Everything in this game that is not mine is on this page. The people who flew it early, the fixes they turned up, and every third party whose work is in the build.
The people who flew it before it was ready and told me the truth about it. Nobody else on this project is credited by name, including me. This list is the exception, because it is the only work in here that is not mine.
Everyone on it appears under a callsign they chose themselves. Not a real name, not a handle from somewhere else — a callsign, picked for this. That is not me being coy on their behalf. It is the same rule I hold myself to, and it would be a strange thing to keep for myself and spend on somebody who is doing me a favour.
If you are on this list and would rather not be, or your callsign is wrong, write to salvoradrift@gmail.com and it changes the same day.
Applications are open on the playtest page.
Credit on this page under your callsign, for as long as the page exists. Every fix that came out of something you found is marked with your callsign in the work orders, permanently, including after release. And the build, early, with the rough edges still on it.
That is the whole offer. There is no money in this yet and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
What changed, build by build, newest first. Anything a tester found carries their callsign on the line, and keeps it — including after release.
Every line here is written from a record made at the time the build shipped. If a fix came out of a tester's report, that report's reference is on it, and the callsign gets printed next to the fix. Nothing on this page is reconstructed after the fact, because a changelog written from memory reads exactly as true as one that is not.
Nine tracks, generated with Suno and produced for this game and nothing else. The rotation changes — titles come out of it as well as into it — and when one goes it gets said here rather than quietly disappearing.
The last seven drift through flight on long crossfades. It is a lonely game and it should sound like one.
Thirty eight effects in the build. The library is licensed; the picking and the cutting are mine, one sound at a time out of hundreds auditioned.
Nothing shipped raw. Every effect was levelled to a broadcast loudness standard, trimmed at the front so it fires on the frame rather than just after it, stripped of its metadata and verified before it went in. The cutting torch and the repair shimmer were rebuilt at the sample level so they loop without a click.
There is no ambient bed anywhere in the game. They were built and then deleted on purpose. The game breathes in silence and score, and the only loops still running are things you are doing rather than things around you.
Original, all of it, from the project's own render pipeline. There is no art folder. Ships, stations, planets, the galaxy disc, turrets, drones and debris are all generated by code — geometry defined mathematically, lit and ray marched, then baked to sprites and embedded in the build. Delete every image on my hard drive and the game looks identical.
Original. No third party libraries ship in the build. One file, no bundler, no package manager, nothing to rot in five years when some dependency goes offline.
The code was written with AI tools and I would rather say that myself than have somebody find it. The design is the part that is mine, and the build log is nineteen chapters of it. That page walks through every system and why it works the way it does.
The game is signed by THE OPERATOR, and the author of SALVOR ADRIFT is the project rather than a person. That is deliberate and it is not changing.
The dedication is on the about page, where it belongs. It is not credits and it is not marketing.
— THE OPERATOR o7