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Starship Simulator is breathtaking in its ambition. And that might be putting it mildly. The premise of a completely accurate galaxy to fly around in a spacecraft is not novel. Elite Dangerous was doing that a decade ago, but somehow it seems no less a fantastic ambition now than it was back then.
Starship Simulator, its one-man dev team of Dan Govier and his indie games company Fleetyard Studios, has been active since the middle of 2022. The game has had a Steam page, its technical alpha demos have won awards, and anybody who, like me, has even the most passing of interest in Space sims has been insta-captivated by what this could turn out to be.
Ever since playing the original Elite, Interdictor Pilot, and Codename MAT on my Amstrad CPC back in the day I have loved games that let me fly around space. By the time I die, somebody needs to work out the percentage of my living days I spent in Elite Dangerous since backing it and Star Citizen at the same time in beta. It won’t be pretty.
If this turns out like I hope it does, things could get much worse. Here you are given your own starship to fly where you want, how you want and to discover and investigate what you want. Seen that before? Okay, however, where this is different is in the frankly scary levels of detail Govier has gone to, even at this early stage in modeling an entire starship – you can technically go behind every panel and find wiring, corridors, and piping, that all works.Â
Every button in the game seems to work. Gone are the days of graphical panels that are just assets to make it look pretty. Try pressing a few and hope you don’t accidentally turn all the oxygen off. Govier has designed the starship with an architect’s level of detail.
It’s impossible to sum up the scope of ambition here so watch the video. Fleetyard has just launched a very reasonable Kickstarter campaign to get it to the next level – we are not talking Star Citizen’s billions here, just a few thousand, and it is already being pre-backed heavily which is exciting for fans of the genre. You can see the Kickstarter here, but be sure to grab the demo from Steam and give it a spin.
