JShock Studios

Four Stripes: Pilot Career

Release notes

Every build that reached anybody, and what changed in it. These are the notes players see inside the game — nothing dressed up for the website.

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  1. 0.1.4 The Left Seat Current

    Added

    • Act III. Making captain used to be where the game stopped. It is now where it starts over: the seat you spent eleven years bidding for turns out to be a different job with the same controls. Nobody senior is coming to take the decision off you, somebody three feet away is learning the job from whatever you happen to do on a Tuesday, and every year of being comfortable is a year not spent building seniority somewhere bigger.
    • Sixteen events written for command, and none of them are about flying. A maintenance deferral at eleven at night that is legal and is not generous. A loadsheet that disagrees with the fuel slip by four hundred kilos, inside every tolerance except the one on the page. A passenger in row fourteen, with the nearest field forty minutes behind you and the destination eighty ahead. A first officer who is three trips from being let go, and a training department that will do whatever you write down.
    • A first officer of your own. Act II gave you a captain every month and measured what they made of you; the same machinery now points the other way, and what the person in the right seat takes away from the trip is the whole cost of several of these cards. One of them is the day you are the one who sets the wrong altitude and they are the one who catches it.
    • The comfort is real, because otherwise it is not a trap. The line you have been bidding for since you arrived — four days on, three off, home every night that is not a Tuesday — actually comes through. So does the money, finally, on something somebody at home stopped asking for years ago. Both of those are there so that leaving costs something.
    • And the pull arrives more than once. A pay scale somebody pins to the crew room wall, a classmate who went two years ago and says it was worth it, a recruiter who already has your hours to the nearest hundred because somebody you have flown with gave them your name.
    • A doctor who says one number twice, and writes the certificate anyway. Twenty years of treating the medical as a diary entry, and the first appointment where it is not.
    • The last page reads your captaincy. Every one of these decisions comes back in the ending, in the same voice that has been reading your career back to you since Act I.

    Changed

    • The left seat lasts about two years now, instead of nine months. The majors want considerably more time in command of a turbine than they used to, and that is time which only accrues once you are the one in command — so the act has room to be lived in rather than passed through. Careers run about a year longer overall because of it.
    • Nothing about a career already in progress changes. On the last build, being made captain was the ending, so nobody is sitting in a left seat waiting for this — it applies from the promotion onward, and it means the promotion is no longer the last thing that happens to you.

  2. 0.1.3 Somewhere Safe

    Added

    • Cloud saves, if you want them. Off until you turn them on, in Settings under This Career. Your careers are copied up at the end of each month, so a lost or replaced phone does not take eleven years with it — and the same career can be picked up on another device, iPhone or Android either way.
    • There is no account and no sign-in. You get a recovery code instead, which is the only thing that reaches your careers — write it down, because nobody can recover it for you, and that is the same reason we hold nothing that says who you are.
    • If another device has played further and this one has not, it catches up on its own. If both have played since they last agreed, you are asked which to keep. Nothing is ever overwritten without you saying so.
    • Send a career as a file. It goes to the usual share sheet, so it is AirDrop, or email, or Drive — and it opens on any phone or tablet on either platform. There is a button to open one back in, too.

    Changed

    • The career code is thirteen times smaller and there is a button to copy it. It used to be thirty-four thousand characters under the instruction "select all of this and copy it, every character matters", which is not something anybody can do on a phone.
    • The stripes sit beside the airplane on a shoulder board rather than floating above it, which also gives the screen back some room.

