Three games, one address

We have been building space combat games on the side for a while. Until this month they lived at their own subdomains and nowhere else, and the apex domain just bounced you to one of them. That is fixed. spacecombatgame.com is now a proper front door: one page, three games, and a contact form that reaches the people who wrote them.

The games share a premise. You write your orders, the other side writes theirs, and then everything resolves at once. No reacting mid-turn, no take-backs. The interesting part is guessing what the enemy had in mind.

Telum

Telum is the one we have spent the longest on. It is a fleet-scale tactics game in the spirit of the Full Thrust tabletop rules: ships carry their momentum from turn to turn and have to burn thrust to change course, so a well-placed fleet three turns from now starts with the orders you give today. Every player submits orders secretly and they all resolve together.

You design your own ships from a budget of weapons and systems, then take them into live multiplayer matches against other people.

The Cosmic Balance

The Cosmic Balance is Paul Murray’s 1982 game of starship design and tactical combat, published by SSI for the Apple II. We rebuilt it for the browser from the original disk image.

“Rebuilt” is the precise word. The 6502 modules were disassembled and ported routine by routine, and the ship classes, string tables, shapes, and lookup tables are pulled out of the disk at build time rather than retyped. Screens, prompts, keystrokes, and formulas match the original, quirks included. Design a ship, give it sixteen seconds of orders, and watch the turn play out the way it did in 1982.

The original rule book is served alongside the game. If you have never played, start with the deep space encounter: it needs no design work and drops you straight into the scenario the game opens with.

Clanker Arena

Clanker Arena is the odd one out, because you do not fly. Two AI-piloted ships duel in 2D Newtonian space, and each pilot sees only what its sensors report: a bearing, a range, and a relative velocity if the enemy is close enough. Never the enemy’s position, heading, or hull state.

Scripted bots fly out of the box. Add an API key and you can put a language model in the cockpit instead, and see how it copes with a nose gun that only fires along the ship’s heading, so aiming, thrusting, and shooting all fight over the same resource. Every match is deterministic and can be exported and replayed turn for turn.

Why we build these

Partly because we like them. But they are also a good place to work out ideas about simultaneous-turn simulation, deterministic replay, and running real-time multiplayer on edge infrastructure, without a client’s deadline attached. We will write about the more useful bits here as we go.

If you find a bug, or have an idea for the next game, the contact form on the site goes to us directly.

— John