Hello! It’s 2023 and it’s been a while since our last update. 2022 was a heads down year–we’ve been very productive and have made a lot of progress on Second Star. We really appreciate your support for the game and are excited to show you some of what we’ve been working on.


Visuals are extremely important in an exploration-based RPG, especially for sci-fi. There is the balance of expectation–something otherworldly, yet familiar. One of the first things our Art and Level Design teams tackled was a complete redesign of the UI system. Interactables such as computer terminals and player menu screens were re-imagined to be a better experience for players!


Here is the fresh incarnation of the Player’s Inventory, now organized into types of items: Resources that can be used in Crafting, Consumables that are one-time use items, and Key Items relevant to specific Objectives.

Dr. Lee’s Messages terminal also received an overhaul! As the science officer on the Persistence, you’ll be able to see all your messages arriving via the data packets sent to you from Earth. Some of these messages will be requests from your crewmates while others are instructions from Mission Control. There might be others, but we don’t want to give away too much!

Your terminal also includes access to the Persistence Crewboard, where your crewmates chat among themselves and react to events in the game. You’ll also be able to tap into the ship’s News and Mission Feeds where you can read up on information periodically received from home.

The Logbook is where you can find information they’ve collected on characters, locations, events, scientific discoveries, and other things learned along the way.

Since there’s a LOT to discover while playing Second Star, we knew keeping it well organized was important. Dr. Lee can now quickly navigate between different categories of data.

Every screen received a fresh new look, including the Comm menu to call your crewmates on the Persistence. The new UI also includes features such as selections with a light up border when hovered for increased visibility.

While exploring the planet surfaces, you’ll encounter a variety of puzzles during your mission to find out what happened to the Second Star. An example of these puzzles is a Communications Tower, which you’ll need to recalibrate. Here’s a sneak peek at one!

Interacting with your crewmates on the Persistence is one of the keystones of Second Star. We redesigned the branching dialogue system to make this experience better. You can now look back on your choices using the History option during a conversation.

As you explore, you’ll be able to collect lifeforms from the planets you visit and bring them aboard the Persistence, where you can cultivate them in the state of the art Hydroponics Bay!


Each species has different preferences and it will be up to you to figure out what each lifeform needs to thrive.



Speaking of lifeforms in Second Star, the Art Team has done an amazing job designing and modeling these. You probably remember the Cluster lifeform from the demo, but we think it’s really cool so we’re going to show it again (don’t worry, we have other ones to show, too!).

Joining the Cluster lifeform is the Bowl lifeform, another silicon-based entity you will encounter wrapped around the rocks of Irkalla.

On Takaroa, you can find the Dragontail lifeform encased in ice and perfectly preserved on what used to be an ocean floor.

The Art Team has taken the Dragontail from 2D concept art to 3D model, ready to be collected– if you can get it out of the ice, that is!

The tangled forests of Banyan will host the intriguing Turtle and Cannibal lifeforms. Below is a sneak peak of their concepts, but make sure to follow our Twitter to see them grow!

Often working hand-in-hand with the Art Team, the Level Design Team also made great strides last year, working diligently to plan and execute the terrain and environments that Dr. Lee will be exploring.

We spent a good chunk of 2022 expanding on Irkalla. Several new areas were sculpted and textured, with lots of details added to make them fun and memorable to explore!

The environments present many challenges that you will need to navigate and overcome.

Beneath Irkalla’s surface are a series of caves and lava tubes that you will be able to explore. Currently these are blockmeshed for initial passes at gameplay implementation.

Takaroa’s environment was mapped out early in the year. Currently, it has been blockmeshed and the level designers worked in close collaboration with the writers to ensure that key locations for exploration, cutscenes, and puzzles were placed correctly.

Our programmers then hooked up traversal of Takaroa. If you’re new to the term “blockmesh”, it just means that these are simplified versions of the land features. We create them in Unity using a tool called ProBuilder, and they will be replaced with high-poly Blender sculpts as work on the level progresses.

Banyan underwent a full work-up as well, from fresh concept art and level planning to terrain sculpting and assembly in Unity.

The planets aren’t the only environments we’ve been working on. The Persistence now has a new area to explore: the domed Observation Deck. Located on the belly of the ship, this room provides a place for you to relax and enjoy an unparalleled view of space!


Our programmers worked hard in 2022 enhancing and refactoring the game’s source code. This included a great deal of reorganization and updating our Unity engine version and all the benefits that come with that. The input system has been rebuilt to better support both mouse/keyboard and gamepad controls. This has given us as a team many quality of life upgrades and makes developing the game much easier.


The Writing Team made a massive push in 2022, completing the first pass of the majority of all the writing in Second Star! They scaffolded and wrote many of the major scenes in the game. Almost all of the relationship talks have been drafted and are in the process of being edited. These are the branching dialogues you will be able to have with your crewmates to get to know them better.

The team also made huge strides in world building, ranging from completing all of the data fragment collectibles to the ambient commentary you’ll hear while on your excursions planetside. Finally, the team finished writing on the Crew Board and are currently working on the Persistence News and Mission feeds.

This was an incredible effort by the Writing Team, amounting to over ten thousand lines of dialogue!


Several new tracks were added to the OST in 2022. Composed with immersion in mind, the music of Second Star is designed to add to the atmosphere and sense of exploration without being distracting. Here are a few new songs for you to enjoy–tracks from Takaroa and Banyan, and a theme that complements the excellent view of the stars from the Observation Deck.

Takaroa Approach[soundcloud.com]

Exploring Banyan[soundcloud.com]

Persistence Observation Deck[soundcloud.com]

As you can see, we’ve been hard at work bringing Second Star[secondstargame.com] to life, one piece at a time! We are passionate about the sci-fi world we’ve created and thrilled with the progress we’ve made. We are deeply appreciative of the support you have given us so far. We look forward to sharing more progress with you, so be sure to follow us on Steam, Twitter, and join our Discord Community[discord.gg] for the most up to date information as we continue to develop Second Star!