  3. 0.1.2 What It Costs

    Added

    • Money matters again after the airline hires you. A career used to end holding about $590,000 with everything already bought — there was nothing left to want by the fifth year, and a tester said so. Now there is somewhere for it to go and things that come and take it.
    • How you live, on the Life tab. A room in somebody else’s house, your own place, a house with a room nobody needs. It comes out every month for as long as you keep it and it slows how fast the people at home drift away — it never stops that drift, because no amount of money buys being there. It is a commitment against an income, not a purchase, and stepping back down costs you what it bought.
    • The bills. A mother who needs care, a roof that has been doing it for a while, four years of per diem across three states, and a marriage that has run out of road. They arrive once, they are large, and there is always a way to meet them — borrowing, or letting something go, both worse than paying. This is what the savings were for.
    • Three more storylines in the airline years: the base you are based at going away, the training department deciding it wants you, and the day something happens in the back and the captain asks what you think.
    • Where you came from matters again. Five new choices that only one background can take — the squadron’s form that goes in the same day, four sentences from a class nobody thought was worth the tuition, eleven words on a flight deck the way it gets said at gravel strips, a phone call to somebody who has been waiting most of your life to be asked.
    • The airline years can put something permanent in your file now. An altitude you descended through that nobody mentioned, and a form with a twenty-four hour window on it — file it and you are protected, say nothing and you are relying on nobody having looked.
    • Every action says what it does. Rest said fatigue "quietly degrades every roll in this game" and never said it takes twenty points off.

    Changed

    • Storylines no longer all happen to everybody. Two careers used to run the same threads in the same order with different answers; now about one in eight gets neither of the ones that were universal, and the whole set is cast from a pool.
    • The stripes and the airplane sit side by side, and the stripes are on a shoulder board rather than floating on the background.
    • The margins are gone on a phone. Two different edges — one for the bars, one for every panel — were spending 52 points of a 402-point screen.

    Fixed

    • An expiring medical is a banner across the top that you cannot scroll past. It is one of the ways this game ends, it arrives on a schedule you can read months ahead, and it was a paragraph inside a panel below a picture.
    • Landscape on an Android tablet, again. The instruments and the tabs were crammed into the left column with two thirds of the glass empty beside them, and the tab bar had collapsed into a small empty box.
    • A card headed "{captain} Has Been Here Nineteen Years", with the captain’s actual name in the paragraph underneath it.
    • "Third day of a four-day" — of a four-day *what*. Crews say it as a noun and nobody else does.

  4. 0.1.1 The Long Wait

    Added

    • Four things to do with a first officer’s month. Pick up an open trip or give one away — the only way to buy time in this job is to sell the flying. Ask the training department for a simulator slot nobody made you take, and show up early to learn the names. The last two move the half of a command upgrade that is not the seniority list, which is the half you can actually do something about.
    • Two things worth buying once the salary starts. A crash pad near the base gives you back a week a month you were spending in transit, and command preparation buys down the wait for the left seat. The act used to hand you money and nothing to spend it on.
    • Ten more events for the airline years, six of them written to fire in an ordinary month — a go-around, eleventh in the de-ice queue, a dent that is not in the logbook, deadheading in row 24. Of twenty-three cards before, the median month had exactly one you were eligible for, so that card is what you got, every time. It is six now.
    • A story that runs three cards deep, across years. Somebody you fly with is struggling; what you do about it decides what you find out later, and what you find out later decides how it ends. Five different ways, and the last page remembers which one.
    • Your file. Not a score — a list. An incident, a certificate action, a suspension: the things that go in the records every airline pulls before they will talk to you. It never comes off, it is read differently as it ages, and no amount of showing up early fixes it. It is in the Logbook, and for most careers it says "nothing on it", which is the point.

    Changed

    • The game speaks American English now. It is set in the United States, at American carriers, under FAA rules, and it had been written in British English throughout — the airplane, the license and the color of the sky all carried the other country’s spelling, and an afternoon was flown in the circuit rather than the pattern. 229 changes, and the one that started it was a tester finding the same word spelled two different ways on a single screen.
    • The way back to the main menu is a button in the footer of the Settings menu, next to Done, instead of "Switch career" folded three taps deep inside a section. Your career is saved the whole time and will be exactly where you left it.
    • Every job says what it fills. Pipeline Patrol is cross-country; Night Freight is multi-engine, cross-country, night, instrument and turbine; Banner Towing is hours and little else. Essentially your whole logbook comes from working, and the game used to make you check another tab to find out which columns.
    • The Act I actions stop when an airline hires you. Renting a 172 and working an FBO ramp for $1,200 against a salary was cluttering the one screen you look at every month.

