Looking for a Traveller-inspired video game about space travel, survival, patrons, skills, danger, and interstellar adventure?
Cosmic Drifter is my playable sci-fi RPG prototype and proof-of-concept project. It is inspired by the feel of Traveller-style science fiction roleplaying, but it is an original CyborgPrime playable project.
Important: Cosmic Drifter is not an official Traveller video game, not a licensed Traveller product, and not a replacement for any Traveller rules. It is a Traveller-inspired sci-fi game experiment built for creative, educational, and entertainment purposes.
Play Cosmic Drifter
You can play the current Cosmic Drifter MVP on itch.io.
Play Cosmic Drifter on itch.io
This is a prototype, so expect rough edges, unfinished systems, and design experiments. The goal is to test ideas, learn what works, and build toward better playable sci-fi RPG experiences over time.
What Is Cosmic Drifter?
Cosmic Drifter is a sci-fi JRPG MVP and proof-of-concept game about an interstellar drifter trying to survive on the edge of a much larger galaxy.
In this game, the player is down on their luck and has found their way to an obscure mining colony in search of employment, opportunity, and a way back into the wider universe.
Through exploration, interaction, missions, rumors, patrons, skills, gear, and combat, the player can uncover storylines and pursue their own path through a science-fiction RPG world full of danger, technology, jobs, and strange discoveries.
Is Cosmic Drifter an Official Traveller Game?
No. Cosmic Drifter is not an official Traveller video game and is not a Traveller-licensed product.
It is a Traveller-inspired sci-fi RPG prototype. The project draws inspiration from the kinds of science-fiction roleplaying situations I enjoy: drifters, skills, patrons, rumors, dangerous jobs, interstellar travel, mining colonies, technology, strange discoveries, and people trying to survive on the edge of a much larger setting.
Cosmic Drifter uses its own project direction, game systems, characters, locations, and setting material. Any resemblance to Traveller-style play is inspiration and genre influence, not official adaptation.
If anybody with a Traveller license wants to hire or commission me to work on a real Traveller video game, they are welcome to contact me.
What You Do in the Game
In Cosmic Drifter, the player starts as an interstellar drifter who has arrived at a remote mining colony in search of work.
Exploration and interaction are important. Talk to people, inspect the environment, gather rumors, find work, accept missions, learn the setting, and look for opportunities to survive and advance.
The current MVP includes a functioning starting area, Admin Office, Bar, Weapon & Armor Shop, Electronics Store, and mine head. You can purchase armor, weapons, and gear. You can go into the mines and fight mine worms. Some mine worms drop raw crystal, which can be sold for credits.
Watch the Demo Walk-Through
Want to see what the project looked like early in development?
You can watch a 20-minute Cosmic Drifter demo walk-through showing the progress I made in the first week.
Follow the Development
You can follow the development of Cosmic Drifter and related game-making experiments at MakeYourOwnRPG.com.
I use projects like Cosmic Drifter to test ideas for sci-fi RPG gameplay, skills, careers, missions, exploration, rumors, patrons, combat, and world interaction.
How to Play
Bringing Up Menus
Use the ESC key on PC to bring up the Main Menu. From there, you can access your item inventory, skills, status screens, and other options.
Use the arrow keys to move up and down the menu.
Press Enter to select your choice.
Use the ESC key to back out of menu selection one level at a time.
The Character Sheet
Access the character sheet using ESC > Status > Select Character.
There are four main sections to the Character Sheet:
- The Character Description
- The Status Menu
- The Character Overview
- The Character Combat Stats and Rank
Character Description Panel
This area contains a short descriptive blurb about the selected character.
Status Menu
Choose various character detail windows using the Status Menu.
Character Overview
This panel displays:
- The Character Portrait
- The Character Name
- The Character Rank in the current Career
- The Character Career
- The Current and Max Hit Points
- The Current and Max Tech Points
- The Character Mortality
When a character replaces organic body parts with cybernetic gear, their humanity, represented by Mortality, is decreased.
Characters cannot go below 55% human and maintain their identity.
Combat Stats, Rank, and Experience
Combat Stats
Each character is represented by statistics that define their relative strengths and weaknesses compared to other characters.
Rank / Career Level: Represents a character's relative experience level in their current career. Rank can be increased by accomplishing tasks, missions, achievements, and winning battles.
Max HP: Represents a character's health, stamina, and overall ability to take damage. HP can be increased by gaining levels or through skills and items.
Max Tech: Represents the character's ability to control technological devices, such as scanners, targeting computers, and starship controls. Tech can be increased through level advancement, skills, cybernetic augments, or items.
