Space Junk Industries is a one-person studio building games that run on a clock instead of a reflex. In Astral Sovereignty you give your orders, and at a fixed, scheduled moment everyone's orders resolve together. In Haulspar your company works on timers that keep going while the app is closed. Then you get on with your day.
Plenty of games reward whoever can be online the longest. These two are built so you do not have to be. In Astral Sovereignty everyone gets the same number of decisions per day, and the winner is whoever decided better. In Haulspar jobs queue up, timers keep running while the app is closed, and a reminder tells you when something is done.
In Astral Sovereignty nothing resolves on your machine. Your screen shows you what you know and takes your intent; the game itself works out what actually happened, under identical rules for everyone. There is nothing to out-click, and nothing a faster computer can win for you.
Orders are intent, not action. Write them ahead, change your mind freely, and they sit until the tick. Then everyone's orders resolve together in the same moment. The gap between deciding and finding out is the game.
After every tick you get a report: what you ordered, what resolved, what changed and why. A game where you cannot tell why you lost is not a strategy game, it is a slot machine. Haulspar's Codex does the same job for its rules: every resource, ship, building and world, explained inside the game.
A tick-based game should not punish you for having a job or living in the wrong timezone. Automation keeps a colony developing, standing routes re-issue themselves, and a caretaker looks after an empire that is left alone — then hands it straight back the moment you return. In Haulspar you come back to finished builds and full storage.
Astral Sovereignty is played in an ordinary web browser, on a phone or at a desk, with no download and no launcher. A phone app is planned for later, after the browser version is finished, and is never allowed to hold it up. Haulspar was made for Android phones from the start, and you install it from Google Play.
In Astral Sovereignty a feature is not finished until the NPC empires can use it too. That one rule is what keeps the galaxy alive as it grows — and what keeps me honest about the real cost of a new idea, at the exact moment I am most tempted by it. Haulspar grows one small playable step at a time, and each step is played on a phone before the next one starts.
One is a galaxy you play in a browser, where everyone's orders resolve together on a schedule. The other is a space company on your phone, where every job runs on a timer that keeps going while the app is closed. They share one idea — neither punishes you for having a life — and almost nothing else.
You rule one empire in a persistent galaxy, starting with a single homeworld and a fog-of-war map. Survey warp nodes, settle worlds your species can actually survive, build fleets and industry, and give orders that the whole galaxy resolves together on a fixed schedule.
You run a space company the government hires as its contractor. Launch satellites and rockets, scan and survey worlds, land crews, build bases, refine what you dig and haul it home — and every timer keeps running while the app is closed.
11 worlds to build on
There is no team here. No reviewer, no testers, no night shift, no artist to hand a brief to, and nobody to remember why a decision was made eight months ago. Every one of those absences had to be answered with something.
A studio is not just labour. It is a set of checks — and when the people go, the checks go quietly with them. You do not notice the reviewer is missing until a player finds the bug.
So each absent role had to be answered by something. Some of those answers are good. One of them, the NPC empires that stress-test the galaxy around the clock, turned out better than the thing it replaced. Others are honest mitigations that stop well short of a fix, and I would rather say which is which.
I would rather hear that something is broken, slow or unfair than hear nothing at all. Criticism is the only way a one-person studio finds out what a hundred players already know.
— The reason the Discord exists
The plan is not to ship a finished thing and walk away. It is to keep both games growing — more content, more systems, better quality — with players telling me where it hurts. That feedback loop is the whole development model, not a nice extra.
Astral Sovereignty is open, it is an alpha, and it runs in your browser with nothing to install. Haulspar is on Google Play for Android phones. Bring your complaints to the Discord — they are the most useful thing you can give me.
The alpha needs nothing installed. Next tick on Sovereign Reach 1 in --:-- minutes and seconds.