    Fixed

    • Landscape. The app declared itself portrait-only, so an Android tablet turned sideways was letterboxed into a portrait window with wallpaper down both sides — and the wide two-pane layout, shipped two versions ago, had never once been reachable on a real device. Underneath it, the tablet threshold was measured off iPads and matched no Android tablet at all.
    • A dark navy splash screen handing over to a cream app on every cold start, a dark keyboard under a light app, and a splash icon that turned out to have been navy-on-navy the whole time.
    • A card headed "{captain} Has Been Here Nineteen Years", with the captain’s actual name in the paragraph underneath.
    • The medical said "free" and charged up to $210.
    • "You need 50 more hours of instructing — use Build Time." Build Time cannot log instruction given. Only the instructing job can, and a tester went and looked.
    • Pronoun buttons on the character screen are capitalized, and They/Them no longer wraps to a second line and leaves the three at different heights.
    • A feedback report from this build says which build it came from. Every 0.1.0 report said "build 0".

  5. 0.1.0 The Right Seat

    Added

    • Act II. The game no longer ends when you get the license — it ends when somebody puts you in the left seat. That is roughly another seven years of career, and it is a different game with the same controls: you finally have a salary, and what you lack is a number on a list.
    • Ten airlines, and none of them are real. Bush operators, three regionals, low-cost majors, legacy carriers with widebodies. Each publishes what it wants from you — hours, turbine time, and a reputation — years before you can meet it. You do not choose a route or an airplane. You choose who is worth making yourself employable by, and they decide the rest.
    • A seniority number, and everything that hangs off it. You join at the bottom. It improves for exactly one reason: people above you leave. It decides whether you hold a line or sit reserve waiting for a phone call at four in the morning, whether you get the days you asked for, and when they will train you for command. And it does not travel — move companies and you start at the bottom of theirs.
    • Bidding. Every month you put in for what you want: a high-time line, short trips and nights at home, or whatever comes. Seniority decides whether you get it. At the bottom of the list nobody is asking you at all.
    • Type ratings, and somebody else paying for them. An airline puts you on a jet that costs tens of thousands to train you on. The rating is yours permanently, whoever paid — but the training contract is real, and leaving early means writing them a check for the part you did not serve.
    • Furloughs. The company puts you on the street for reasons that have nothing to do with you. You keep every hour, every rating and every type. What you lose is the seniority. Sometimes there are six months of notice and sometimes there is none at all.
    • A crew. Six captains at each company, and one of them every month — the exacting one who briefs everything twice, the generous one who hands you the hard legs, the one who has been here nineteen years and tells you about all of them. What they make of you is not your reputation on the field. It is narrower, and it matters more.
    • Events happen in two beats now. The card asks; a second card tells you what happened and what it cost, itemised. Every number used to move off screen, so a choice that took four points of standing and a thousand dollars read exactly like one that cost nothing.
    • Twenty-three new events for the airline years, and two of them are answers to promises Act I made you years earlier.
    • A picture of your career — the stripes on your sleeve and the airplane you fly, both drawn from your save. Watch the sleeve.

    Changed

    • A tablet in landscape finally uses the screen. The pinned column is wider and now carries what you would otherwise change tabs to read: what to do next, who you are flying with, and the last few things that happened.
    • Reputation decides which airlines will have you. All three regionals want the same hours, so the only thing between them is whether they will take your call. The best one will not, for a while.
    • Command is a seniority award, but somebody still has to put you up for it. The list reaching you makes you eligible. What the people you fly with think of you decides how long after that it takes.
    • A bad safety record can now cost you the certificate. Everything it cost before — health, standing, money — grows back. Months on the ground do not.
    • The Flight tab knows which act you are in, and stops telling an airline first officer that the regionals are hiring.

