Bandestar

What is it?

Bandestar is a top-down space trading and combat game where you fly a spaceship through a 30-sector galaxy, buying and selling cargo, fighting rival factions, completing missions, and upgrading your ship with new weapons, shields, and engines.

The economy basically works. Each station has an economy type — industrial, research, trade hub, frontier, black market — that pushes prices up and down in ways you can exploit. Surplus goods are cheap and plentiful; scarce goods are expensive and limited. Grey market selling means you can offload any cargo anywhere, but at a discount. Haul ore from an industrial station to a frontier outpost and you'll make real money. Sit in one sector and churn trades and you'll watch prices drift against you.

Three factions — Merchants Guild, Freebooters, Frontier Corps — compete for control across the galaxy. Your reputation with each one affects what prices you get, which ships you can buy, whether stations will trade with you at all, and whether enemy pilots shoot on sight. Missions shift faction tensions; kills cost you standing with whoever you shot.

The galaxy pushes back as you get deadlier. Every kill builds your infamy. Hit the thresholds and named hunters start appearing when you enter sectors, looking specifically for you.

You start in a basic Sparrow. Work your way up through 17 ship classes across 4 tiers to unlock heavier hulls, more weapon slots, and eventually ships that require serious faction standing to purchase. Upgrades are modular — weapons, shields, engines, cargo, mining, and aux slots — with a protected core laser slot that can be swapped but never removed.

The core loop: dock at stations to trade and upgrade, fly the sector to fight and mine, warp to new sectors to find better prices and harder enemies. Sector crises (pirate sieges, trade blockades, plague outbreaks) add urgency and targets on top.

Who Made This?

My 10yo son and I started building this together as a creative coding project. He helps with ideas, testing, and deciding what features matter most. I handle the technical implementation. It's been a great way to explore game design together and show him how games actually work under the hood.

Fair Warning

This is a project we're building for fun. Progress will be slow and sporadic. We're learning as we go, and we're prioritizing making something we enjoy over any kind of release schedule.

If you enjoy the concept and want to see where this goes, we'd love your feedback on what feels fun vs. what feels like a chore. Every bit of encouragement helps!

Inspiration

I played Elite when I was a kid. It was too hard for me, but I could tell that it was something special. Later on I discovered Escape Velocity, which had everything I loved about Elite, but was accessible enough that I could really play it and discover what it had to offer.

This game is intended to be a love letter to those classic games - to this day EV might still be my all-time favorite. I am hoping that in time it might approach some fraction of what made Elite, EV and their sequels so amazing - it is nowhere close to that yet!

Tools

Written with DragonRuby, which is pretty terrific. :)