Starship Simulator: The Demo

According to the science station on the bridge of the UNSF Magellan, the center of the galaxy is north of 25,000 light years away, it will take a bit less than four days to get there at our cruising speed of 2,000,000 times the speed of light, and there we will find either a gas dwarf planet or perhaps a terrestrial planet. It kept changing its mind.

Starship Simulator, currently live on Kickstarter with a demo available on Steam, has a simple premise: You’re on a starship. You have a job to do (if you want a job) — you can be the captain, the pilot, an engineer, or just a bartender, but every job on the ship is vital. You’re a member of the crew, and each one of you is necessary in some way to the safe operation of the ship. And, you can go anywhere in the galaxy.

The concept itself is enough to get anyone who grew up on the Enterprise D salivating. A tutorial takes you through the process of starting with a cold and dark starship and bringing up the fusion reactor, charging the batteries, powering the systems and finally turning the lights on on the bridge. As I went through the startup procedure, I was thinking — “Each one of these hundreds of devices can break. And probably will. Engineers gonna be BUSY.” In fact, they already had broken, since I’d been punching random buttons while waiting for the tutorial to catch up, and at the end of the procedure to cool the fusion coils down below 12K to trigger superconductivity, the temperature wasn’t going down. I had to trace the diagnostics back to the specific buttons I’d been playing with, set them correctly, and then shepherd the coils on their trip toward absolute zero.

I’d engineered. On a starship.

There are seven decks on the Magellan, making this quite a bit smaller than the Enterprise. The bottom two decks are devoted to engineering; living quarters, science labs, lounges, a hanger deck and various other to-be-implemented areas. The only other currently interesting bit of the ship available in the demo is up on the command deck.

They say that sitting in the captain’s chair for the first time changes you. It changed me. I’d had this idea of a starship captain being this unapproachable, unimpeachable vast reservoir of knowledge, diplomacy and authority. When I sat in the chair myself, I didn’t feel any of that. Turns out that what a captain does all day in the chair is decide if it’s time to turn on the disco lights yet.

Engage the glittery ball, captain!

From their station on the bridge, the science officer can scan planets and other objects in the system, check out the stellar neighborhood, and bring up the library computer’s information on any phenomena in range — and also add to it with new scans. The science officer can send likely candidates to the helm for the pilot to use in charting a course.

The game promises a fully realized simulation of our solar system and galaxy. This really is the weakest part of the demo.

Starship Simulator isn’t called Galaxy Simulator, for a reason. In the demo, the planets didn’t have moons, didn’t appear to move at all, actually. You can’t orbit a planet. A tutorial mission has you setting a course to Alpha Centauri, a binary star system fairly near to us, in stellar terms. Upon arriving — one star. We also have a fairly good idea about at least some of the planets in the system, but that didn’t seem to be translated here. Our actual closest neighbor sun, the red dwarf Proxima Centauri (the third star in the system, about a light year distant from the other two), wasn’t there at all. I was dubious at how well the game was going to simulate the galaxy.

From Earth, looking toward the center of galaxy shows a bright, glowing river of stars. The center of the galaxy in Starship Simulator is dark and barren. A single nebula corewards was the only obvious landmark along the way, and it was mysterious and beautiful and very three dimensional up close. That far from Sol, though, almost every planet was within 0.01 AU from its sun, which seemed a tad unrealistic.

As a member of the Magellan crew, you are assigned tasks on a first come/first serve basis. The only NPCs I saw in the demo were the engineering staff, who significantly didn’t rush to fix issues I caused when I went down there to play a little mischief, so I guess that’s not quite in yet.

In the actual game, you’ll be able to play the captain, setting the course of the ship and leading away missions. The pilot will pilot the ship and the shuttles, the science crew will take on assigned science tasks, medics will heal the sick, and so on. If you don’t do your job, maybe another NPC will, or just maybe you not holding up your part of the job will cause issues throughout the starship.

This is a game that cries out for VR (and that is a stretch goal for the Kickstarter campaign). Every button and switch is something you manually have to flip with your mouse at the moment. There are key mappings for common stuff you can do at the few working stations, but largely, you’ll have to get right up close and hit the buttons yourself.

This game could be amazing in multiplayer, and that is planned as well. This wouldn’t be the first multiplayer starship simulator, nor even the first one in VR. But this would be the first one where players and NPCs can share responsibilities, and the first one where the starship is simulated in such detail.

The developers have a very ambitious roadmap ahead of them. What they have so far is impressive, but what they have now is just a small fraction of the stuff they’re planning to release. It could be a long road ahead before they deliver on the promise.

But, it’s a good start.