The setup
Supanova Comic Con & Gaming is Australia's national pop-culture expo. Its Sydney weekend runs Friday-through-Sunday at Sydney Olympic Park's Showground, and this year, 19–21 June 2026, we brought FOXFIRE.
Booth was small. A screen, a couple of controllers, headphones, a wishlist QR code, and a sign. What we didn't know going in was how the game would land with people who'd never seen a FOXFIRE trailer, never heard the word thrust in the same sentence as survivor-like, and never touched anything we'd built.
We know now.
The handoff
The thing you learn from watching strangers touch your game is that you don't know your game. You know the person you've been designing it for — the version of a player you keep in your head, months of playtesting refined into an internal user. That person is patient. That person reads tooltips. That person understands why the FTL drive matters at minute sixteen.
The stranger at your booth is not that person. The stranger at your booth has ninety seconds to figure out what the game is before deciding whether it's worth another ninety. They're at Supanova; there are a thousand other things to do. You are competing with a Pikachu photo booth.
We handed over the controller a lot.
What resonated instantly
Some things landed inside the first ten seconds without us saying a word.
Movement. This was the biggest surprise, and the one we'd been most worried about. Thrust physics are the game's biggest bet — we wagered that people would find momentum-based flying more interesting than the frictionless WASD grid-movement they're used to from every other survivor-like. Turns out, when the ship handles the way a spaceship should, people don't need to be told that's what's happening. They tilt into their first drift, they overshoot, they laugh, and by the second try they're already correcting.
The arsenal firing itself. The survivor-like's core promise is that combat happens automatically while you focus on positioning. New players got this immediately. The moment the first laser started firing, without them touching a button, we watched the same small "oh, that's cool" face something like fifty times over three days.
The escape countdown. The last hundred seconds of a Stage 1 run are the FTL drive completing and the game escalating hard while the player runs for the exit. This drama landed universally. Players who'd been idly steering ninety seconds earlier were now leaning forward, muttering at the screen.
Where players bounced (or paused)
Some things didn't land. The 90+ item list on our phones by Sunday night started here.
The first thirty seconds of information. New players hit the level-up screen for the first time and don't know what a passive is, what an evolution is, or why the game just paused. A big chunk of the list is about that opening minute — clearer language, better first-run-only prompts, tooltips that appear when a card is dwelt on for more than a beat.
Every run started on the Military. That's the default start ship, the on-ramp, and until progression flags unlock more, it's the only ship a fresh save has — and every booth run was a fresh save. Watching three days of Military-only runs was its own kind of lesson: the Military is a great on-ramp, but a booth playtest can't tell you how the other four ships land because nobody at a booth gets to try them. One of the first things we shipped after Supanova was a temporary playtest policy that makes Freighter, Scout, ODEC, and Crescent Moon selectable from a fresh save alongside the Military. Next event, we'll get the real data.
The offscreen indicators. Players who had a good Stage 1 asked us multiple times where the offscreen artillery was coming from. The HUD indicators are there — they just aren't reading as "this is a threat you can go hunt." Somewhere between an icon and an animation, the message isn't landing yet.
What we shipped from the 90+ item list
By Sunday night we had a shared note with more than ninety items. Five weeks on, most of what mattered has landed. Rough breakdown by category:
Menu overhaul (the largest slice). A shared terminal-chrome standard applied across every screen — Start Screen, Codex, Launch Loadout, Sector Selection, Hangar, Armoury, Flight Training. Shared header, footer, and tab components with a "no menu text below Caption 18px" readability floor. A UI-scale system that resolves to a natively-fitted viewport so text scales cleanly at 1280x800 (Steam Deck) as well as 1920x1080. This one row on the list was really a program.
Level-up card readability. Tooltip delay dropped to zero milliseconds so item-effect and evolution-pair popups appear the moment a card is hovered — the engine's inherited 0.5s idle delay was making players think the game wasn't responding. Upgrade cards now show live total-to-total values instead of delta-to-total. A contract check locks the zero-idle-delay project setting so it can't drift back later.
Stage 2 opens Storm First now. The Stage 2 opening we ran at Supanova was a subtle build-up. New save states now open into the storm directly instead. Watching new players over three days convinced us the previous opening buried the stage's identity. Saved runs preserve their variant; fresh runs get storm-first.
Ship polish. Freighter thrust retune plus battering-ram sweeps of destructible terrain. Scout base-movement authority tuned and phase-aim damage gating fixed. ODEC charge pips got their alpha reworked so the time-dilation indicator reads correctly around the ship silhouette. The Crescent Moon hull sprite finally landed, with its Phase-Shift readiness indicator on it.
New Flight Training content. A Detonation Breakout course — thrust physics through calm, gauntlet, pinch, and sprint corridors — shipped as Course 04. Goods Line Bandit, a smaller time-trial variant, progressed through several rounds of feel work with rail-layout difficulty tiers. Neither of these is a Stage 1 onboarding fix. They're the reward loop for players who love flying enough to want more of just that.
Small quality-of-life fixes. Choice panels no longer share the spacebar-confirm with gameplay. Chest pickups gained a direct overlap fallback. Debug scripted openings stopped hijacking non-default loadouts. Charge-turret audio pauses with threat timers. A dozen of these each, each on their own too small to write a paragraph about, together the difference between a game that feels finished and one that doesn't quite.
Things we thought we'd changed and hadn't. A couple of items in this bucket, which is embarrassing. They're shipped now.
What Supanova taught us about FOXFIRE
Three things bigger than the item list.
The game reads correctly. People without any context understood what FOXFIRE is inside their first minute. That was not guaranteed. "Space survivor-like with thrust physics" is a positioning statement that could have needed heavy explaining. It didn't. We're going to keep leaning into it.
The Military is the on-ramp for a reason. The other four ships are why players keep playing; the Military is why they play at all. Both roles matter. The design intent — a forgiving baseline that reveals depth over time — is confirmed by three days of strangers.
We are further along than we thought. Working on a game for years, in a small studio, you lose calibration on what "finished" looks like. Watching strangers play FOXFIRE for the first time — for many of them, we watched a whole first run start-to-finish — reset our sense of what the game is. It's a game. It's playable. People wanted more of it. That's more than we knew for sure on Friday morning.
Where next
The big items on the list are shipped. What's still there is the long tail — the remaining onboarding language work, the offscreen-threat legibility pass, and the mid-run camera behaviours that surprised people at the booth. Those roll into the next few weeks. Dispatches will keep updating as things land.
And the actual next thing on the calendar is another event, so we get to run this whole loop again. Different strangers, different queue, and — if the ship-selection unlock lands in time — the other four ships in strangers' hands for the first time.
If any of this made FOXFIRE sound like the game you'd want on your Steam wishlist, that's on the home page. And thank you for reading.