Star Trail, one day later

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Last time I introduced Star Trail, The Oregon Trail in space, which I built in three days without writing a line of code myself. I directed it, and an AI agent (Claude Code) did the typing.

The experiment didn't stop when the post went up. Over the next day there were 26 more commits and nearly 14,000 new lines of game code. The game you play today is quite different from the one I wrote about. Here's what changed.

By the numbers

You choose your crew now

This was the biggest change, and it reverses something I was proud of in the first post.

At launch, every crew member had one hidden trait that quietly tilted the odds until an event revealed it. It sounded clever, but it played like luck. You can't plan around something you can't see.

So before writing any code, we wrote a design doc for a new trait system. Then we built it:

• Everyone has two traits, visible from the moment you meet them. Each trait has an upside and a downside, and there are 33 of them: the Pig eats two shares of food, the Hypochondriac takes to bed with illnesses that aren't real, the Perfectionist's repairs do twice as much for twice the scrap, and the Spacesick sink the mood in every nebula.
• At the start you meet eight people and take four. You can tap a face to read their profile, or hit Random if you'd rather let fate decide. The four you leave behind are never seen again.
• Some traits don't get along. An introvert and an extrovert drift apart, and every clashing pair has an event of its own.
• Traits can change. The grump mellows into an optimist, the drinker dries out, the coward toughens up. It's rare, about one run in seven, which makes it feel earned.
• Secrets are now the only hidden layer. A thief or an ex-pirate in your crew stays a mystery until something brings it out. Visible traits feed the mystery too: when food goes missing, everyone looks at the Pig, whoever it really was.

Your crew also opens doors out there. Seven encounter choices only appear when someone aboard has the right trait: a pacifist can talk pirates down, a stargazer can read the stars, and someone tough can go down to a planet alone.

Food

Oregon Trail without food was always going to feel off. Now everyone aboard, captain included, eats every jump. On the crew screen you can set rations to filling, meager or bare bones, which stretch the food at a cost to morale. When the food runs out the crew go hungry, and then people start dying. Life in the galley comes with its own events: thin soup, food thieves, a hoarded stash, and the occasional feast.

Faces and speech bubbles

At launch, the game was mostly text on cards. Now it talks.

• The people you meet have faces. Dockmasters, the merchant, pirate captains, bounty hunters and survivors all show up on screen, and what they say appears in a speech bubble pointing at them. Named characters keep the same face for the whole run.
• Your crew make remarks. As the ship arrives somewhere, someone might pipe up in a bubble by their face on the side of the screen, and you can answer. Saying nothing is an option too. Your reply says something about you, and they warm or cool depending on who they are.
• Conversations. Now and then a crew member wants to talk: about home, their old job, what they hope for. Only they hear your replies.
• The cards got leaner. Each one now shows only the current step, and the crew react in small bubbles beside their faces instead of in a block of text. A face only flashes when that person's opinion of you actually moved.

Places your crew know

A big batch of new encounters arrived in one evening, and many of them are tied to the people aboard. A crew member might know where something is: the gambler's casino station, the devout's shrine, a warband of their own people, the hypochondriac's favourite quarantine station. When they do, it gets marked on your chart a short detour away. Do you go?

Elsewhere you'll find refugee convoys, smugglers, customs patrols, a prison transport, a mining strike, a hermit, black markets, a repair yard, and a race. A dozen souped-up ships line up at a beacon to race through a debris field, winner takes the fuel. Somebody painted flames on their hull.

Rare encounters are less rare now, about one section in eight. Most of them are wonders: a generation ship, a ship graveyard, a Dyson shell you explore in stages, and the ferryman, who will carry you a whole section closer to home in exchange for one of your crew.

Ion storms now drift across the chart too. Every jump spent inside one costs you hull.

Morale matters more

Morale used to be a number you watched. Now it tilts every choice. In high spirits, good outcomes are a little likelier and bad ones a little less, and the reverse when spirits are low. Morale also fades back toward steady on its own, so you have to keep the crew's spirits up.

All of this made the journey harder in the back half. A careful bot used to survive the last section about 61% of the time. Now it's about 42%. Overall, the best bot gets home a little under half the time (about 47%), so good play still wins.

The less glamorous stuff

• The whole UI scales to the screen. Everything is laid out for one reference phone and scaled from there, so every device gets the same layout with no scrolling.
• A proper home page. startrail.greyden.games is now a retro game box with real screenshots, and the game itself is at /play.
• Privacy done properly. There's a privacy policy and a support page. In the UK, EU and EEA, the optional analytics stay off until you accept them, and a Global Privacy Control signal counts as an opt-out. The iOS and Android apps contain only the game, with no analytics at all.
• A text audit. We went over every event, encounter and line the crew say, looking for anything that didn't read like people talking: game words leaking into the fiction, openings that didn't match their outcomes, repeated tics.

What vibe coding taught me this time

Design docs first, code second. The trait overhaul started as a written plan that listed every existing trait with its upside and downside. It flagged the ones with no downside (free picks once visible) and the ones that were all downside (nobody would ever choose them). Only then did we build. The agent is fast enough that the slow part is deciding what you actually want, so it's worth writing that down.

Being willing to undo things. Hidden traits were a headline feature of the first post, and a day later they were gone. When rewriting costs minutes, not weeks, it's much easier to admit something isn't working.

Content scales when it's checked. Content nearly doubled in a day. That only works because every new encounter and event goes through the validator, which catches typos, unreachable branches, places nobody can mark on the chart, and outcomes that could never happen, and because the bots replay thousands of runs to show what the new content does to balance.

Play it

Star Trail runs in your browser on phone or desktop: startrail.greyden.games. Pick your four, watch the food, and try to get them all home.