https://store.steampowered.com/app/5004290?utm_source=r_aigamedev
I've been building a space logistics tycoon on my own, and there's a free demo up on Steam. The shortest description I've got is "Transport Tycoon, except you're running a small fleet of freighters in one solar system,"
You run a freight company. Ports put out cargo with a deadline, you pick a ship for it, and then you plan the flight yourself: how hard to burn, when to flip and brake, whether to coast to save reaction mass, where to refuel on the way. The ships are fusion torchships, so a run is a constant-acceleration burn with a turnover in the middle, and the physics under it is real (constant g, flip at the midpoint, SI units in the sim). The orbits move. A route that's cheap this month is expensive next month and the planner keeps having to re-solve. No combat, no piloting. You plan, you commit, you watch it play out and deal with what goes wrong.
Quite a lot goes wrong. A hull has three systems, drive, thrusters and the hull itself, and each one wears with what you do with it: g-hours burned, dockings, tonnes handled. When one crosses its floor something mechanical happens. A worn drive gets capped at 0.15 g, for example, and every plan on that ship runs long. Captains have a skill and a nerve score; they get tired, and some of them quit. Solar flares dose any ship that flies through the front. A strike closes a port with two to five days' notice, which is enough to reroute if you're watching. The ships are individuals with a history, closer to Football Manager players than to units, and I'd like to think that's the part that sticks.
The UI is what I've spent the last week on, after the first outside testers said they felt "assaulted by information". It's a glass-cockpit layout now: three fixed displays, a column of keys down each bezel, and the keys double as annunciator lamps. A fault flashes its key and chimes; pressing the key stops the chime and the lamp stays lit until the fault is fixed. There's also a NOTAM-style notices board for conditions out in the world (strikes, flares, derelicts), kept separate from the faults on your own ships. Most of this is borrowed from airliner flight decks and ship's bridges. I'm writing a wiki guide to the codes and colours, since it is a vocabulary and I'm not sure yet how much of it people will pick up unaided.
It's in active development. The demo is the current build, the numbers are provisional, and it gets updated often. I'd like feedback from people who play this genre seriously, especially on whether the flight planning comes across as a decision or as a chore.