Offense: Represents the offensive strength of the character. Offense can be increased by gaining levels or through combat skills, weapons, and items.
Defense: Represents the defensive strength of the character. Defense can be increased by gaining levels or through defensive skills, armor, and other items.
Tech Offense: Represents the character's offensive capability with technical or technology-driven actions.
Tech Defense: Represents the character's defensive capability against technical or technology-driven threats.
Initiative: Represents the quickness and dexterity of the character, including the ability to strike critical blows and dodge critical attacks.
Fate: Represents a character's ability to avoid or inflict secondary effects from attacks.
Experience
Increase Career Ranks by accumulating Experience Points.
Current Experience: Experience Points are awarded for advancing missions, solving problems, figuring out puzzles, and winning combat.
To Next Rank: The Experience Points accumulated toward the next Rank in this Career.
Total Experience For Next Rank: The Experience Points required to gain promotion to the next Rank in this Career.
Standard Characteristics
Each character is represented by characteristics that describe different physical, mental, and social aspects of the character.
The higher the number, the stronger the character is in that area.
Normal human Characteristics max out at 15. This maximum can be overcome by various means within the game, such as cybernetic augmentation.
STR / Strength: Represents physical strength and influences hand-to-hand damage, lifting, pushing, pulling, and physical force.
DEX / Dexterity: Represents balance and agility. Dexterity also influences Initiative and Accuracy.
END / Endurance: Represents toughness and resilience. Endurance influences Hit Points.
INT / Intellect: Represents smartness and adaptability. Intellect affects Tech and Tech Offense.
EDU / Education: Represents education level, memory, training, and technical understanding. Education affects Tech and Tech Defense.
SOC / Social: Represents social position and social presence. Lower numbers might mean the character is homeless, gruff, or unlikable. Higher numbers mean the character may be well-known, respected, or charismatic.
Skills
Your character can learn various skills to help accomplish goals in the game.
Some skills can be used in combat, some outside combat, and some both in and out of combat. Some skills are tested passively behind the scenes and may change the story depending on outcomes.
Current Skill List
(More skills may be added as the game develops.)
- Administration: Interacting with bureaucracies. Reduces administration fees associated with obtaining licenses, permits, and documentation.
- Advocate: Familiarity with interstellar laws. Reduces fines, solicitor fees, and legal jeopardy from illegal or underworld activities.
- Astrogation: Navigation within star systems and through Jump Space. Allows fast travel between navigation buoys and places the JumpFrame closer to the intended Jump target.
- Athletics: Helps with feats of strength, endurance, and dexterity. Provides bonuses to running, jumping, swimming, climbing, balancing, and physical exertion.
- Broker: Helps with interstellar trade, including cargo, freight, mail, passengers, and profitable trade routes.
- Carouse: The art of socializing. Use Carouse to gather rumors at bars or find patrons.
- Comms: Helps increase the range of communications devices, jam signals, or enhance comms.
- Computers: Helps with interacting with computers, hacking systems, opening computerized locks, defeating intrusion protection, and crafting programs or computers.
- Deception: Helps with tricking people, telling convincing lies, misdirecting attention, and sleight of hand.
- Engineer: Helps with repairs of ship-based or facility-based systems such as power plants, drive systems, weapons systems, and more. Allows crafting of engineering components and devices.
- Gambler: Helps with calculating odds, understanding common gambling games, and taking chances.
- Gun Combat: Familiarity with pistols and rifles. Provides bonuses to ranged combat.
- Gunner: Familiarity with ship-based, facility-based, or vehicle-based weapon turrets and targeting systems.
- Heavy Weapons: Familiarity with rocket launchers, grenade launchers, and other man-portable heavy weapons.
- Investigate: Helps with discovering information, uncovering conspiracies, finding hidden information, exposing cover-ups, and landing a great news story.
- JOT / Jack Of All Trades: A special skill that reflects a character's ability to improvise and adapt. It helps negate negative modifiers to untrained skills.
- Mechanic: Familiarity with repairing vehicles and small mechanical systems, such as drones. Allows crafting of mechanical devices and components.
- Medic: Familiarity with biological processes, life-saving medical techniques, first aid, and the healing arts.
- Melee: Familiarity with hand-to-hand combat, martial arts, knives, clubs, and improvised weapons.
- Navigation: Familiarity with finding your way in the wilderness, especially planetside. Allows fast travel between known navigation points.
- Persuade: Familiarity with diplomacy, negotiation, agreement, and convincing others.
- Pilot: Familiarity with spaceship and shuttle flight systems. Helps with evasion during space combat.
- Recon: Noticing the unusual, spotting things or people that are out of place, finding hidden items, noticing ambushes, and reducing surprise.
