Hey everyone! Stuart & Hollister here, the creators of the April Fools’ demo.

Now that it’s been a couple of months in the wild, we feel we can finally spill the beans on all the secrets in our game.



If you never got to play it, please check it out for yourselves. We’ve even updated it with a Linux build!

(And for those of you with older versions of OpenGL, we hope to release a compatibility update soon!)



We loved watching the community’s progress on our Discord and reading your comments across our social pages. Did you know it took less than 24 hours for some in the community to find the innermost secrets of the demo? That is some serious detective work!



We also transferred over 200GiB for the installers, which is more than 2000 demos total. And most of that traffic was within the first two weeks!



For those who may not have discovered everything, we present our official Starry Expanse Demo Game Guide™

** SPOILERS AHEAD **

Chaotic Good

Our character select screen is probably the first clue that the demo is not what it seems. Choosing Atrus or Gehn will play their respective themes in-game. Clicking on the viewer at the end of the walkway will animate the dome opening… as a helicopter. Inside the dome is a cone gun. It is very underpowered so you can behold the cone physics. Clicking the button at the end of the catwalk extends the drawbridge to the map room. Clicking the map room control will spawn a pin mesh. Clicking it a hundred more times will spawn a hundred more pin meshes. They also have physics which is wonderful to watch. There are 4 (it was supposed to be 5 but we didn’t finish the last one 🙁 ) ads that display randomly on the bottom of the screen. Walk to the end of the Cone Garden to encounter a paywall.

Chaotic Neutral

Jump is linked to score. Reach twenty to jump one more. Fly into the sky. You can find the Atrus hot air balloon by jumping as much as you can in Spike Garden. Clicking 25 times on any character’s avatar whilst in-game will trigger a character-specific animation: Atrus spawns donuts which spill onto the walkway because physics.

Gehn spawns a Wahrk that jumps over his head. It was supposed to despawn after the animation but to ensure we didn’t miss the April first deadline, it got past our non-existent 2AM QA checks. Click on the “Buy Gehn Tokens” buttons on the paywall and you’ll be taken to a page on our website claiming we are scamming you (we’re not!). Proceed anyway and you’ll be taken to a page that gives a random hint.

Chaotic Evil

The health suicide bar only works by clicking and dragging. Drag to zero to commit suicide. Clicking New Game and Back a ridiculous amount of times will slowly break the start screen until you hit the Super Miller Bros version, otherwise known as New Game+ (or NG+ for short). Once NG+ is unlocked you may play as Rand or Robyn. They have some amazing character art that is designed to glitch out, accompanied with some quality 8-bit ambience. In NG+, the Wahrk totems will watch you wherever you go. Clicking 25 times on NG+ character’s avatars whilst in-game will trigger a character-specific animation: Rand spawns a VR headset and exclaims his love for VR.

Robyn spawns a Korg keyboard that falls on his head. Physics just adds so much realism to the game, you know? The spikes in Spike Garden will be covered in cones in NG+ mode. The paywall at the end of Spike Garden will be a physical “pay wall” in NG+ mode (patent pending).

Thank you to everyone for playing our demo. We had a great time making it, learned some very useful things, and even made some assets that may end up in the final game!

But most rewarding was watching the community come together to find the easter eggs we hid for you. Thank you for making it special!

