I’ve been iterating on the visuals of The Patchwork Ship. I started with an ASCII blob, then a blocky cigar, to colored bricks, a mess of pixels, to its current coherent form.

The Patchwork Ship is a game about escaping a dying star. You play a brain-in-a-box probe, manufactured by an abandoned sentient factory that is trying their best to save the trapped souls they have in storage. They keep building ship after ship and send them on their way with the hope that some of them will make it. Therefore, having unique ships is essential to the motif of survival construction, along with an evolving journey that keeps each gameplay loop fresh.

I’ve been tackling a lot of rough edges that came up with the live playtesting.

As I incrementally built up the game, I iterated through multiple fonts; some for aesthetics, some for functionality. What resulted was that I had a ton of fonts installed, but not a lot of consistency. I started with an issue with extended characters not showing, and that revealed a much bigger problem. I ended up swapping almost all fonts throughout the entire game with a low number of highly reused fonts. That also means all interfaces have access to the primary set of font faces; regular, italic, bold, and bold + italic.

The first public playtest of The Patchwork Ship at the Summer 2026 Lake George Games Expo was a success with a massive amount of takeaways! All photos were taken with verbal consent.

There were over 400 tickets sold to the event and I was busy demoing all day. I ended up with five pages of handwritten notes as I watched people play and asked them about their perspectives. I’m really deeply appreciative of the time people spent playing and the depth of the feedback that I got!

I’m proud to announce that I’ve launched the Steam store page for Null Band Games’ first commercial release. Wishlist The Patchwork Ship today!

The Patchwork Ship is a spacecraft roguelike deckbuilder. As a brain-in-a-box probe, you must evolve, grow, and collaborate with others to escape a dying star.

The swiftly approaching deadline of the expo has been a great motivator, and I’ve had to consider both physical and digital presence. On the physical side…

I’ve continued my work on Steam Deck compatibility, but I’m not confident I’ll be able to get it to the level of polish that I think it should be. I will bring two mice, keyboards, and monitors, along with my two Steam Decks (original LED and a white OLED). This will guarantee that everyone will be able to play and avoids obvious feedback about controller support.