As expected, something has gone terribly wrong... The homeworld contracted your company for its first terraforming project, but instead you find yourself stranded on an asteroid, aided only by a pithy computer. Everything out here is supposed to be lifeless, so imagine your surprise to find it infested with biomechanical entities. Hungry ones!
Drill, craft, and blast your way through winding caverns. Upgrade your utility pod with auto-cannons, laser drills, and scanners. Build an army of tireless drones. After all, you'll need every advantage to venture deep into the asteroid's secrets if you want to repair your ship and escape. Discover its genesis, or become lunch.
Terraforming may be the homeworld's final salvation. Sending their best was the obvious choice, if it wasn't so expensive anyway. Instead, they stranded you in... the Veridian Expanse.
Though the game is not yet complete, if you like what you see you can wishlist it on Steam and itch.io. Since I'm developing this game part time, mostly by myself, any help spreading the word is very very appreciated! :)
Honestly Veridian Expanse should run on most hardware that can access the modern web to download it. If you are reading this, it will probably run! The game is written from scratch, so it has very low system requirements.
Feedback and bug reports are very welcome. I haven't really started building up a community yet, but that means you can get in early! ;) I have a Discord chat set up, you can also post on the Steam or itch.io discussion forums.
Veridian Expanse runs on the Raspberry Pi! Being written in C using Vulkan makes it pretty efficient, and it runs well using the V3DV driver in Mesa. (Debian 12 "Bookworm" version or newer recommended) However the Vulkan driver only supports the Pi 4 and later. Binaries for the Pi should have came with your download.
The source code for Veridian Expanse is available under the GPLv3. In addition to the Raspberry Pi, I hope to make Veridian Expanse available on a bunch of fun platforms like Flathub, the BSDs, and Haiku. :) Due to AI scraping I don't keep a public source mirror but, you already have it! The source is included in resources.zip if you want to take a look or compile it yourself. As of writting, it should compile pretty much out of the box on Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Haiku, and Mac. You will need to provide SDL (2 or 3), OpenGL, and optionally Vulkan or Metal. Moderate build instructions are included.
Why open source a game that I plan to sell? First of all, any game on Steam will be available on pirate sites within hours of publishing. Pirates are only interested in the binary anyway, why would they even care about the source? On the other hand, if you want to get a game you bought running on something interesting like a cheap Linux handheld or something, you do need the source for that. Also, I've already shared the code with people when they had questions about how I implemented certain things anyway.