PULSAR: Lost Colony

PULSAR: Lost Colony is a starship simulation game under active development by the indie studio Leafy Games. The game features five playable classes: Captain, Pilot, Weapons Specialist, Scientist, and Engineer, each with its own distinct responsibilities, areas of expertise, and systems to maintain. These systems are interconnected with each other and can be affected by each other's settings, offering a fun and immersive Starship experience.

Gameplay
PULSAR is played from a first-person perspective, with the majority of the action taking place aboard a starship in a randomly generated galaxy. Each of the afore-mentioned classes is responsible for handling, maintaining, and upgrading various aspects of their vessel's operation. The Pilot, for example, is responsible for safely maneuvering around debris, weapons fire, proximity explosives, and natural phenomena between sectors. The Engineer, by contrast, is responsible for upgrading outdated components, repairing damaged systems, extinguishing fires, and maintaining the stability of the reactor core while ensuring all of the ship's systems get the power required.

Classes
Main Article: Classes

PULSAR features five playable classes, each one responsible for handling a specific area of a starship's operation.

The Captain is the commanding officer and is responsible for issuing orders, responding to hails, designating targets, setting/overriding the alert status, plotting the starmap course, sorting out disagreements, and generally determining the next course of action for their ship and crew. The Captain typically has final say in executive decisions and can override the judgement of their crewmates at any time, though many Captains choose to operate their vessels under democratic systems where each crewmate has a voice in the next course of action.

The Weapons Specialist, colloquially known as "The Gunner", is the tactical officer responsible for ensuring the safety of the ship, crew, and cargo. The Weapons Specialist manually targets and fires the turrets, defends against intruders, protects away teams, boards enemy vessels, and handles Nuclear Warhead usage.

The Pilot is the helm officer and is responsible for maneuvering the vessel around obstructions, evading incoming weapons fire, aligning to warp beacons, maintaining a clear line of fire with enemy targets for The Gunner, docking with repair bays, and for some crews, winning The Ion Races.

The Scientist is the research specialist, field medic, and computer whiz. Scientists are responsible for operating a vessel's EM sensors, probing for anomalous energy signatures, utilizing warp programs, decrypting incoming viruses, searching the GX Database, modulating shield frequency, healing injured crewmates, and managing a vessel's cloaking system if installed.

The Engineer is... The Engineer. Engineers are responsible for repairing damaged systems, upgrading outdated ship components with scrap, extinguishing fires, allocating power from the Reactor to various systems as needed, maintaining the stability of the Reactor Core, and in a worst-case scenario, ejecting the Reactor Core. Engineers also share the responsibility of managing a vessel's cloaking system, the responsibility for which is typically either allocated by the Captain or handled on a "whoever pulls the lever first" basis.

Development
The game is under active development by the indie studio Leafy Games. Development began in summer of 2012. In August 2013, Leafy Games posted their first video to their official YouTube channel and presented the game to the public. Shortly after the video was posted, a Kickstarter was created in order to generate money for the game's development. The Kickstarter was a success, with the developers raising nearly $55,422 during the Kickstarter campaign. In January 2014, it was announced that Leafy Games had enough donations to resign from their everyday jobs and were to spend all time developing and adding features to PULSAR: Lost Colony. The game was released in an Alpha state on February 25, 2014, and reached beta on August 27, 2015. The developers announce new updates via Devlogs that are posted to their YouTube channel, leafygamesofficial.