The first real playthrough
For months the game had been tested in pieces: one feature at a time, with saves built on purpose to land at the right spot. This time it was played. New game from the menu, no prepared saves, the main path and everything you can do without being made to.
What came out of it
The playthrough holds. No dead ends, no moment where the player is left without something to do. On the technical side: 155 resources loaded, 94 media files, no failed requests, zero errors and zero warnings in the console for the whole run. The day counter comes down as intended to the last figure, the ship’s log closes the game with twenty-two entries, the map shows what it should and stays quiet about what it should not.
Five defects surfaced. None of them blocking, all fixed in the same session, one at a time, each with its own numbered version and its own re-check. Two were about pacing: a character transmitting twice in a row, a screen that failed to change tone after an important turn in the story. One was a dialogue option no player could ever have seen, because the condition to reach it always arrived too late: text written, paid for in time, invisible.
The defect that did not show
The fifth came out precisely while I was verifying the other four, and it was the worst. Loading a game saved past a certain point, including the autosave, the line inviting you to press a key to continue did not appear. But the game was already listening. At the first key pressed, for any reason at all, the closing sequence began.
The cause is the kind that teaches you something. The notice was being appended to the text on screen, and another part of the program rebuilt that text on load, carrying it away without noticing. Now the notice is not appended: it is recomputed every time the screen is drawn, so either it is really there or the game is not listening. State notices do not get to lean on something someone else can rebuild.
How long it takes
We now know with some precision.
| How you play it | How long it takes |
|---|---|
| With the walkthrough in hand, without reading | about 15 minutes |
| First playthrough, main path, reading everything | about 1 hour 45 |
| First playthrough, completionist | between 2 hours 15 and 2 hours 30 |
The introduction runs 96 seconds and can be skipped with a key. The closing sequence, from the credits to the scene after them, runs 83.
The first executable, and the first embarrassment
With the playthrough verified it was time to package the game and hand it to someone. The first build went to the team, and it was unusable: not a single scene image loaded, ten black rooms where the ship should have been. Simone noticed in thirty seconds, by installing it.
The reason is worth telling, because it is the kind of mistake that grows
exactly where you stop looking. In development the game runs inside a local
server, and a path like /images/… works. The packaged game has no server: it
opens files straight off the disk, and in that context the leading slash no
longer means “the game folder”, it means “the root of the drive”. Twenty-two
paths across thirteen files were looking for images in a place that does not
exist. In development it was invisible. In the package it was fatal.
The lesson is a blunt one and worth writing down: a perfect playthrough in development tells you nothing about the build. Now, before any delivery, the package gets opened for real and questioned image by image. The screenshot at the top of this post was taken that way, from the production package: if you can see it, that check passed.
We are looking for five people
The game is complete and can be finished. Things are still missing, the big ones being the voice acting, which has yet to be recorded, and a handful of images not yet commissioned. But what is there plays from beginning to end, and it is time to show it to someone who did not build it.
We are looking for five people outside the team willing to play it and tell us where they got lost. If you want to be one of them, write to runtimeradio@gmail.com. We take the first five who get in touch, and we will update this post once the places are filled.
Some honest warnings before you write:
- The game is in Italian only. The translation will come, but it is not there yet, and without Italian you will not get far.
- You need Windows 10 or 11, 64 bit. There are no other builds for now.
- The file comes as a temporary link, not attached to an email.
- The executable is not signed, so Windows will show the “Windows protected your PC” warning. That is expected: More info → Run anyway.
- There is no voice acting. The game is read, not heard. Music and sound effects are in.
- Set aside about two hours, two and a half if you look at everything.
What we need is not a list of bugs. We need to know where you stopped, unsure what to do, and for how long. There is no game over and there is no dead end: if you felt stuck, the fault is ours, and that is exactly the thing we want to hear.