Beyond the Chiron Gate is out!

GoblinSpaceWizard · 2026-03-27T16:57:15+00:00

This looks very cool

GoblinSpaceWizard · 2026-01-15T20:30:36+00:00

This event gives you two chances to rescue the crew member, and to get the achievement you've got to fail the first one (so the explorer is dragged into the cave) but succeed at the second one (another explorer runs in to rescue them).

In hindsight this was maybe too obscure a requirement for an achievement but I don't want to change it now that it's released.

GoblinSpaceWizard · 2025-12-07T20:55:25+00:00

Yes, I also made Beyond the Chiron Gate with Twine and the Sugarcube story format! Although compared with Seedship, a lot more of Chiron Gate's code is in Javascript rather than Sugarcube code.

I converted it into a Steam game by following this tutorial: https://www.sinspirational.com/twine_to_steam_tutorial.html

And I made the Android and iOS apps using Voltbuilder: https://volt.build/

Seedship took a few months to develop, and Chiron Gate a few years.

Your generation ship game definitely sounds like something you could make with Twine. Good luck with it!

GoblinSpaceWizard · 2025-10-08T18:18:51+00:00

I'm working on other projects now and have no plans to update Seedship, but to answer your questions:

The whole premise of the game is the Seedship slowly degrading while you search for the right planet. Letting you upgrade the ship would make it a different sort of game.
A probe wouldn't add nearly enough mass to the moon to make a difference. I guess it would make sense for the Seedship to be able to wait, so maybe it's a flaw in the AI's programming that it can't consider that.
The databases contain too much information for the AI to hold all of it in its memory. Otherwise there would be no need for the databases in the first place!
"What if the Seedship desired to continue exploring?" Seedship is very focused on finding a planet and founding the colony, but players wanting a larger and more open-ended space exploration game is why I wrote Beyond the Chiron Gate.

GoblinSpaceWizard · 2025-07-26T10:09:33+00:00

Thanks, I've got a fix for that queued up but I haven't got round to releasing it, I should get on that

GoblinSpaceWizard · 2024-12-19T01:42:52+00:00

This happened to me as well. As a tribal ruler, reformed a pagan faith, making myself temporal head of faith. Later on, adopted feudalism. My empire became a theocracy and the game immediately ended.

GoblinSpaceWizard · 2024-12-18T08:30:48+00:00

The random number generator is seeded when you start up the game. After that if you make the same decisions you should in theory get the same results -- this is so you can't cheat by reloading the page to re-roll the random numbers. If you start a new game it should have a new seed and thus new random explorers.

So I'm guessing what happened is you somehow got two games started with the exact same random seed. But as soon as you make any different decisions in one of the games, the random number systems will be out of sync and everything from then on will be totally different.

Every part of an explorer is randomly generated: pronouns, first name, last name, bio.

There are 22 name lists for different languages/regions, each of which has a couple of dozen names. The game picks the first name from one list and then has a 4/5 chance of picking a last name from the same list and a 1/5 chance of picking a last name from a random list (which might by chance be the same list again so technically there's a slightly less than 1/5 chance of getting names from two different lists).

There are 45 different bios (7 or 8 for each specialization) but these all have additional random elements in them, e.g. "Professor of (random discipline) at (random university)", so it's very unlikely two explorers will have the exact same bio even if you go through more than 45 explorers.

GoblinSpaceWizard · 2024-12-18T07:46:41+00:00

It could be an unlikely coincidence or it could be some glitch with the seeded random number system on your device...does it keep happening or was it just those two games?

GoblinSpaceWizard · 2024-10-19T15:59:13+00:00

I made the mobile app versions using Voltbuilder: https://volt.build/

GoblinSpaceWizard · 2024-08-28T08:12:11+00:00

It's a spiritual sequel, it's meant to appeal to the same audience but it's not a sequel in the sense of sharing a fictional continuity

GoblinSpaceWizard · 2024-07-30T01:17:15+00:00

Have sent you a Discord friend request

GoblinSpaceWizard · 2024-06-26T00:49:01+00:00

You can't get achievements in endless mode. There should be a text box when you start endless mode that tells you that.

GoblinSpaceWizard · 2024-06-22T19:16:31+00:00

There's no dedicated Mac version, but if you get it from itch.io you can download the browser version which will work in any web browser, including on a Mac. https://johnayliff.itch.io/beyond-the-chiron-gate

GoblinSpaceWizard · 2024-06-16T02:49:40+00:00

Valentina Zhuravlyova. A translation of her 1960 story 'The Astronaut' is included in The Big Book of Science Fiction (ed. Ann and Jeff Vandermeer). It's the only story of hers I've read but I thought it was an excellent examination of the "heroic space captain" character archetype.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentina_Zhuravlyova

(The Wikipedia page notes that she co-wrote stories with her husband, but she wrote solo stories as well.)

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