- Science: Familiarity with scientific concepts such as physics, chemistry, cosmology, history, and more.
- Sensors: Familiarity with personal, vehicle, ship, or station-based sensor systems. Helps with scanning anomalous phenomena, alien flora and fauna, ships, and objects in space.
- Stealth: Helps with hiding, sneaking, and remaining unseen or undetected.
- Steward: Helps with high-class passengers and allows food and drink crafting.
- Streetwise: Helps with gathering rumors, surviving on the streets, interacting with underworld elements, recognizing social structures, and more.
- Survival: Helps with foraging, finding shelter, limiting environmental exposure, hunting, tracking, and surviving in the wilderness.
- Vac Suit: Helps with using, moving, working, and fighting in a vac suit and in low- or no-gravity situations.
Certain items can be accessed through combinations of skills, such as Vac Suit 1 plus Heavy Weapons 1 to unlock BattleDress access.
Careers and Rank
Rank represents your advancement within a career path. If you leave a career and return to it later, you keep whatever Ranks you have earned in that career.
There are a variety of Careers to choose from.
You can change Careers at any time by registering your new Career with the appropriate in-game business or guild.
Use the in-game character creation to set up a starting character according to your preferred playing style.
You start as a Drifter.
| Class | Level | HP | Attack | Defense | Initiative | Fate | Tech |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Drifter | 1 | 21 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
Missions, Patrons, Rumors, Crew, and Guilds
Missions
Missions are a way to earn money, reputation, experience points, gear, career advancement, and knowledge about the world.
Class Missions
Class missions present opportunities to advance your career by engaging in tasks related to that career.
Science-based missions may advance Scholar careers, while combat missions may advance military careers.
Story Missions
Story missions help you learn about the lore of the world: the people, places, factions, histories, and mysteries that shape the game environment.
Uncover the secrets of the sector by completing Story Missions.
Patrons
Although work opportunities can come from anywhere, Patrons are a common source of missions.
Patrons can come in many forms and usually have missions that follow a theme according to that Patron’s interests, needs, or hidden agenda.
Rumors
Rumors are a great way to gather leads for possible jobs.
Go to places where people congregate to listen for rumors of interest.
Crew
You may not have all the skills you need to accomplish a task.
You may need to hire mercenaries or crew members to accompany you on your missions.
Find crew in places where people looking for work are likely to gather.
Guilds
There are a variety of guilds in the sector.
Some guilds accept any member who applies. Other guilds are more exclusive and will check your reputation before letting you join.
Guild benefits can range from discounts on certain items to extra skills, special weapons and armor, and even life insurance.
Items, Weapons, Armor, Devices, and Crafting
Items
Items can be crafted by players, purchased from vendors, dropped by enemies, given as mission rewards, or found during exploration.
Item icons contain information at a glance, including Tech Level, Item Type, and Rarity.
- Tech Level is noted in the bottom-left corner.
- The Item Type is indicated by the pictogram in the center.
- The color-coded icon and border indicate the rarity of the item.
In this example, the icon represents a snub pistol. It is uncommon and has a Tech Level of 8.
Weapons
Space is a dangerous place. Pirates prey on merchant ships, and hostile alien lifeforms roam the surfaces of uncharted planets.
You will need a way to defend yourself while exploring the cosmos.
Armor
Protect yourself from attack with armor.
Armor comes in a variety of styles and is built for a variety of purposes. Vac suits protect you from the cold vacuum of space, while hostile environment suits allow you to work in environmental extremes such as extreme heat, corrosive atmospheres, and dangerous pressure conditions.
Devices
Various devices can help you during your adventures.
Device use depends on the amount of Tech score a character has.
Scanner: Provides critical information about enemies and entities in the environment.
Pocket Secretary: Tracks missions and allows the player to send and receive communications.
Crafting
It is possible to create your own items in the game.
Weapons, armor, devices, and other useful items can be created through crafting.
To craft an item, the character needs to know the recipe and must have the raw materials or ingredients in their inventory.
Some items require a fabrication device to be crafted.
Tech Levels, Races, and Hazards
Tech Level
In a star-spanning setting, there will be a variety of planets. Some are inhabited, and some are too hostile to support life.
Planets that are inhabited may be at different stages of technological development. Tech Level is a gauge of how technologically advanced a society is and dictates what types of items are commonplace.
Tech Levels in Cosmic Drifter support the game’s equipment, worldbuilding, hazards, and sense of technological progression. They are part of the project’s original sci-fi game design and should be understood as game-setting material rather than official Traveller rules.
Races
The main character is human.
There are a variety of alien races you can encounter in the game, although the setting is currently a human-centric empire.
