ATLAS Project — you are the Captain, not the ship [WIP]
Posted: Sun Oct 04, 2026 3:13 am
Hi again, I'm Julio. I introduced myself here recently and promised a proper ATLAS thread, so here it is.
I grew up with Battlecruiser 3000AD, Silent Hunter: Wolves of the Pacific, and X-COM. They each scratched a different itch: systems worth learning, decisions made with imperfect information, freedom in a larger world, and mechanics interacting in ways that made the simulation feel believable. ATLAS is my attempt to bring some of those ideas together in a starship command game.
I try to guide the whole game by one idea: “You are the Captain, not the ship.”
I want you to be able to walk aboard, go to the CIC, see what your officers know, make a decision, and then see the consequences while the rest of the crew keeps doing its job.
The Captain shouldn't have a magical view of every system or personally perform every routine task. That's the experience I'm building toward. I'm still early, and I'm a long way from the complete version of that idea.
Prototype / work in progress: the current in-game CIC visual slice. Not final art.
What I have so far:
The prototype has a four-deck ship blockout and a physical Captain who can move through it. There are 35 persistent named people, including the Captain, with personnel records and a Commander Tablet. The ship also has a thrust-gravity and coast/zero-G movement foundation.
The latest passed crew-life milestone added bounded needs and self-care, purposeful local work, physical travel, rest, and ownership of shared resources. I can walk through the ship and find people doing things for reasons. That foundation has been tested over and over again by me, but it does not mean every crew behavior feels right or that the living ship is finished.
Prototype / work in progress: the Captain at a shipboard stair landing.
Prototype / work in progress: a Deck 2 habitation and mess observation from the accepted crew-life candidate. Crew are in medical, recreation, and other local activities.
What I'm working on now
I recently finished the ship-time and watches milestone: a 24-hour ship day, Blue/Gold/Black watches, physical relief, and an Officer of the Deck who can keep the ship running when the Captain is elsewhere.
That milestone took several tries. I rejected playable candidates when watch turnover, crew movement, or what I was seeing as the Captain didn't feel believable, even when parts of the simulation were technically doing what they were supposed to do.
I don't want a technical check that can pass while the ship still feels like a database with legs.
Man, has this been a challenge. Getting the crew to move around and behave in ways that look natural and believable has been harder than I expected.
The current work is more structural. I'm redesigning the ship from the accepted four-deck prototype baseline toward a six-deck layout. The six-deck version is not the accepted live ship yet. I'm proving the geometry, routes, clearances, and existing gameplay systems before it replaces the current layout.
Where I want to take it
Longer term, I want command through officers and departments, incomplete reports, emergencies, flight and sensors, damage control, combat, and a campaign that gives the Captain reasons to make hard calls.
I want travel time to matter. I want crew fatigue to matter. I want orbital mechanics to matter enough that getting somewhere isn't just clicking a destination and watching a loading screen.
Much further down the road, I want the Captain to be able to take direct control when physically present, including taking a shuttle on an away mission.
But that should have consequences. If you're off flying a shuttle, you're not aboard your ship commanding it. Maybe your XO handles everything perfectly. Maybe that's the moment something goes wrong. That's the sort of tradeoff I'm interested in.
There are a lot of systems I want to build. I'm deliberately trying to prove them one layer at a time rather than pretend they're all already there.
There is no public build yet, and I am not promising a date.
I'm building ATLAS as a solo developer with a full-time career and a family. I'm building this in my free time. All of it. The images in this thread are genuine in-game prototype captures.
I am curious how other space-sim players feel about command information. Would you rather get an imperfect report from an officer and decide under uncertainty, or have the full simulation truth visible in the UI? Where should the captain's knowledge stop?
I will keep future ATLAS updates in this thread as the ship and game develop.
I grew up with Battlecruiser 3000AD, Silent Hunter: Wolves of the Pacific, and X-COM. They each scratched a different itch: systems worth learning, decisions made with imperfect information, freedom in a larger world, and mechanics interacting in ways that made the simulation feel believable. ATLAS is my attempt to bring some of those ideas together in a starship command game.
I try to guide the whole game by one idea: “You are the Captain, not the ship.”
I want you to be able to walk aboard, go to the CIC, see what your officers know, make a decision, and then see the consequences while the rest of the crew keeps doing its job.
The Captain shouldn't have a magical view of every system or personally perform every routine task. That's the experience I'm building toward. I'm still early, and I'm a long way from the complete version of that idea.
- download.png (420.66 KiB) Viewed 61 times
What I have so far:
The prototype has a four-deck ship blockout and a physical Captain who can move through it. There are 35 persistent named people, including the Captain, with personnel records and a Commander Tablet. The ship also has a thrust-gravity and coast/zero-G movement foundation.
The latest passed crew-life milestone added bounded needs and self-care, purposeful local work, physical travel, rest, and ownership of shared resources. I can walk through the ship and find people doing things for reasons. That foundation has been tested over and over again by me, but it does not mean every crew behavior feels right or that the living ship is finished.
- download2.png (229.6 KiB) Viewed 61 times
- download3.png (128.15 KiB) Viewed 61 times
What I'm working on now
I recently finished the ship-time and watches milestone: a 24-hour ship day, Blue/Gold/Black watches, physical relief, and an Officer of the Deck who can keep the ship running when the Captain is elsewhere.
That milestone took several tries. I rejected playable candidates when watch turnover, crew movement, or what I was seeing as the Captain didn't feel believable, even when parts of the simulation were technically doing what they were supposed to do.
I don't want a technical check that can pass while the ship still feels like a database with legs.
Man, has this been a challenge. Getting the crew to move around and behave in ways that look natural and believable has been harder than I expected.
The current work is more structural. I'm redesigning the ship from the accepted four-deck prototype baseline toward a six-deck layout. The six-deck version is not the accepted live ship yet. I'm proving the geometry, routes, clearances, and existing gameplay systems before it replaces the current layout.
Where I want to take it
Longer term, I want command through officers and departments, incomplete reports, emergencies, flight and sensors, damage control, combat, and a campaign that gives the Captain reasons to make hard calls.
I want travel time to matter. I want crew fatigue to matter. I want orbital mechanics to matter enough that getting somewhere isn't just clicking a destination and watching a loading screen.
Much further down the road, I want the Captain to be able to take direct control when physically present, including taking a shuttle on an away mission.
But that should have consequences. If you're off flying a shuttle, you're not aboard your ship commanding it. Maybe your XO handles everything perfectly. Maybe that's the moment something goes wrong. That's the sort of tradeoff I'm interested in.
There are a lot of systems I want to build. I'm deliberately trying to prove them one layer at a time rather than pretend they're all already there.
There is no public build yet, and I am not promising a date.
I'm building ATLAS as a solo developer with a full-time career and a family. I'm building this in my free time. All of it. The images in this thread are genuine in-game prototype captures.
I am curious how other space-sim players feel about command information. Would you rather get an imperfect report from an officer and decide under uncertainty, or have the full simulation truth visible in the UI? Where should the captain's knowledge stop?
I will keep future ATLAS updates in this thread as the ship and game develop.