Lifeship is in a good place. We have been testing missions,updating stories, and improving the art (more on that later). The important thing is that 3 years in, and we are still having a great time with the game! But we realized that we may not have been as communicative as you(we) would like. So this is the first update in a series of scheduled monthly development updates that will drop on the 1^st of each month.

To get us started, let’s talk about mission testing. Each mission is hand(human)-crafted from the ground up for maximum enjoyment. It starts with a story, some choices, and some visual cues. This is fed into the map making machine (Odin is the machine), who creates a bespoke mission map,and adds some enemies and salvage. Then, depending on the complexity of the mission, we test it. This leads to edits to the story, to the enemies, to the maps, even to specific rules of the mission. It’s a painstaking and wonderful process. We love playing the game. This has taken up most of the time between the last update and now. The missions are starting to hum…they feel great to play. They have awesome cinematic moments and meaningful choices.

The other big item on our agenda has been fixing the art. It became clear to us through the kickstarter that we had been heckin’ bamboozled and the art we were using had been finished with AI. We took that on the chin,found an artist here in New Zealand who does not use AI and put her to work (HiCait!) The heart of Lifeship is characters and their journeys, so it is so important that we get this right.

We really appreciate everyone’s ongoing support for this project. If you have a topic you would like to see explored in detail, email chris@ikarangilabs.com with your questions or ideas. Until next time, fly safe!

-Chris