How do you simulate something that doesn’t actually exist in real life yet? Well, if you’re indie developer Fleetyard Studios, you start creating a title that marries some of the favorite parts of internet spaceship titles together into one. This is the ambition of Starship Simulator, which is looking to combine “fully simulated, realistically designed starships with a full-scale Milky Way galaxy, driven by real astrophysics.”
As the simulator portion of the game’s name suggests, Starship Simulator is doing its level best to build as realistic of a starship as possible, including a carefully planned structural framework, fully simulated systems that manage things like power, and a detailed damage model. As for gameplay, it’s all about exploration, whether it’s scanning stars in the galaxy for possible discoveries and plotting a course or simply aiming the nose of the ship in a direction and hitting the FTL drive.
The game will let players take up several individual roles, whether it’s captain, engineering, or even a simple passenger, while other roles will be taken up by AI crewmates, meaning players can completely ignore engineering gameplay and let the bots handle it, though Starship promises all roles will have depth. As for scale, Starship is session-based and built for a small group of players flying around space, not creating an MMO galaxy.
Players can run into cosmic phenomena, new planets, or new alien life from the simple to the spacefaring, all of which procedurally generate in a 1:1 replica of the Milky Way. Ships can be deeply customized, from light colors to materials of floors and panels, and every object aboard can be interacted with.
As one might reasonably expect, there’s a whole lot of skepticism around Fleetyard’s scope here, along with questions about its Kickstarter ask of $82K to make it happen. Replies from lead devs say that Starship already has its main features ready, so it’s a matter of fleshing them out and polishing it, while the Kickstarter page says funding will go towards getting a minimum viable early access build released; this stated alpha version of the game will include the full procedural galaxy, full roles implemented along with a full NPC crew to fill in the blanks, the ability to probe planets for resources, and procedurally generated alien races.
The game is already on Steam with a playable demo for those who are curious, while the crowdfunding total has crested $250K with 20 days left at the time of this writing. A video presentation with lead dev Dan Govier is also available to watch below.
