Entry 2
No lasers, no losing
. Written to catch up on decisions made before the diary began.
Every space game I’ve ever played eventually hands you a laser. It’s practically a law of physics. You fly somewhere, something shoots at you, you shoot back, and the soothing ambient music turns into the kind of music that means you’re about to lose your cargo.
Nana’s Nebula doesn’t have weapons. None. Not even a “mining laser” that suspiciously also works on pirates.
This was one of the first decisions I made, and it’s shaped a lot of the others. The game is supposed to be the thing you play to unwind. If the point is to relax, nothing should be able to take your farm away from you while you’re making a cup of tea.
But then what’s the tension?
This is the bit I went back and forth on. A game with no friction at all gets boring quickly, and cozy games still need something pushing back.
So there are rivals. Other operators, out there in the Solar System, farming and mining and trading alongside you. They’ll beat you to a good asteroid. They’ll undercut your prices at the market. They might show up at the spaceport looking smug about their tomato yields.
What they can’t do is make you lose. There’s no game over. A rival can make your week slightly more annoying, the way a neighbour with a better garden does. They can’t bankrupt you, blow you up or end your run.
I like this because it gives you something to measure yourself against without turning the game into a fight. You can try to outgrow them, or you can completely ignore them and spend three in-game seasons perfecting a single field of space potatoes. Both are valid ways to play.
The other half: automation
The other source of progress is getting your operation to run itself. Early on, everything needs tending by hand: your crops, your outposts, your little mining setups. Over time you build up tech and a fleet that takes over the routine jobs, so you can go and explore further out.
That loop, from doing everything yourself to watching a well-oiled machine hum along, is the most satisfying feeling in this genre. It’s also, I’ve realised, roughly what I’m trying to do with my own evenings.
No lasers. No losing. Lots of potatoes.