Bussard: spaceflight programming adventure

[technomancy]

Bussard is a hard-sci-fi game with programming as a core mechanic where you explore worlds to try to find hints of your past. The game is fairly text-heavy, and the story is rather cerebral, so if you're looking for a quick action romp, this is probably not the game for you.

https://technomancy.itch.io/bussard

The beta I've just released has the engine and worlds fairly polished, but the characters, story, and missions are just getting started. Eventually I plan to make it so that you can learn programming by playing the game, but that's a ways off still.

It's implemented in the LOVE 2D game engine, which uses Lua. The engine is nearly 3k lines of Lua, while there are almost 2k lines of in-game code. The ship is programmed in Lua; it comes with a default setup which creates key bindings for all the commands and sets up the text editor, console, SSH client, etc, but it can be edited by the player as they go. I'm planning on writing puzzles and challenges which require programming to solve them.

At this point I'm primarily interested in feedback on two things: the in-game tutorial, and the progression of the first major mission (on Tana Prime). I want to make sure the explanation of the game functionality in the tutorial is clear without being too verbose. The mission does some unusual things that I think will surprise players, but I want to make sure it's not frustrating. Of course bug reports are always great too, and new contributors are welcome, whether it's for contributing code, art, writing, or whatever. See the spoilers/ directory in the source for an overview of the backstory, worlds, etc, and Contributing.md for how the code is laid out and the philosophy behind the game.

Development and issue tracking is on GitLab: https://gitlab.com/technomancy/bussard All the original content is GPLv3, but we use a fair bit of MIT libs and CC-licensed assets.

[technomancy]

I created a trailer last night that might help give a better idea of gameplay: https://youtu.be/ARcQc_alg_w

[GryGry]

I loved dat games in my youth. Maybe I'll show to my son