For those new to our community, Jump Ship is a co-op PvE where you are the crew of a space ship. We're thrilled to share some insights from our recent office playtest.

Last Friday, we had an office playtest for Jump Ship. Our goal was to evaluate the game's readability and how well it communicates information to new players. We want Jump Ship to be enjoyable and playable without any prior knowledge.

Big fans visiting the office

The playtest involved testing the the tutorial and one of the game's missions.

Our playtest provided valuable feedback on readability for sure, and overall status:

• The game is incredibly fun! The players were laughing throughout the session :)
  
• The chaos level is currently too high, leading to some confusion.
  
• Some items and their uses weren't immediately clear to players.

Based on these findings, we're already working on:

• Refining the chaos: We want the game to be chaotic, but in the right way. Players should understand why events occur and how to take action. We're improving the HUD to highlight critical information and provide more context for items in hand or in use.
  
• Balancing intensity: We're reducing simultaneous chaotic events to prevent overwhelming players.
  
• Clearer item descriptions: We're rewriting descriptions to be more direct and informative.

We're planning another playtest soon to evaluate these improvements. Our focus is on smoothing out the gameplay experience and making it easier for new players to jump in.

The feedback has been instrumental in shaping these priorities. We're committed to creating the best space crew experience possible and we're excited to invite more community testers eventually and hear what you think!

Do you already have ideas on how we can make the game more accessible to new players? Let us know :)

Thank you for your continued support and enthusiasm. Together, we're creating an amazing universe!

Hello everyone!

We're thrilled to be back from our summer vacation, recharged and ready to jump back into development. 🌞

We've been hard at work and are excited to share some of the new animations, VFX, and game features we’ve been working on. There’s still more in the pipeline, but they’re not quite ready to be shown just yet.

Our plan is to start internal playtesting with friends and family by the end of August. After that, we’ll take some time to incorporate their feedback before inviting a small group of external gamers to join in. As the game becomes more stable, we’ll gradually expand this group further.

We’re really excited about what’s coming, and we can’t wait to share more with you soon!

Please note: everything is a work in progress and subject to change.

We recently created a new revive animation. Here is draft. How do you revive your downed friend? With some good ol' magic!


Here is a compilation of some new VFX systems we've implemented.

• In the first scene is your ship is being wrecked. You can see how everything inside start to go crazy, and then you see the whole ship explodes with a classic From Software ending.
  
• The second scene is the loading screen when traveling from one destination to another.
  
• The third scene shows one of the big ships you'll encounter doing an Oppenheimer.

We've gotten a lot of questions regarding what a session could look like. This footage was recorded in March 2024 in preparation for our Gameplay Explainer video. The whole session was longer than 10 minutes. We edited it down and cut between the different players' perspective to show you what a destination would look like when playing four players. Please enjoy

Hello! I hope you've had a great week!

This week, I'm excited to share some work-in-progress animations with you. We've been updating the animations for the SMG, assault rifle, and shotgun.

One challenge we've faced is differentiating the SMG and assault rifle, as they can often seem too similar. Our current strategy is to make the assault rifles more powerful but less accurate, and capable of burst firing. The SMG, on the other hand, will be more agile with a higher firing rate, though it will be slightly less powerful. As for the shotgun, a classic in FPS games, remains highly effective at short ranges but less so at longer distances.

The assult rifle with a reload
Assult Rifle and SMG kicks filmed in a test range level
Shotgun! (can you say shotgun without sounding like the announcer in Metal Slug? It's impossible!)

It's May the 4th, the international Star Wars day!

Jump Ship draws inspiration from many different sources, including Star Wars. When friends ask us what kind of co-op game we're building, we sometimes describe Jump Ship as the ultimate Chewbacca and Han Solo experience—the duo that somehow always makes it through tight situations. That's the feeling we want you to have when playing the game with your friends!

So, what have we been up to? We've been reworking parts of the ship combat, the combat station, and player ship damage. I know this probably doesn't make much sense for you right now, since you can't test the game, but we'd like to give you some behind the scenes regardless :)

Please note, recorded directly from dev's computer in a dev level. Nothing is final!

General combat

• Depending on how close the crosshair is to the enemy ship's sweet spot (indicated by the small dot moving ahead of the ship) you can get critical, normal and glancing hits. They produced 3x, 1x, 0.5x damage respectively. Tracking enemy ships and consecutively doing critical hits kills much faster.
  
• Not all things has a sweet spot (stationary targets, and very large ships, in those cases all hits defaults to normal hits). We can set that up manually per ship/target.
  
