Jumplight Odyssey – Official FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

When is release? Are you going to EA?

This is not confirmed just yet! The EA date is also unconfirmed as of yet, but stay tuned!

Will you Port to Mac/Consoles?

Right now our plan is to release EA only on Steam, but we won’t say no to what might happen in the future! We’d love to, but we’re an indie so we have to be realistic with our dev capacity.

I Gave Feedback From the Demo. Will There be Improvements?

Yes! The Demo was a very early build that we have already iterated on and improved significantly! There will be improvements to our crew prioritization, feedback loops, hauling, UI/UX, and heaps more. We’ve tried to take onboard all the feedback from you wonderful people that have played the Demo and are in the process of integrating this feedback into our dev process.

Crew Prioritization / Can I Assign Tasks to Crew?

There’ll be more information closer about the adjustments made to the game, including crew prioritization and task assignment, as well as other Captainly duties.

Will There be Mod Support?

We’re heavily considering it, but it’s unlikely that we’ll have anything ready for mod support for EA. That’s not to say that it can’t come into play in the future! We’re planning to use EA to gauge what the community want to see.

Different Modes?

There will be Custom Odysseys, absolutely. You will be able to define a number of parameters so that you can set up a run in the various ways that you want to play Jumplight Odyssey. You are more than able to play a more chilled version of JLO than presented in the Demo. There are options to remove the pressure of the Zutopan Fleet all together and just chill, or dial that pressure up even further!

Can I Create my own Captain/Crew/Customize?

The answer is that we’re only an indie studio, so we have to be really careful about what we commit our teams to, so its unlikely that we’ll have customization options for EA… But that’s not to say it won’t occur into the future! (We use EA to gauge what the community really wants.. Like customisation.)

Will we be able to go “Off Ship” for Away Missions/Jets/etc?

This decision was intentional! Our Game Design team wanted the Captain’s (your!) focus to be on the ship itself. Not to say that it won’t come in the future, but it’s just not a focus point for us with EA.

Inspiration?

The initial inspiration came from a series of things all happening at roughly the same time. We had played FTL and enjoyed that; Rimworld too had come out and was telling incredible anecdotal stories procedurally; Then Fallout Shelter hit and I had a shelf pull of Incredible Cross-Sections books and thought…. what if you put FTL + Rimworld + Incredible Cross-Sections together and reduce the fiddlyness of a Rimworld with the more duplo like controls of Two Point Hospital. (I say duplo with the highest respect as a game designer, their controls are a delight). There were other factors too, many of us were fans of Battlestar Galatica, I was a big Robotech nerd. Then Ty suggested we push the style and feel of the game further back to a 1970’s Starblazers era. We all sat on the concept for a couple of years while it bubbled away in the background until the timing was right.

The team are pouring in their own heart and soul into the project too. There are team members who love Stardew Valley and other colony sims, all those little contributions are all finding different ways into the project. Which is really delightful. We are being careful to curate what the core identity of Jumplight Odyssey is and what it grows into. As much as it’s come from all these areas of inspiration, we want the game to find new ground and thread new space.

Can I Engage With Other Ships?

Other ships have been hinted at as part of future plans…

Will There be Different Weaponry I can add to my Ship? Can I Fight Back Against Voltan?

What we have playable in the current Demo is a very solid foundation for combat. The feeling that we intend to evoke with JLO’s combat is – yes, this is a battle cruiser, and it is a military vessel – but this is not a war game, and you are not playing a Captain who is trying to win battles. You’re playing a Captain that is trying to survive, and to preserve the last of her people by taking them to their safety – the Forever Star. It is really important to us that the first version of combat – the one that you experience in the Demo – elicits the feeling that this pursuing Zutopan fleet are dangerous. They should feel oppressive.

Can I Stream the Game? Can I Be Part of EA?

Yes! We have more information coming for EA, but if you wanted to be part of our Keymailer, hop in our Discord and ask for the link!

Will you cater to bigger screens?

We’ll be optimizing for EA!

More languages/localization?

Again, we’ll be optimizing with EA!

What are “Captain’s Promises”?

This is where we’re going to have to be particularly coy… This is a gameplay system currently under development, but we wanted to hint at it during the Demo. Some of you with very keen eyes have spotted the tab that says “Captain’s Promises” in Captain Euphora’s Chambers. The main hint that we’ll give is in reference to the “Hope Bar”. By hovering over the Hope Bar, you can see there is talk on Promises and their place in the gameplay system.

What is Hope?

Hope is the measure of the SDF Catalina’s overall outlook and belief in you as their captain. Hope declines when crew die or are left behind, and increase when a promise is fulfilled or survivors are collected (among other things). Hope is a particularly powerful tool for a Captain because it directly influences the Morale of all of your crew.

Will we be Able to Train the Survivors?

The short answer is: not in the Demo, no! Who’s to say about the future plans…

Who are the Custom Characters in the Key Art?

The Key Art on Steam and around our Social Media shows off some special-looking characters… While we can’t give much away, we can confirm that we certainly have plans for more bespoke characters like Euphora within the JLO Universe. They will coexist with all of these procedurally generated crew and interact with them.

Does That Mean There is a Running Universal Storyline?

It’s very important to us that you feel, as the Captain, that you are telling YOUR story. But we also – especially with Euphora’s Odyssey – want to make sure that our IP and universe has a beating heart, with a greater narrative unfolding. It’s best described as playing “shades of Euphora”. You are following her canonical journey, but there’s lots of procedural generation that goes into everything – your crew, your biomes, even Euphora herself! So no one’s run will be the same as anyone else’s. Events may occur in your run that would never occur in your friend’s, and vice versa.

Will There be Variations on Combat Intensity?

What we have playable in the current Demo is a very solid foundation for combat. The feeling that we intend to evoke with JLO’s combat is – yes, this is a battle cruiser, and it is a military vessel – but this is not a war game, and you are not playing a Captain who is trying to win battles. You’re playing a Captain that is trying to survive, and to preserve the last of her people by taking them to their safety – the Forever Star. It is really important to us that the first version of combat – the one that you experience in the Demo – elicits the feeling that this pursuing Zutopan fleet are dangerous. They should feel oppressive.

Ultimately, the fact that you can only hope to survive and jump away is a very fundamental part of our combat Game Design. That’s not to say that we won’t have more varieties of combat in the future, it was just important for us to build the “Zutopan Fleet are scary” foundation tonally in this Demo.

Should we Expect any Other Threats? Or can I Just Speedrun to the Forever Star?

Once we move beyond the Demo, you will be able to play further through the journey screen. After some time, you may start to see the repercussions of skipping stars accumulate. Skipping biomes means skipping over resources – there is an attached opportunity cost. It is a sense that you will hone in as your experience as Captain grows, you will find that you know which resources are worth skipping and which are worth hanging around for, even with the Zutopans at your backdoor.

There may also be other threats that you’ll need to factor for, and start building toward early… But that’s information for another time.

Will There Be a Way to Beef up Ham?

There’s definitely been talk in the studio about how viable is a run where you invest heavily into Ham.

So much of Game Design is about providing tools for the player to tell their own goofy stories. And so we’ve already seen people in the demo do some crazy stuff… And that fills our hearts with so much joy, because ultimately we’re not trying to create one experience. We’re trying to create a platform in which people can go and tell their own stories and do kooky little experiments. If you can’t get up to shenanigans in Jumplight Odyssey, we haven’t done our job right.