Dark Nova ][

July 6, 2026 · View on GitHub

A space trading adventure. Buy low, sell high, outrun the law, and try not to think too hard about what's waiting when you drop out of warp.

Dark Nova ][ is a cross-platform remake of Dark Nova (iPhone, 2009), itself descended from Pieter Spronck's classic Space Trader for Palm OS — one of the great open-source trading games. This remake preserves the economic simulation that made Space Trader special and builds a modern narrative layer on top of it.

The game

120 star systems on a seeded galaxy map — tech levels, governments, special resources, and system crises that move real prices
A working economy: the classic price model (base + tech × increment ± variance, doubled by wars and plagues, discounted by resources)
Combat encounters: police inspections, pirate attacks, traders, and things in the dark that are none of the above
The witness system: destroyed ships tell no tales. Let a survivor escape and the Galactic News Network runs your name; leave no witnesses and your deeds stay yours. Fame and infamy are information, not meters.
Persistent rivals: eight named captains per galaxy who remember. The pirate you spare comes back — in a bigger ship, holding a grudge.
Dice-spawned quests: relief runs to plague worlds, fixers offering to launder your police record, freight contracts recovered from derelict flight recorders. Stakes are locked when the job is offered.
Arrival vignettes: distress calls that might be bait, dead ships with intact airlocks, interdictors who know exactly what you're hauling

An LLM-driven narrative layer (dynamic dialogue, generated news prose, rival voices) and AI-generated scene art are designed and in progress — see docs/AI_MODERNIZATION.md. The game is offline-first by design: every AI feature has an engine-side fallback, and the deterministic game engine is always the sole authority over game state.

Running it

Requires Flutter 3.x+.

flutter pub get
flutter test          # 91 tests
flutter run -d chrome # or any device

The engine (lib/engine/, lib/models/) is pure Dart with no Flutter dependencies — it runs headless, which is how the test suite drives entire fights, quests, and rescue decisions without a UI.

License

Dark Nova ][ is free software, released under the GNU General Public License v3 (see LICENSE).

It honors its lineage: the game data model and economic design derive from Space Trader for Palm OS by Pieter Spronck, released under the GNU General Public License. Thank you, Pieter — this genre exists because you gave it away.