Spacesteading

Goal

As the leader of a newly-formed space colony, it is your job to cultivate its technological capabilities while maintaining a stable environment. Supplies arrive passively at the spaceport, which can be used to construct additional buildings. Each building will provide or consume Food, Energy, Oxygen, and Carbon Dioxide; you will want to keep carbon low while ensuring that you do not run out of the others.

Your goal is to construct and power a Deep Space Communicator, which requires a substantial amount of supplies and the presence of an Advanced Research Lab to build. In order to store enough supplies, you will need to build Supply Depots, and to fill those warehouses more quickly, you can build an additional spaceport, followed by Graphene Synthesizers, and finally building a Telescope, Asteroid Survey Station, and an Ore Extraction Dock to locate valuable materials on nearby asteroids and mine them for resources much more quickly than importing them from your closest neighbor.

Testing has determined that it is possible to beat the game in under six minutes.

How to Play

Resources

There are five resources to balance: Food, Oxygen, Energy, Carbon Dioxide, and Supplies. Each has a maximum capacity, which can be marginally increased by building more facilities that produce that resource or substantially increased by building special-purpose storage facilities like the Supply Depot or Oxygen Reserve Station. Supplies are used in the construction of new buildings, and the other four are in a constant state of being produced and consumed; if they drop to zero (or maximum in the case of carbon dioxide), they will flash red and be considered critical.

The population of your space colony requires both food and oxygen to survive, so failing to maintain adequate levels of either will result in the population dying until the demand drops below production. The demand increases as more people move in. The residents and some of the facilities will also produce Carbon Dioxide, and it will need to be addressed as well; it can be reduced by plant-based facilities, a Carbon Scrubber, or by building a Graphene Synthesizer to convert it into supplies.

Energy is consumed by each facility, and if you run out of it, buildings will begin to automatically shut off, causing its energy consumption to drop to zero, but also resulting in its production, consumption, and reserve capacity of all resources to drop to zero as well (functionally, you will not have it until it is powered back on). Once your power sources grow, these buildings will automatically reactivate. Instead of waiting for a blackout, you can click the lightning bolt in the bottom-left corner to enter Power Toggle Mode, allowing you to click on a tile to manually shut it off (cannot be used on spacecports, power stations, or habitats). A facility manually shut down will have a blue "M" on the icon to indicate that it was manually shut down.

Building

To build a new facility, click on the hammer icon in the bottom-left corner to open the Building Panel, which will display an icon list of all facility types. You can hover over a choice to see a description, its building requirements, and its net impact on each resource type. When you're ready to build, click it to enter Placement Mode, which will show a holographic preview of the tile. If the preview is green, you are hovering over a valid, empty space, and you can click the left mouse button to build there. New buildings can only be placed adjacent to existing ones.

Credits

Engine & Frameworks

• Game Engine: Unity Personal Edition (version 6000.0.49f1)

First-Party Assets Created (by Christian Russell aka ReltivlyObjectv):

• Game Logic, Hex Grid Mechanics, and Menu/Event Systems are driven by C# and were written in Visual Studio 2022
• UI Frames, Backgrounds, Foreground, Gauges, Indicators, and Icon sprites (other than those specified in another section) were created with Affinity Designer 2
• 3D Models were created using Blender 4.2.2 (Including IvyGen Addon)
• In-Game animations are driven by custom C# scripts

Third-Party Assets Used

• Music licensed from alkakrab - Artist has confirmed tracks are YouTube copyright safe (https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/audio/music/sci-fi-space-30-tracks-game-music-pack-285604)
• Space Skybox courtesy of Dogmatic (https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/2d/textures-materials/sky/free-skyboxes-space-178953)
• Some model textures provided courtesy of ambientCG (https://ambientcg.com)
• Honeycomb Happiness font used with Affinity Designer 2 to create title card graphic

AI Disclosure

• Food, Energy, Supply, Hammer, and Bed icons created with ChatGPT (other icons made by hand) then refined and cleaned with Affinity Designer 2
• Sound Effects were created with ElevenLabs Sound Effects Component
• Narration audio files were created with ElevenLabs Text-to-Speech (using the voice "Christian" on the public voice library)