The 1.0 launch of Young Suns is now live on XBOX for PC, XBOX Series X|S, and XBOX One! We’re so excited to share this major update with you all, and are so grateful to everyone who took the time to check out the world of Young Suns and support this project with feedback.

Young Suns surprise launched into Game Preview last year, and we were excited, but nervous! Each project we’ve worked on has been larger than the last, and Young Suns was no different. We, of course, want the game to do well, but more importantly, we want the game to mean something to people, just like Goodbye Volcano High.

Our time in Game Preview taught us a lot! Most surprising and exciting was how much you all loved the world of Young Suns, even when much of it was still in development. We got our fair share of constructive criticism, too, which helped a ton in reworking the game for 1.0.

When developing a game, it’s so easy to get wrapped up in tiny details that players might not see, while overlooking what seems like obvious quality of life fixes from the outside. Pretty quickly, players ran into an issue of overflowing backpacks and inventory, and nothing to do with extra items, which makes traversing the Junk Drawer difficult. With feedback from players, we developed donation boxes and implemented item stacking, helping sundogs free up space and earn gratitude in exchange for donating to the common good.

Another crucial piece of player feedback was including more masculine hair styles. While our character creator isn’t gendered, we still wanted to provide a wide variety of options for everyone. Our goal is for anyone to be able to create themselves in Young Suns, and we’re off to a pretty good start! We’ve added some shorter hairstyles and are still at work finalizing more that we can’t wait to share.

What we can share, however, are all of the huge changes in 1.0!

One of our favorite features of 1.0 are the new xenofauna—that’s right, little guys for you to meet on your travels! With the new Analyzer tool, you’ll be able to scan xenofauna to unlock entries about them in your Jovipedia, an encyclopedia located right in your scroll. As you explore, more entries will pop up, giving you the finer details on the world around you. There’s so much to learn about the history of Young Suns, and we’re eager for players to dig in. Like another famous online encyclopedia, there are some…passionate disagreements among editors for you to discover!

While we were in Game Preview, we worked hard on implementing thousands of lines of dialogue into the game and integrating our first bits of quest content (with more to come!). You’ll meet former revolutionaries who are trying to figure out a world they weren’t sure they’d live to see, navigate lingering friction between former friends, and help make society better for everyone.

1.0 also introduces our brand new Job Board. Here, you’ll be able to choose from a variety of tasks your fellow Jovians need help with, including daily and weekly jobs tied to a real-world clock, taking you all over the Junk Drawer.

Our quest content will also introduce you to the stories of our dynamic characters, like Bea, a former ecoterrorist who was forced into cryosleep during the revolution; Andrea, an affable farm technician who’ll regale you with the potential of human composting; and Gus, a descendant of revolutionary pirates and expert at jailbreaking old corporation tech.

The Junk Drawer itself has even gotten an update, featuring twelve new moonlets to explore! Our artists are out of this world (hehe), and they’ve really upgraded the environments. The KO_OP Slack is regularly filled with screenshots from our internal playtests of just how dang pretty this game is and how good it feels to be in it. It can be hard to not stop while flying through the Junk Drawer to marvel at the sky.

We really wanted to create a universe that felt welcoming, rather than cold and harsh, and you can see this reflected in the vibrancy of the universe we built. Moonlets are teeming with life, abandoned stations are awash in bright colors with characters tinkering away to bring them back to functionality, and space itself is full of resources to collect as you make your way through the stars.

Finally, we’ve completely overhauled our economy, adding 50 new items, adjusting how many resources drop and how often, increasing the amount of loose resources you can find on the surface of moonlets, and tweaking recipes to make them challenging, not grind-y.

Building out our decorations in Young Suns can be a bit of a challenge at times. We don’t want things to feel too unfamiliar, but we do want them to feel like a natural progression of various designs. When concepting, we looked at all kinds of resources from retro-futurism to modular art to Bauhaus to pieces we just plain like and would put in our houses ourselves. We even took photos of objects we came across in the real world for inspiration.

We’ve created some new furniture sets for you to decorate with, as well as a new upgrade system to expand your ship, giving you several new rooms to create the perfect reading nook, rearrange a messy living room, and make a space that’s totally unique to you.

“But what about Steam?” you might be wondering! While we’re not revealing the release date JUST yet, we can share that Young Suns will be coming to Steam later this fall in Early Access!

“Why Early Access?” you might subsequently be wondering. Well, some of the answer is boring behind-the-scenes exclusivity stuff, but the more important answer is that Young Suns is constantly growing and expanding thanks to player feedback and our own finalization of core systems, and Early Access helps us reflect that. Our Steam launch will also introduce an expanded quest system that focuses on character bonds and arcs! There’s so much we want to do with Young Suns, and we’re thrilled to take this journey with you.

We hope that you’ll check out Young Suns on XBOX or give us a wishlist over on Steam (it helps us a ton!), and maybe tell a friend or two about it. We’re one of the only predominately queer and trans-led co-operative studios, and your support directly helps us keep doing what we’re doing!

Have fun with the 1.0 launch, sundogs, and talk again soon!