StarWorks

StarWorks is a game about building spacecraft and the industry behind them. You start on an empty site on a planet, you mine ore, you refine it, and you use it to manufacture the parts of the rockets you assemble. Then you launch.

Nothing here is scripted: orbits are integrated, aerodynamics are solved on the real shape of your vehicle, and the ground your landing gear touches is the same ground physics sees.

Assemble it, stage it, and find out in flight why it tumbles

The design office gives you a parts palette, symmetry up to eightfold, staging you reorder line by line, a fairing you draw by hand around the payload, and a readout of the centres of mass and pressure. Nothing in there validates a craft for you: the flight decides.

Aerodynamics that know the shape of your craft

Every part is run offline through a solver that samples the incoming airflow direction across a full grid and produces a table of forces and moments. In flight your vehicle has a real centre of pressure, a real angle of attack, real stability — and a badly balanced rocket tumbles, without any rule having decided it should.

Build the chain that gets you to orbit

Mines, furnaces, electrolysers, presses, centrifuges, conveyors, a power grid, warehouses, an assembly hall, a launch pad. A rocket does not appear from a menu: it is produced, out of metal you extracted, by a factory you placed and powered. Distant sites trade freight over routes you open.

Step outside the ship

You walk out on foot, you climb into the cockpit, you fly from the pilot's seat with instruments you read and controls you touch. The terrain is real fractal relief, with grass, dust and cast shadows — not a texture under your boots.

One solar system, then the others

Procedural planets with atmospheres and rings, atmospheric reentry with heating and plasma, manoeuvres planned ahead of time, time warp, docking. The distances are true, all the way out to the neighbouring stars.

Written for this

An in-house engine in C++20 and Vulkan. No generic engine: positional precision, the scale of the distances and the fixed-step simulation are architectural decisions, not settings.