You Don't Feed the Crew, the Supply Chain Does

Still no name. Still taking suggestions. The naming poll lives here.

Twenty-three commits today. Two completely different fronts. That’s worth explaining, because from the outside it probably looks scattered.

Two tracks, one reason

On one hand: asteroid belt rendering, mineral readouts on planets, scanning interactions, derelict interiors. Visual stuff. On the other: save/load, faction NPCs with reputation, settlement trading, a First Contact scenario with milestone tracking. Gameplay stuff.

The natural advice is “get mechanics working first, make it pretty later.” I’m not ignoring that — I’m just not doing pretty. These visuals aren’t polish. They’re the functional layer for how things actually get displayed. I’m still building how the game programmatically shows you things. How sprites get created and attached to real objects in the world. Without that, the gameplay systems exist but you can’t see them doing anything. So they go together. The “pretty” pass is later. Right now it’s workable placeholders all the way down.

What this game actually is

I’ve been cagey about this because it’s still forming, but here’s the shape of it:

This is a roguelike where you’re in a position of authority. You’re a captain. You can convince people to follow you. You can convince them to build factories and towns for you. You don’t have to take care of them, though — the simulation does that. If the capacity to get food or grow it exists somewhere, it just happens. If it doesn’t, things get wiped out. That’s not your fault. That’s a supply chain failure, and those happen.

You’re out there exploring. Everything else exists to help you do that. Economies exist so you can retrofit and repair. Assuming there’s an economy in the system you’re in, obviously. And if there isn’t — if you’ve got the resources and the charisma — you can set up your own base somewhere. Convince people to staff it. It becomes a new point of interest on the map. That part’s future work, but that’s the direction.

Death is a hat

“Roguelike” usually means permadeath. Here it’s more like succession. Until everyone on the ship is dead, there’s someone to command. The captain is the player, but that hat moves around. You die, someone else picks it up. That gives you a kind of “lives” stat you can burn through and still manage to crawl back to a shipyard to fix up, resupply, hire new crew.

When the last person dies, that’s it. Run over.

First Contact

The First Contact scenario is the beginning of actual narrative structure. The premise: it’s been long enough — twenty thousand years — that nobody really remembers the old order. So when you leave your system to explore, this is genuinely net new. Humanity getting warp-capable again after a long dark age, stepping out into a universe that kept going without them.

There’s an interesting edge case we haven’t solved yet: it’s possible we’ll generate NPCs that are older than that gap. Beings that remember the old order when nobody else does. How that interaction works — what they know, what they think of you, what it means to meet someone who remembers the world before the collapse — that’s going to need its own design pass.

The actual work

In concrete terms, today looked like this:

And design docs for save systems, settlement interaction, and downtime mechanics. Because at some point you have to write down what you’re doing or you forget what you decided.

Baby steps. But a lot of them, all at once. Everything, Everywhere, All at once. lol.