Stapledon's Voyage
Travel as fast as you like. Live with the consequences.
You are the first traveller with a drive that can push a ship arbitrarily close to the speed of light. There is no faster-than-light travel, no FTL messaging and no time travel: only real relativistic time dilation. You have 100 subjective years aboard your ship.
Every journey is a trade. Pick a destination and a cruise speed between 0.9c and 0.999999c. The faster you go, the less time passes for you, and the more centuries pass for everyone else. The galaxy you leave is not the galaxy you come back to.
The game is named after Olaf Stapledon, author of Star Maker and Last and First Men: vast timescales, philosophical exploration, and the feeling that individual choices are tiny against deep time, yet still consequential.
The pillars
These come from the design repo's core pillars. Every feature has to serve at least one.
| Pillar | In one line |
|---|---|
| Choices are final | No saves, no reloads. A committed journey cannot be undone. |
| The game doesn't judge | It shows consequences, not morals. You find the meaning. |
| Time has emotional weight | Time dilation means loss, isolation and treasuring what remains. |
| The ship is home | A crew gives human scale against cosmic alienation. |
| Grounded strangeness | Aliens are scientifically plausible and as diverse as possible. |
Hard SF, with one admitted hand-wave
The ship travels inside a Higgs bubble, the one piece of invented physics. It is defined by three properties, and everything it implies is derived exactly (the bubble canon). Everything else on screen is real special and general relativity, held to a normative spec with numbered check values (the physics).
That makes the game a physics lesson you can fly. At 0.99c the stars crowd ahead and turn blue-white, the sky behind goes black, your clock runs 7.09 times slower than Earth's, and the numbers on the screen are the ones you would compute by hand.
What exists today, and what is planned
The game is pre-alpha. Release 1 builds the foundations, and is partly done:
- Running today: the relativistic sky (335,157 real stars over the Milky Way, aberration, Doppler colour and beaming, a photometric naked-eye exposure, the forward glow of the cosmic background at high γ); the galaxy map on the real catalogues, with companion stars at their system's distance; the journey core (the planner, the irreversible commit, the two clocks, deterministic replay); and, on a test stub, the crew's optional AI layer with the Medic's conversation scene.
- In progress: the first playable journey through the ship's interior (M4, its first steps merged; you can walk the bridge in the development build), and planets and flybys inside a star system (M5, a new milestone whose physics packages are published).
- Planned for Release 1: black holes rendered to general relativity (M3).
- After Release 1: the wider game: a galaxy that changes while you travel, a finite crew, trade in technology and ideas. None of it is built yet.
Concept art for the captain, the crew and the bridge is on the concept art page, and every release gets a news post.
See the roadmap for the detail.
Built in AILANG and Godot
Godot 4 renders everything you see. The simulation is written in AILANG and runs as a child process on the AILANG bytecode VM. Given the same seed and inputs it produces byte-identical output. See Built with AILANG.