A first-person, goal-less space exploration game, heavily inspired by Alessandro Ghignola's Noctis IV (2001). Vesperis is vibe coded: the whole thing was written with an AI coding agent, from the software renderer to the planet function, in the space of a few days.

You fly a small ship between the stars of a procedurally generated galaxy, approach planets and moons, pick a landing sector on a map and walk (or drive) around on surfaces generated by the same function that painted the globe you saw from orbit. Nothing has a name until you give it one. There is no objective. Everything is deterministic: the same sector, star, planet and square metre of ground is always the same.

The picture is rendered in software at 320x200 (scaled up 1x-4x) through palette intensity ramps and a soft smoothing filter, in the spirit of the original.

Since 1.1.0 the galaxy has the proportions of ours (200 billion stars in a disc with a bulge, arms, globular and open clusters, the band of the Milky Way in every sky), fourteen kinds of star (red dwarfs that flare, neutron stars, protostars, Wolf-Rayet stars, black holes among them) and dead peoples: one desert or felisian world in eight once had a civilisation, whose ruins, roads and graves read the terrain they stood on, and whose recordings, taken from the ruins and decoded on the ship, are texts, music and star charts in a language, a voice and a musical tradition of the world's own. A signal radar on the ship points at the worlds that still transmit. Saves from 1.0.0 load, but the galaxy was rebuilt: a saved star may be gone.

1.2.0 adds time and witness: an almanac of the coming events (sunrises, eclipses, moonrises, a front's arrival, a meteor shower's peak) that runs the clock to them; a telescope on the ship; weather fronts that move and arrive; nights with meteor showers, the zodiacal light and earthshine; and probes dropped into gas giants, each giant with its own decks, storms and glow, whose descents come back as recordings in the gallery and profiles on the data sheet. The Vimana jumps any number of light years along the aim, and on the ground a scanner points to ruins, lakes, peaks and the other sights while the explorer marks and names what they find on the sector map. The giants were regenerated (generation 12).

1.3.0 is the far, the faint and the peoples. Each dead people is found at the age it had reached when it fell, from the stone age to a far future, and its world shows it: towns, roads and great works of that age across the people's own lands, buildings in an architecture of its own, and on a world of two peoples the frontier between them and the battlefields of their wars. Their records come in the genres and the tongue of the people and the age (letters, chronicles, songs, sermons, broadcasts, a star chart on a cave's ceiling or a navigation chart of routes), and the decoder reads them as a history along the people's eras. Instruments taken from the ruins are played from a case on the ship, a drone bay sends three drones down to bring back records and instruments, and the ship's player plays what the ship has heard and held. A chart of the whole galaxy plots the next jump, and the radar's gain hears signals thousands of light years away. The peoples were regenerated (generation 13): saves load, and the shards already found are kept with new contents.

Download the build for your machine from the releases page, unzip it and run vesperis (on macOS, Vesperis.app). The game writes its save, settings and guide files next to itself (the macOS app uses ~/Documents/vesperis).

• macOS: the app is not signed. If it is refused, right-click it and choose Open once, or run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine Vesperis.app.
• Linux: needs an X11 display (XWayland is fine) and OpenGL 3.3.
• Windows: a single vesperis.exe, no installer.

Press H at any time for the key reference, Esc for the menu.

Requirements: a C++17 compiler and raylib 5.x (brew install raylib on macOS; on Linux install the raylib development package or let CMake fetch it). Then:

make                # builds ./vesperis (the game) and ./vesperis_test (headless checks)
./vesperis

CMake works too: cmake -B build-cmake && cmake --build build-cmake -j. Add -DVESPERIS_FETCH_RAYLIB=ON to download and build raylib when none is installed (Linux, Windows), -DVESPERIS_BUILD_GAME=OFF to build only the headless harness, and ctest --test-dir build-cmake runs the headless checks. packaging/make_app.sh wraps the macOS binary into dist/Vesperis.app, packaging/make_zip.sh makes a portable zip, web/build_web.sh targets the browser with emsdk (experimental).

The headless harness needs no window: ./vesperis_test flow plays through a whole expedition and dumps frames to shots/tests/, ./vesperis_test unit runs the unit tests, ./vesperis_test regress the determinism and frame hashes; run it without arguments for the full list of modes.

A gamepad works out of the box (left stick walks, right stick looks, A enter, B back, X jump, Y data, bumpers sprint and chase view). Keyboard layouts: copy vesperis_keys.example.txt to vesperis_keys.txt and list PHYSICAL LOGICAL pairs, or use the key bindings screen in the settings.

In space:

You live in the ship's cabin: the mouse turns your head, W A S D walk between the windows, E uses what you face (the console on the left, the flight computer at the front, the screens on the right, the capsule in its cage), U lights the cabin, Y turns the hull to glass, PgUp/PgDn take the lifter to the roof deck. The classic cockpit camera is one setting away (SHIP VIEW).

Landing map: arrows move the cursor (Shift = fast), Z zooms into the cursor's sector, R picks a random lit land site, C toggles the cloud overlay, J jumps under the biggest body in that world's sky, V shows the peoples (where their records were kept; a people's whole map once all its records are held), Enter lands, Esc returns.

On the surface:

The expedition is saved to vesperis_save.txt in the working directory when you quit, and can be continued from the title screen. Names, notes and the log live in guide.txt; settings in vesperis_settings.txt.

src/core      math, hashing, noise, 8-bit framebuffer + palette + smoothing filter,
              scanline rasteriser with depth buffer, 5x7 font, PNG writer, input
src/galaxy    star field and star classes, system generator, the planet function,
              drainage, landmarks and maps
src/space     star field, suns, ray-traced globes and rings, sky bodies
src/surface   landing site geometry, terrain caches, sky, terrain, water, objects, life
src/game      state machine, autopilot, HUD, menus, save/load, audio synthesis
src/platform_raylib.cpp   window, input and audio via raylib
src/main_headless.cpp     tests and screenshot generation without a window
docs/         development notes: bug reports, plans, reference notes

Vesperis is heavily inspired by Noctis IV by Alessandro Ghignola. It shares no code with it. Written in C++ with raylib for the window, input and sound. MIT licence.