    Fixed

    • The Career tab used to point you at airlines this build cannot reach, and quote a requirement you could never meet.
    • Act I’s events kept firing after an airline hired you — a regional first officer being called into a chief pilot’s office over a story written for a student.
    • Running out of money was supposed to be able to end a career and could not.
    • Your name no longer gets cut off, the widebody no longer has four engines, and the night freight twin no longer logs turbine time it could not possibly have.

  6. 0.0.5 Less Menu, More Cockpit

    Added

    • Difficulty can be changed after a career has started, and it now says which one you are on. It was picked once at the beginning — before you knew what any of it meant — and then never shown again. Changing it applies from that month on and takes nothing back.
    • Everything you can buy now says what it actually does: how much cheaper renting gets, how much slower your health falls, how much less each thing tires you. The descriptions were doing all the work and none of them mentioned a number.
    • The full career ladder is a popout now, opened from the Career tab.

    Changed

    • The Career and Life tabs are roughly half as long. The ladder moved into its popout, and the panels you read once — the clock, your stats, the people on the field, your background — fold away behind their headings. Anything with a deadline in it stays open.
    • Settings is sorted into sections that open one at a time, so the whole menu fits on screen instead of being scrolled through.
    • Send feedback and moving a career to another device are in Settings now, alongside switching careers. They were at the bottom of the help screen, behind the glossary, which is a strange place to keep two buttons that do something.
    • The game is laid out as five acts rather than two. Act I is the one you can play; the rest are named and described so it is clear what is coming and in what order, instead of implying it all arrives at once.
    • Pronouns have to be chosen rather than starting on they/them. It was a decision being made for you that was easy to walk straight past.

    Fixed

    • Your name no longer gets cut off at the top of the screen on a phone.
    • Running out of money can now actually end a career. It was meant to, and could not — the condition asked for a debt larger than any career ever reaches, so the ending was unreachable rather than rare. Playing well is unaffected; this only catches a career that has genuinely stopped.

  7. 0.0.4 Three Careers

    Added

    • Three career slots. The backgrounds are genuinely different runs — a military convert and someone who never went to university are not playing the same game — and until now trying another one meant destroying the career you cared about. Your existing career is Career 1 and has not been touched.
    • Fatigue and health now sit permanently at the top of the screen, next to your time units. People kept opening the Life tab just to read fatigue before deciding whether to take one more trip, which is a tab change to answer a question you have every month.
    • A colorblind-friendly setting. This game says a lot with green for good and red for bad, which is the one pair that disappears for the most common kind of colorblindness. Turning it on moves that onto blue and orange instead.
    • Turned sideways on a tablet, the game now uses the whole screen: your instruments, End Month and the tabs move into a column down the side instead of eating the space above and below.
    • A small line of numbers under the tabs describing your career in shorthand, so a screenshot of a problem tells us everything we need without a round of twenty questions. It can be switched off in Settings, but please leave it on while testing.

    Changed

    • An ended career can be kept. You can leave it where it is, go back to your careers, and read the ending again later instead of only starting over.
    • If something goes wrong that does not crash the game outright, it is now recorded and attached to your feedback — the kind of failure that used to look like a button simply not working.

    Fixed

    • A rating could show as finished and still refuse to let you take the checkride — 15 of 15 training hours, a full bar, and the game asking for one more hour. Flight time builds up in fractions, and the display was rounding 14.96 up to 15 while the rule underneath was not. The two now agree, and the hours are shown to one decimal so you can see exactly where you are.
    • Being told you needed a whole extra hour of training when you were a tenth of an hour short.
    • On Android, the top of the screen no longer sits underneath the clock and battery icons.
    • The ending said "He were pleased" for anyone who had not chosen they/them.
    • The pilot name at the top no longer pushes the screen sideways on smaller phones.

  8. 0.0.3 Start Here

    Changed

    • The button that starts your career is much harder to miss. It was styled the same way as the pronoun, background and difficulty options above it, so once you had chosen those, it looked like a fourth thing you had already picked rather than the way in.
    • While it is still grayed out, it now tells you what is actually missing instead of always asking for both a name and a background when you have already given one of them.

