I said I'd rebuild the first five minutes. Here they are.

Last time I wrote here, I made a promise: the next update would be about the first five minutes of Starfend. Not new content, not more systems — just fixing the fact that people who got taught the game played for hours, and people who got dropped in cold bounced in two minutes.

That update is live today. It turned out to be the biggest one I’ve ever shipped.

The 23 minutes that caused this

A player recorded himself playing the demo for 23 minutes. He didn’t know I was watching. Near the end he said this:

“The tutorial is vague. I didn’t retain any of the information. I mostly just stumbled my way through.”

That is not a fun thing to read about the game you’ve spent years on. It is, however, the most useful thing anyone has ever told me about it. I’d been blaming Steam’s algorithm for my numbers. He showed me the problem was the first two minutes, and that I was the one who put it there.

Almost everything below exists because of that video.

The opening, rebuilt

Your first match now drops you straight into the game. No prep screen, no fleet menu, no stone inventory, no skill tree. You get a drone, you get a wave, and you learn by doing it: move, place, call the wave, fire, dash, shield. The deeper systems open up after the game clicks, not before.

While rebuilding the tutorial I also found a bug I’d never have found on my own. Watching that video, I noticed he kept fumbling between the mouse and the controller, ending up with two things highlighted on screen at once. I assumed it was him. It wasn’t — the controller glyphs were wrong, so there was no way to tell how to turn on controller navigation. He fell back to the mouse because the game never told him he didn’t have to. One wrong icon, and a whole input scheme was invisible.

That’s the kind of thing you cannot see from inside your own game.

The dash is now a weapon

The other note from that video: the auto-firing made him feel powerless. He wanted a trigger to pull.

I thought about it for a long time and decided manual firing was the wrong answer — it would have quietly turned Starfend into a twin-stick shooter and made the towers pointless. So I gave the pilot power a different way.

Dash into a meteor that’s hunting you and it dies — and the kill instantly refunds your cooldown, so you can chain straight into the next one.

There’s a rule: it only works on the meteors chasing you. Dash at the meteors flowing down the lane and you phase right through them. If the dash deleted lane meteors, your towers would stop mattering and the game would fall apart.

But meteors lock onto you constantly — more and more of them the deeper you go — and that rule turned into my favorite thing in the game. The lane is the tower defense. Your own tail is the action game. At high levels you’re weaving through a swarm, parrying kill after kill, while your fleet holds the line behind you.

I didn’t plan that. It came out of taking a complaint seriously.

Everything else

• The whole UI was rebuilt, and the game is properly animated now. Menus, cards, the skill tree, explosions, hit feedback, screen shake. The old build feels stiff next to this one.
• The pause screen works. It no longer paints a background over the battlefield — you can inspect the field and rotate the camera while paused. It’s a tower defense. You should be allowed to think.
• “Manage Stones” is gone, replaced by real tabs. It kept getting mistaken for a settings button.
• The voice-over is cut, along with the periodic chatter. Enough people called it irritating that I stopped defending it.
• Five difficulty levels, unlocking progressively, with scores tracked per difficulty.
• A 100-node skill tree — ten colors, ten nodes each.
• A leaderboard, and a credits screen.
• A “Reset Progress” button in Settings, so you can wipe everything and see the game cold.
• Ten languages, in-game.
• A performance pass aimed at Steam Deck.

Thank you for the hard thing

If you’ve played Starfend and something annoyed you, tell me. I can’t see my own game anymore — I’ve looked at it for too long. The people who say the uncomfortable thing out loud are the ones actually building it with me.

Starfend is on Steam now with all of this in it, and the free demo goes deep — all the way to level 25.

More soon.

— Ranieri