Hazards
Aside from hungry alien beasts that want to eat you for lunch, a character may encounter a variety of hazards while exploring the cosmos.
Corrosive Atmospheres: Chemical compounds in the atmosphere corrode and degrade regular vac suits. Unprotected humans would be dead in minutes or seconds.
Radiation: Extreme radiation can severely injure or kill an unprotected human. Anti-radiation drugs, combat armor, and other items can protect against radiation.
Vacuum: The vacuum of space is deadly to an unprotected human. Vac suits provide life support and limited protection from the effects of vacuum.
Extreme Pressure: Under the sea or on planets with dense atmospheres, pressures can be extreme. Hostile environment suits help protect against crushing pressure.
Extreme Gravity: Extreme gravity can crush an unprotected human on the surface of a massive planet. Powered battle armor and hostile environment suits can provide some protection while allowing the user to remain mobile.
Achievements
Characters can gain extra bonuses by completing Achievements throughout the game.
How Can I Support This Project?
I am happy to donate my time to this project as a teacher of game design and digital arts.
I try to use free assets and create original assets when practical. However, some development expenses add up over time, including RPG Maker software, indie artwork, icon packs, map assets, system plugins, hosting, and coffee.
If you are able and interested, I appreciate support, feedback, playtesting, encouragement, and practical advice.
If you have experience with crowdfunding or think this project could benefit from something like Kickstarter, please reach out to me. I would appreciate advice on whether this kind of project is suitable and how to approach it.
Thank you for your support and interest.
Take the User Survey
Have an opinion to share?
Take 10 minutes to take the Cosmic Drifter user survey.
Hailing Frequencies Open
Are you interested in playing a video game with a Traveller-inspired feel made by a long-time Traveller player and fan?
Do you have suggestions that could make this game better?
Tell me about it in the Comments section. I am interested in what you have to say about a Traveller-inspired video game.
Follow More CyborgPrime Playable Projects
Want more updates about Cosmic Drifter, playable prototypes, sci-fi RPG experiments, and CyborgPrime game projects?
Join the CyborgPrime Games updates list and I’ll let you know when new playable projects, devlogs, and major updates are available.
You can also join me and other sci-fi RPG fans on the CyborgPrime Discord server.
Play Cosmic Drifter on itch.io
Change Log
21.02.16
- Updated skills list
- Updated some screenshots of the character sheet
21.02.11
- Created Character Sheet
- Created Skill List Display
- Created Non-Character Generation System
21.02.03
- Set the game resolution to HD 1280x720
- Set up the Skills Screen
- Worked on reducing the Skill List to the most useful 33 skills
21.01.09
- Changed sound effects for going through doors
- Changed sound effects for changing menu entries
- Changed the sound effect for selecting menu items
- Implemented first 12 skills
21.01.03
- Created self-installer for Windows
- Developed more game mechanics
- Created standard Character Attributes: STR, DEX, END, INT, EDU, SOC
- Revamped the Character Sheet
- Organized some backend JavaScript to make it easier to find libraries
20.12.25
- Received support from an anonymous patron who upgraded my RPG Maker in true Traveller-inspired style
- Added Custom Window Designer
- Added CyberCity Tileset
- Added space-themed background music
20.12.23
- Added many new animation effects for combat
- Added new enemy graphics
- Added new battle backgrounds
- Added new sci-fi tilesets
- Added new background music
- Added new character portraits
- Added new animation sheets
20.12.22
- Added dialog for the Med Bay Info NPC
- Added dialog for the Maintenance Office Info NPC
- Added dialog for the Bar Info NPC
- Added dialog for the Diner Info NPC
- Added Carouse mechanic
- Created the first animated test monster: replacement mine worm
- Fixed a bug where the attack animation continued to loop after the first attack instead of going back to idle
20.12.21
- Added basic game lore to the starter zone
- Added Tech Level information at the Electronics Shop
- Added Law Level information at the Weapon Shop
- Added Info NPC characters to all shops to help new players get oriented
- Added support for DragonBones animations
- Developed a concept for character creation that allows skills to evolve naturally out of gameplay
- Installed and configured RPG Maker
- Created a variety of map locations for the starter zone
Bug Reports
21.01.05
- Using “Attack” instead of the Gun Combat skill attacks with the equipped gun but does not spend ammo.
To-Do
- Optimize the dialog from the Electronics Store.
- Set up missions system
- Add armor and weapon upgrade slots
- Add crafting examples
- Add breakout points in the character creation process so players can start untrained, trained only in background skills, with background and first career skills, or with background skills and two career terms
- Implement Achievement System
- Convert project to RPG Maker MZ