• AI shields now regenerate after a given amount of time incentivising use of shield penetrating weapons, or boarding if you lack those types of weapons. We currently lack indications of this in the HUD. (As this is more of a feature to incentivise use of combat station or boarding regeneration doesn't happen when playing solo).
  
• AI Corvettes no longer shoot long range missiles when downed.
  
• AI Corvettes has a further orbit distance to ensure that players can't attack the corvette sitting still, they'd have to move towards it and chase it to take it down.
  
• For ship to ship combat we now have a damage counter that accumulates damage up to 2 seconds and then clears to better indicate the amount of damage dealt by your different weapons.

Pilot

• Auto aim crosshair no longer snaps to target. You will have to steer the playership crosshair to enemy ships to hitting them.

Combat station

• Combat station now supports up to two sockets with larger cannons or other components.
  
• We replaced the old autocannon with a railgun. A powerful insta-hit attack that penetrates enemies shields and damages the hull directly.
  
• We reintroduced a active ship shield that can be triggered from the combat station that keeps damage to 0 for a set amount of time.
  
• You can swap between items using numericals (1-3). You can install two railguns, or two shields if you'd like.
  
• Auto aim crosshair no longer snaps to target. You will have to properly aim crosshair to enemy ships to hitting them.
  
• When aiming using the railgun turret, the pilot will see a laser pointer indicating where you are aiming to help the pilot assist the combat station.

Player ship damage

• Instead of gradually damaging components and damage points we now trigger "events" (read internal explosions) at intervals where several things may break simultaneously.
  
• These events are somewhat concentrated around areas of the ship and will be more varied than before (some damage points where never picked etc.).
  
• Damage point types cycle, so getting same type of damage points breaking down over and over should be much less likely.

This is the way.
/@kappische

Please note: everything is a work in progress and subject to change. The stuff recorded here is captured directly from devs editors so it's not optimized in any way :D

Hey all, hope you're having a nice Friday!

This week we've been focusing on some effects and animations. We have more stuff in the works, but are not ready to show those yet!

We tweaked the jump animation for the player ship and enemies. The player ship now has a bit more cinematic feel to it:
And the enemies (Comity) jumps in a similar fashion, since they're using similar tech like the players (Atirans)
We've also re worked some of our backdrops and added some nice god rays. Looks a bit more epic if you ask me! :D
The guns got some love too! With some fancier surface and muzzleflash effects
Aaaaand sometimes things just break completely...ːsteamfacepalmː

Hi friends!
I'm @kappische, one of the devs here at Keepsake. I just wanted to write down some words to summarize our greatest regards to everyone who has wishlisted, provided feedback, and asked questions since launching the page last week.

We've received over 100,000 wishlists within the first week! That's an amazing start, so thank you very much! Our goal was to reach 100,000 wishlists when launching into Early Access. To achieve that within a week exceeded our expectations and dreams! We celebrated the reveal in the office and have been reading your comments, feedback, and questions. Thank you very much for this!

In future posts I'm hoping to go a bit more behind the scenes and treat this space as a dev log so you can tag along on the development of the game.

Below are some of the questions we've received, along with their answers:

What can you do on the ship?
We're always thinking of and expanding on the various activities you can do on the ship. These include installing/uninstalling components, rerouting energy, disposing of items, using airlocks/eject tubes, make pizza, manning turrets, and more. I'm hoping to show you activities in a future video rather than just listing things here :)

Can you play solo?
Yes, you can. The game scales depending on the number of players. However, playing co-op will provide the best experience since that's what we're tuning the game for.

When will the game be released?
We haven't decided on a specific date yet. We'll provide more information later. Currently, we're targeting late 2024 for Early Access.

Are there other types of enemies than robots?
The current on-foot enemy types you encounter are robots. They will appear in different configurations that we'll reveal more about in the future. Human adversaries are something we'd like to explore in the future, but it's out of scope for the Early Access launch since our team is quite small and we need to prioritize accordingly.

What will the game cost?
We haven't finalized the price yet, but it will be in the ballpark of other 4-player co-op games of similar scope. Final pricing details will be announced at a later date.

How long will you be in Early Access?
Our intention is to use Early Access as a way to finalize the game together with the feedback from you all in the community. We will stay in Early Access until we are satisfied the game has the polish, features and content we feel it should have for a 1.0 release, but even after that our plan is to continue the development of the game with bugfixes and content.

On what platforms will you release?
We've announced Steam (Windows) and Xbox releases so far. We'll consider other platforms in the future.

Why no PvP?
We personally enjoy PvE games, and unfortunately, implementing PvP is a very costly endeavor that we're not prioritizing. The game isn't designed for PvP, and it would essentially require starting over and creating a new project to make PvP work properly.

Keep the questions and feedback coming!
Thank you!
/Daniel