# What happens when you hand FOXFIRE to strangers > Tag: WORKSHOP · Supanova Sydney 2026. Published 2026-07-23 by Tom and Ollie, FOXFIRE developers. Mirrors https://getfoxfire.com/dispatches/hand-foxfire-to-strangers/. Three days at Supanova Sydney 2026, 19–21 June, Sydney Showground. First time FOXFIRE was in strangers' hands. What resonated instantly, where players bounced, and the 90+ item improvement list at the end — most of which is now shipped. --- ## The setup Supanova Comic Con & Gaming is Australia's national pop-culture expo. Sydney weekend, Friday-through-Sunday at Sydney Olympic Park's Showground. Small booth: screen, controllers, headphones, wishlist QR, sign. First time we'd handed FOXFIRE to people who'd never seen a trailer. --- ## What resonated instantly - **Movement.** Biggest surprise — the thrust physics landed without explanation. New players tilt into their first drift, overshoot, laugh, correct by the second try. The wagered-on differentiator (momentum-based flying vs frictionless WASD grid-movement) works in the wild. - **Arsenal firing itself.** The survivor-like's core promise (auto-fire while you focus on positioning) reads immediately. First laser fires, players get the "oh, that's cool" beat. - **The escape countdown.** Last 100 seconds of a Stage 1 run — FTL drive completes, game escalates hard, player runs for exit. Drama landed universally. ## Where players bounced (or paused) - **First 30 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. Biggest slice of the improvement list started here. - **Every run started on the Military.** The Military is the default start ship — until progression flags unlock more, it's the only ship a fresh save has. Every booth run was a fresh save. So Supanova taught us how the Military lands with strangers; it couldn't teach us about the other four. Post-Supanova, a temporary playtest policy makes all five ships selectable from a fresh save. - **Offscreen indicators.** Players who had a good Stage 1 asked us where the offscreen artillery was coming from. HUD indicators are there but not reading as "this is a threat you can go hunt". --- ## What shipped from the 90+ item list Five weeks on, most of what mattered has landed. Categories: - **Menu overhaul (largest slice).** Shared terminal-chrome standard 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. UI-scale system resolves to natively-fitted viewport at 1280x800 (Steam Deck) as well as 1920x1080. - **Level-up card readability.** Tooltip delay dropped to zero milliseconds so item-effect and evolution-pair popups appear the moment a card is hovered. Upgrade cards show live total-to-total values instead of delta-to-total. Contract check locks the zero-idle-delay setting so it can't drift back. - **Stage 2 opens Storm First now.** New save states open into the storm directly instead of a subtle build-up. Watching new players 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 + battering-ram terrain sweeps. Scout base-movement authority tuned + phase-aim damage gating fixed. ODEC charge pip alpha reworked so time-dilation indicator reads correctly. Crescent Moon hull sprite finally landed with Phase-Shift readiness indicator. - **New Flight Training content.** Detonation Breakout Course 04 shipped (thrust physics through calm/gauntlet/pinch/sprint corridors). Goods Line Bandit time-trial progressed through several rounds of feel work with rail-layout difficulty tiers. - **Small quality-of-life fixes.** Choice panels no longer share spacebar-confirm with gameplay. Chest pickups gained direct overlap fallback. Debug scripted openings stopped hijacking non-default loadouts. Charge-turret audio pauses with threat timers. - **Things we thought we'd changed and hadn't.** A couple of items in this bucket, which is embarrassing. Shipped now. --- ## What Supanova taught us about FOXFIRE - **The game reads correctly.** People without any context understood what FOXFIRE is inside their first minute. "Space survivor-like with thrust physics" is a positioning statement that could have needed heavy explaining. It didn't. - **The Military is the on-ramp for a reason.** Other four ships are why players keep playing; Military is why they play at all. Design intent confirmed by three days of strangers. - **We're further along than we thought.** Watching strangers play FOXFIRE for the first time reset our sense of what the game is. It's a game. It's playable. People wanted more of it. --- ## Where next Big items on the list are shipped. Long tail — remaining onboarding language work, offscreen-threat legibility pass, mid-run camera behaviours that surprised people — rolls on. Next thing on the calendar is another event: different strangers, different queue, and if the ship-selection unlock lands in time, the other four ships in strangers' hands for the first time. --- ## Where to look next - https://getfoxfire.com/dispatches/survivor-likes-we-tune-against/ — five peer survivor-likes we reference while tuning ours - https://getfoxfire.com/dispatches/nova-drift-and-foxfire/ — long-form comparison with the closest mechanical peer - https://getfoxfire.com/game/ — FOXFIRE systems overview - https://store.steampowered.com/app/4714090/FOXFIRE/ — wishlist on Steam Last updated: 2026-07-23