Firstlight
A space strategy and trade sim, in Unreal Engine 5.
First playable in progress
Target:
The economy doesn't wait for you
Colonies make things and use things up. When one runs short, a freight job shows up on its own, a real ship picks up real cargo and flies it there, and the price moves when it lands. Or it doesn't land, because pirates got to it first.
You can send a patrol to cover a raid or let it go. Either way the journal tells you what happened, why, and what it cost. Nothing gets hidden behind flavor text.
The sim doesn't know Unreal exists
The game is split in two layers. The sim is plain C++ with no engine in it. Unreal draws it, takes input, and runs the UI, and the only way between them is one bridge.
- Unreal Engine 5 Rendering, input, UI, the galaxy you actually look at
FSimBridge, the only connection between the two layers- The sim Markets, colonies, freight, raids, combat, travel. Plain C++, no engine
- Same seed, same galaxy.The sim is deterministic, which already caught bugs that would have been invisible otherwise.
- Around 490 headless checks.The whole economy runs in a console window. The suite runs before anything gets pushed.
- No editor needed to test it.That's the biggest reason the project moves at all.
Where it's at
- M0Project skeleton, sim tested headlessDone
- M1Freight: cargo is physicalDone
- M2The economy runs without the playerDone
- M3Pirate raids on cargo in transitDone
- M4Vertical slice, start to finish in the editorDone
- M5Multiple star systems and jumping between themDone
- M6Combat that resolves when nobody's watchingDone
- M7Tactical layer: formation commands mid-battleDone
- FPFirst playableIn progress
- VS1Playable slice: final art, audio, onboarding, outside playtestLater
First playable is the first build where you click New Game and play the whole loop without touching the console. About 15 to 20 minutes:
- Start a new game on a frontier colony that's short on fuel.
- Send a freighter from a neighbouring colony, with a real route and travel time.
- A raid warning pops up on it. Send the patrol or ignore it.
- The cargo lands or it doesn't, and the price reacts.
- Jump to a second system.
- End screen: what changed, what you did, what it cost.
Ugly is fine. Missing is not.
From my first playable notes. Status as of . Dates are targets, not promises.
Concept art
Screenshots
[placeholder: screenshots, once the first playable exists]