The combat demo for Free Stars: Children of Infinity is out, and it's free

That prose was wrangled into branching interactive readability by the skilled hand of narrative lead Mallory Littleton. Through it all, lead designer Dan Gerstein has been a force of nature, wrangling a distributed team through a wild Kickstarter and a development process that has gone on longer than anyone anticipated. (I certainly didn’t think I was signing up for five years of nights-and-weekends writing when I volunteered back in 2021!) But the end is finally in sight. Dan’s updates on the Pistol Shrimp Games blog are a great source of information for where things currently stand; all I know is that the pile of volunteer writing work in front of me is shrinking rather than growing, and that means we’re in the home stretch. So forgive me if I’m a bit more exuberant than I’d normally be for a free indie game’s demo release. The Ur-Quan Masters matters deeply to me; it was a game that showed up at exactly the right point in my teenage years to make a massive and deep impression. I’m still kind of in shock that I’ve been able to help write the official sequel—a game that Paul and Fred characterized to me in an email as something they intend “to feel like a seamless continuation of the player’s memory of UQM.” At least in this fan’s appraisal, I think we’ve succeeded. You’ll have to wait a bit longer to find out for yourselves—but in the meantime, the combat demo will provide at least a bit of a tease. You can grab it for free on Steam or GOG. Now, go forth and launch fighters!