  9. 0.0.2 Ways To Not Make It

    Added

    • You can leave aviation. Until now the only way a career ended was the license, a failed medical, or turning sixty-five — so you could be broke at forty with a commercial certificate you could not afford to use, and the game would just keep going. There are now six endings and only one of them is the license.
    • Careers can also end without you choosing it: run out of money for long enough, or fail enough checkrides that nobody will put you up for another one. Neither happens suddenly, and both give you plenty of warning.
    • A difficulty setting. Forgiving, As It Is, or Unforgiving — it changes the bills, the wear on you, how much benefit of the doubt an examiner gives, and how often a week goes wrong. It does not change the license you are working toward.
    • A light theme, and it is now the default. There is still a dark one, and a setting to follow whatever your phone does.
    • A settings menu: theme, whether to warn you before ending a month with time unspent, and whether to show the teaching cards — including a way to see them all again from the start.
    • The interface ages with you. You start out working off a battered paper kneeboard and end up holding something with a company asset tag on it.
    • If the game ever breaks, it now says so properly instead of showing you nothing — and hands you your career as a code you can send to us, so the exact problem can be looked at rather than guessed at.

    Changed

    • End Month is on every screen now, not just Flight. You decide to end a month while looking at a job or an upgrade, and having to walk back to another tab first was silly.
    • The name field shows an example, because it was not clear whether it wanted a first name or a full one. Either works.
    • Published by JShock Studios. The in-app feedback button now goes to support@jshockstudios.com, which is the address in our privacy policy.

    Fixed

    • A career could be left in a state the game could not draw, which meant it would fail to open and stay that way. Saves are now repaired on loading instead.
    • Careers made in older versions carry forward correctly rather than arriving grounded on a rule they never played under.

  10. 0.0.1 Act I

    Added

    • The whole of Act I: start as a broke student pilot and get as far as an airline transport license, which is the certificate an airline cockpit requires. Roughly two to five years depending on where you started.
    • Five backgrounds that change the route rather than just the numbers. Each sets your starting age, and retirement is fixed at sixty-five — a late start is a real and permanent cost, and no amount of money buys the years back.
    • Real certificates in the real order: private, instrument, commercial, multi-engine, instructor, airline transport. Each needs a written exam, training hours, and a checkride — and the airline license needs an age and a course as well as the hours.
    • Checkrides are played. An examiner hands you a scenario and you build the response in order against a clock — knowledge hides wrong options, composure buys seconds, airmanship forgives ordering slips. There is a "fly it by the book" button if you would rather not tap.
    • Seven flying jobs, from towing banners over a beach to single-pilot night freight. The pay is not the point; each fills a different column of your logbook, and some fill none of the ones you need.
    • A logbook that tells the truth. Total hours are not the qualification — the columns are. You can pass fifteen hundred hours and still be a year away from an airline.
    • A medical certificate that expires, and an examiner who can defer rather than sign. The certificate never expires; the medical does, constantly, and losing it ends everything overnight.
    • Currency. Stop flying for a few months and you are no longer legal to carry anyone, whatever your logbook says. The regulation does not care why you stopped.
    • People who drift when you ignore them, at different speeds depending on temperament, and who leave for good if you let them reach zero.
    • An instructor, a chief pilot and someone you trained alongside — named, with opinions about you that are not the same thing as your reputation.
    • Decisions about weather, tired aircraft and duty days that are legal but not safe. The game is keeping score, will never show you the number, and will send the bill months later from a direction you were not watching.
    • Consequences that remember. The student you signed off when you had doubts, the student you refused to sign off, the night you called in fatigued — all of it comes back, and your career ends by telling you what it added up to.
    • Things worth buying once: a share in a club airplane, a home simulator, a room on the airfield, a headset that lets you land able to think.
    • A career transfer code, so a career can move between a phone, a tablet, or iOS and Android.