Devlog #1: Why we are building Sunsfall

Browser space strategy has a great core: you grow planets, research your way to better ships, scout your neighbours, raid them, and fight for territory with an alliance. Fleets fly in real time across a map of coordinates, and every decision costs something.

Many of us played these games for years and then stopped. Not because the core got boring, but because the games stopped fitting into our lives.

The reasons people quit

Before writing a line of code, we read what players say when they leave. The same five reasons kept coming up:

1. Paying for power. Premium currencies, speed-ups and resources for sale.
2. Time pressure. Alarm clocks at 3 a.m. to save a fleet from a night raid.
3. No fair start. Newcomers arrive years behind and get farmed for days.
4. Dying worlds. Universes shrink, then get merged.
5. Clutter. A dozen planets to manage, extra tech trees, expedition grinding.

What Sunsfall does instead

Sunsfall answers each of these directly. Money only buys cosmetics and convenience, written down in our public Fair Play Charter. Quiet Hours give every player a daily 7-hour window in which nobody can attack them. Seasons last 8 weeks and everyone starts from zero, together. Clearly labelled NPC factions keep quiet sectors alive. And the rule set stays small: at most 8 planets and 3 resources plus energy.

What we keep is everything that makes the genre worth playing: raids, espionage, debris fields, real-time fleets, alliances and leaderboards.

Where we are

The interface exists as a clickable mockup on desktop and mobile, in English, German and Hungarian. The screenshots on our home page come from it. Next is the rules engine and a balance simulator that plays whole seasons with bots, so the numbers hold up before anyone plays.

We will not take pre-orders. Sunsfall launches when it is finished. If you want to hear when that is, follow our Facebook page. We only post when there is something real to tell.