Space Junk Industries is a one-person studio building persistent games that resolve on a schedule instead of a reflex. You give your orders. At a fixed, scheduled moment, everyone's orders resolve together. Then you get on with your day.
Most multiplayer games reward whoever can be online the longest. Tick-based games do not. Everyone gets the same number of decisions per day, and the winner is whoever decided better.
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.
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.
Astral Sovereignty is played in an ordinary web browser, on a phone or at a desk, with no download and no launcher — and Atomic Tick is being built the same way. A phone app is planned for later, after the browser versions are finished, and is never allowed to hold them up.
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.
One is open and being played right now. The other is deep in design and partly built. They share a spine — scheduled ticks, editable order queues, reports you can actually read — and share 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.
A persistent role-playing game where each character gets at most one action per tick. Not an energy bar, not action points you can hoard — one action, one tick, for everyone. You queue what your character will do next, and one entry resolves per tick, forever, whether you are watching or not.
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 worlds 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. Bring your complaints to the Discord — they are the most useful thing you can give me.
Nothing to install. Next tick on Alpha Shard 1 in --:-- minutes and seconds.
