StarBots

You land on a planet you can see the whole of. So does someone else.

StarBots is a colony sim with an RTS camera, played across the surface of a small spherical world. You manage a handful of robots — not an army. They mine, they build, they research, and they stretch your network across the curve of the planet one antenna at a time.

On the other side of that curve, a rival faction is doing exactly the same thing. They land, found a core, mine, build, defend and expand. They are not waves spawning from the edge of the map. They are a mirror of you, running the same clock, and they want the same planet.

There's only room for one owner.

The planet is the base. There's no main base with a decorative map around it. Your colony spreads until it covers the world, and territory is the resource that matters most. You can't build where your network doesn't reach — so expanding is a chain of antennas, not a click.

The horizon is the fog of war. From orbit you see everything, including the blue crystals on the far side. On the ground you see as far as the curve and no further. Nothing is hidden from you: the cost isn't finding, it's getting there and staying.

Few robots, and each one matters. Your crew have names, talents and opinions, and they say them out loud. Losing one hurts. You decide what matters; they decide how. No decision in this game should come down to clicking speed — and you can pause to plan whenever you want.

Night is a mechanic. Solar panels stop when the sun goes down. If you didn't plan for that, something switches itself off and tells you its name. You learn power once, by consequence, and never forget it.

How it ends. Research the Launch Platform, build it, and the same ship that dropped you off comes back for your crew. Or take the planet the hard way — the rival is welcome to leave in pieces. The amethyst you need for the first ending happens to be under their feet, so the two roads meet.

In this demo (~40 minutes)

• Seven procedurally generated planet types — finish one and the next partida starts on a new world
• Thirteen structures: habitats, hub, lab, silo, generator, solar, turret, wall, antenna, shield dome, missile launcher, anti-missile battery, launch platform
• Four crystals and scrap, with research gating what your drills can even touch
• Real power: day/night cycle, generators burning conductor, and blackout by priority
• Meteor showers, and a shield dome if you saw them coming
• A rival colony that mines, builds, researches, defends and sends expeditions
• Robots with names, talents and 13 animation states
• Keyboard + mouse or gamepad, with full key remapping
• 10 languages: EN, PT-BR, ES, FR, DE, IT, RU, JA, KO, ZH
• Windows 64-bit and macOS

Honest notes

This is an early demo, and two things are missing on purpose because I want feedback before building them:

• No saving yet. A run is one sitting, around 40 minutes.
• The rival is a colony, not a genius. They play the same game you do, but they won't outsmart you.

If you play it, tell me where you got bored and where you got stuck. That's the whole reason this page exists.