Summary
[Kevin Kelm] created something wondrous: Halcyon Dawn, an utterly unique and desperately challenging game that is equal parts intricate starship simulator, imposing hardware console, video game, and love letter to John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War book series. Grab a beverage for this one, because it’s chock-full of detail.
First, how is it played? The simulator represents the ship Halcyon Dawn, a stolen and renamed vessel, and the player representing its sole crew member. The ship’s new mission is to establish a home for its payload of genetically-engineered unfortunates, escaping a cruel sort of indentured military servitude. The former masters of course have a very different view of the whole situation, throwing around terms like “treason” and “theft” and in general preferring the version of the desperate protagonist they had the most control over.
As the player is meant to be operating the ship on their own, the cockpit is imposing. All 152 controls and six screens are meaningful and will be needed to pilot the Halcyon Dawn, survive hostile actions, repel boarding attempts, mine and refine vast amounts of raw materials, and in general keep the ship running and intact until an autofactory can be deployed in orbit of a suitable planet to create a new home.
All easier said than done. It’s one thing to pilot and tweak a temperamental ship, but doing so while also performing damage control and thwarting a boarding attempt by manipulating life support is quite another. Want more details? Gameplay is documented here and the physical controls have their own library.
The product of a year of focused work, [Kevin] – now retired – pointed his decades of hardware and software experience at Halcyon Dawn after realizing one night that everything he needed to create it already existed. How this whole project came to be is also a tribute to the amazing tools and equipment that hobbyists and hackers of all kinds now have to turn an idea into something that actually exists in the world. Even so, it was a load of work he is not keen to repeat. Don’t miss the technical deep-dive and photo gallery of the build.
While the game itself — being a fan-made derivative of Scalzi’s work (and useless without the custom-made hardware console) — isn’t being released, [Kevin] has shared the underlying hardware framework it is built on. Enigma is an ESP32-based set of input and output PCBs made for integrating switches, knobs, displays, relays, and more with a Python library to make them easy to work with.
Starship simulators are a wonderful subset of projects, and every one is different from the last. Something about physical builds really works for them, and while we’ve seen a camper trailer converted to starship simulator [Kevin]’s project focuses the whole experience beautifully into the single-person console you see here. Watch a video of Halcyon Dawn running in an arcade-like “attract” mode embedded just below.
Very nice setup, well built. I would like to see more of the videogame, its intriguing. There’s a sore lack of space travel sims out there and I want more.
I tried No Man’s Sky, but its not very fun after the first 4 hours, kinda repetetive. Tried X4 Foundations and couldn’t get hold of the UI, too confusing. I want to try Startfield (I am a fan of Bethesda, so its a no brainer) but I have heard the actual space traversal aspect isn’t very fleshed out and is more like ‘fast travel’
My brothers are into Flight sim and truck sims, so I too dream of building a good setup like this someday
I bought Elite Dangerous for Xbox One, very cool game but absolutely awful on a controller because it took so many overlays to get at all of the necessary controls. I only played a couple hours before I quit in frustration. I bet it would be awesome in a rig like this though.
Must have been awhile ago, Frontier abandoned console development back in 2022. I had it on a PS4 and it was pretty fun. I play on PC now and it fully supports mods, plenty of people flashing circuitpython on a ESP32, plugging it into a USB and wiring up some switches. I have the full HOTAS and rudder pedals and it makes it much easier to fly, I don’t need the nav computer for autolanding I can do better manually. Combat is still difficult and mostly depends on who spends money or grinds rather than skill. Mostly in game I do the equivalent of smuggling mafia leaders in a bizjet, but in space, its just the right level of challenge. I would suggest that for every finely finished sim cockpit you see online there are 10, maybe 100 people like me with sheet metal scraps and duct tape and not enough time/money/motivation to make it look “good”. I have USB attached switches for landing gear and various other things, really quite convenient. The learning curve is somewhat vertical until you get one switch working, then it flattens out and the effort level drops to about zero to add pushbutton #13 after you already added pushbutton #12.
Impressive! Something tells me the maker has had more fun building that thing than actually playing the game, but that doesn’t matter!
Yeah I agree with you, sometimes the goal is just an excuse to have some fun :)