Rustwake

Your ship came with a debt. Twenty-five thousand credits, owed to a woman nobody says no to, and the first payment is due in ten days. So you do what frontier pilots do: haul cargo, carry passengers, take the jobs nobody else wants, and fight off the pirates who think your rusty Scrap Runner looks like an easy mark.

Rustwake is a top-down space trading game in the spirit of the old Escape Velocity games. Fly anywhere in a galaxy of 20 star systems, land on 42 planets and stations, and make your own way.

What you do

• Trade. Buy cheap where something is plentiful, sell where it's scarce. Prices move when you trade and when the news changes.
• Take jobs. Deliveries, passengers, rush jobs, smuggling and bounties from each planet's Mission Computer, with the route drawn on the map before you take it.
• Fight, or run. Blasters, lasers, missiles, torpedoes and mines, with better grades sold farther from the Frontier. Board disabled ships to rob or capture them. Hire wingmen. Keep an eye on a rival who keeps turning up.
• Build your ship. Start in the little Scrap Runner and work up through nine ships for sale, all the way to a Frigate, with weapons, gear, refits and a paint job with your ship's name on it.
• Choose a side. A story in three chapters takes you from the Frontier into a war between the Hegemony and the Free Worlds, with a choice that changes the galaxy and two endings.

Rivet, your robot co-pilot, explains each new thing the first time it comes up, so there's no tutorial to sit through.

Controls

• W or ↑ to thrust, A and D (or ← →) to turn, S to swing around, Shift for the afterburner
• Space to fire guns, F for missiles, X to drop a mine
• Tab targets the nearest enemy, R the next ship. H to hail, B to board
• L to land, M for the galaxy map, J to jump, I for your mission log
• Esc or P pauses. F1 or ? shows every key, any time
• Every flying key can be changed in Settings

Good to know

• Rustwake runs in a desktop browser and needs a keyboard. It plays right here on the page; the button in the bottom right of the game makes it full screen. In full screen, Esc leaves full screen first, so press P to pause.
• Your pilots are saved in this browser (three slots). Browsers can clear that storage, so use Save to file on the title screen now and then to keep a copy on your computer, and Load from file to bring a pilot back.
• Settings has three difficulty levels, volume controls, and Calmer effects, which cuts down screen shake and flashing. The game has explosions and bright flashes when you jump.
• Working your way up to a Frigate, the biggest ship you can buy, takes about five hours of trading and fighting. The story can be played alongside at your own pace.

How it was made

Rustwake is a game by Sean, built with Claude, an AI from Anthropic. Claude wrote the code and the story's words, with Sean deciding the design and the story. The portraits and the landing pictures were painted with Adobe Firefly, an AI image tool, from prompts written for the game. The ships were built in Blender.

The music and sound effects were made by people and shared for free: music by Leonardo Paz, Alexandr Zhelanov, yd, Emma_MA, TAD and Yin Guanghui (from OpenGameArt.org), and sound effects by Kenney (kenney.nl). The fonts are Barlow by Jeremy Tribby and Big Shoulders Stencil by Patric King. The full credits and licenses are on the game's Credits page.