I spent months building a space scanner discovery game and it just launched on the Play Store — come find weird stuff in the void with me 🛸
Hey all! It's launch day. Starscanner is officially live on the Play Store after months of grinding, and I'm equal parts excited and nauseous. Figured this is the moment to actually show people.
The pitch (short version): You're sweeping a scanner across deep space looking for weird stuff. Sometimes you find a chunk of ice. Sometimes you find a rogue planet. Sometimes you find something that probably shouldn't exist. Then you upgrade your gear and go find more.
The pitch (longer, because Reddit): It started as a "what if a Geiger counter was fun" experiment and turned into a full-on collection game. You've got:
~480 unique discoveries to find — comets, asteroids, exoplanets, nebulae, signals, anomalies, and a bunch of stuff I won't spoil. Each one has a hand-written description and its own art.
Rarity tiers that actually feel different — pulling a Mythic after 200 scans of nothing hits like it should
An energy system that isn't predatory — scans cost 10, regen one per 30s, and you can upgrade both sides of that equation in the Lab
Upgrade tree with stuff like Amplifier (better rolls), Sonar (more discoveries per scan), Attractor (bad-luck protection so you're not stuck pulling commons forever), and Fortune (rarity bias)
Scan paths — different regions of space have different drop pools, so you're not just smashing one button
Squads — co-op feature where you and your friends contribute energy to communal signals and split the loot. This was a nightmare to build but it's the part I'm most proud of.
Offline progression — close the app, come back later, your scanner kept working (within reason, I'm not trying to make this an idle game)
What it's NOT:
Not pay-to-win. There's a shop, there are IAPs, there's an ad here and there. But every upgrade is reachable through play. I hate gacha mechanics and I refuse to ship one.
Not "finished" in the dead-game sense — I'll be patching, balancing, and adding stuff based on what people actually do with it. I'm a solo dev. The art is AI-assisted (I generated and then hand-curated every single one of those ~480 icons — there's exactly one comet, "Tebbutt," that doesn't have custom art because the generator gave up on me, and I think that's funny enough to leave in). The backend is a separate service handling auth and squad sync. The whole client is Kotlin/Compose. Where to get it: 🔗 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.starscanner.app It's free. Give it a try, and if you like it, a rating genuinely helps a tiny launch like this more than you'd think. What I'd love from you:
Tell me what you find first (and how long it took)
Tell me what feels off — pacing, energy, upgrade cost, anything
Squad up with a friend and tell me if it actually works at scale
Bug reports, the weirder the better
If you hate something, tell me that too. I can take it. Hanging out in the comments all day. AMA about the build, the gameplay, why I picked Compose over Unity, why squads almost made me quit, whatever. Cheers, and happy scanning 🚀