[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.
I am of the opinion that the best space sim of all time was Freelancer, though it is quite dated these days. IMHO, the UI was as close to perfect as possible, and the flight controls seemed exactly right. The gameplay was also excellent, with seriously gorgeous graphics for the time.
I’ve played a number of modern space sims, including No Man’s Sky and Elite Dangerous, and none of them seem to have caught the spirit of Freelancer. Either the graphics are beautiful and the controls are janky, or the graphics are janky, or the gameplay is so difficult that getting started is nearly impossible for a casual player. Nothing I’ve seen seems to have the right combination of elements for my tastes/needs as a player.
Your own experiences may vary from mine, of course.
+1 for Freelancer, spent many hours just trucking goods across the galaxy
considering its still being played, id say thats not far from true. but there is this little game from the ’90s called freespace tilting my opinion. i think the engine still has some of my code in it. id argue that freelancer is a space shooter and not a space sim mostly because it wasnt designed for a joystick. anything called a sim thats not a car sim should require a hotas.
Starship sets, fan-helps
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/whats-going-on.290623/page-6#post-15102778
I never even figured out how to manually dock with the space-station in the original 80s Elite on my ZX Spectrum. Did manage to successfully operate the notoriously-finicky Lenslok copy-protection when loading the game, though, which was almost as challenging…
My son and I have a mars station at the children’s museum. We can roll play space station catastrophies for hours. Led me to start down a similar project but with simpler stations farther away. Looking forward to diving into this deeper and enhancing our setup. Would love to Pick the designers brain. What an awesome project worthy of Scalzi and his world(s)!
Do you happen to have a link to see that exhibit online? Sounds very interesting
This perhaps?
https://www.planetary.org/press-releases/0607_astrobot_diaries_and_mars_stations
https://www.facebook.com/groups/spacehipsters/posts/7954557404589073/
In the news
https://phys.org/news/2026-07-graphite-newly.html
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-microwave-neural-network-method-compress.html#google_vignette
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 :)
I have that problem, I had way more fun building the controls for flight sim than I did actually flying the planes.
This was right at the height of Covid so you couldn’t get joysticks or other controllers. I had to make my own joystick with a 3D printer, Teensys and Hall sensors I had on hand.
Now play some Space Nerds In Space.
With that timeline, budget and expected income from the product, how would you have done it?
I wouldn’t have done them at all. Who are they for if the game is never meant to be released? Is he watching the intro cinematic every time he fires up the game?
He’s an engineer, not a film producer. This is exactly what AI video generation should be used for.
But can it play KSP?
Now that would be fun.
“… fell asleep listening to “The End of All Things.” I woke up with a startle at 3AM with the realization: I can build a fully functional starship cockpit!”
Dream or nightmare?
Likely the feeling Dr. Frankenstein had when he first realized he could reanimate dead tissues.
Since Starship is still floating, maybe it can be used as a museum, with this in its nose.
I think cockpits of old planes should be placed in playgrounds so kids can imagine they’re Han or Sulu.
This is so cool, so incredibly cool!!!
I tried to make something similar on an Arduino:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mu3NkQNRMM
But of course, this is far superior!!!