Deck & Conn

About this game

Latest news

• Announcements·4 Sept 2026Official

  Patrol In Progress - Deck & Conn v1.1 is out!

  Patrols in campaign mode can now be paused and resumed by quitting the game or back to the main menu. Additionally, more bugs have been fixed and there’s been some AI tweaks.Our next focus is some improvements to the in-game NPC AI, and as requested an accelerated animation for when you’re doing lots of in-sector travel without enemies present.Thanks to everyone sending us feedback!Changes:* PATROLS CAN BE RESUMED - quitting the game or to the menu will suspend the patrol for resumption at the player's leisure* Docking with an enemy vessel to scuttle or take a prize no longer disables ownship's sensors* Merchant SOS events now resolve when the enemy vessel surrenders* You must repair your vessel in dynamic campaigns before being able to leave portFixes:* Fixed sound issues when loading a game / starting a scenario with a ship that has a hot reactor* Fixed text on the conn MFD when choosing to take a vessel a prize* When a ship is destroyed, ASRs and Launchers that were targeting it clear their selection* Fixed a periodic crash bug when AIs attempt to escape a sector from combat
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• Patch Notes·3 Sept 2026Official

  Deck & Conn v1.0.2 live

  Version 1.0.2 is available now.Changes:AI: Improved friendly NPC ships dealing with enemy vessels surrenderingFixes:Fixed bug which could cause player captains lost with ship not being respected properlyFixed font issue with the PAM terminalFixed glitch where detected ships was not being incremented correctly in dynamic campaignsStopped crew suggesting mags turned on when the system is already onAI: Fixed prize vessels qualifying as friendly fire for previously-queued fireWe are currently doing internal testing on a new in-patrol save system to allow patrols to take place over multiple sessions. If you want to help test it, join the open_testing branch where it will become available in the next 24 hours.Thanks again to everyone sending us feedback and bug reports! We've got a growing list of features to add soon based on your emails and posts.
  Read full article on Community Announcements (Elissa)

• Patch Notes·2 Sept 2026Official

  Deck & Conn 1.0.1 is up!

  Deck & Conn v1.0.1 is now up! This build contains some fixes for bugs reported since launch. A full change list can be found when you first start the game. Thanks to those who helped out by sending in bug reports!A quick roadmap for the next week - more small updates will come in the next few days fixing and tweaking things players have reported.Over the next week, we will then work towards version 1.1, which will focus on adding the ability to save the state of your patrol during dynamic campaigns, to let you quit and resume later.Another quick note - we’ve exposed an open_testing branch, so if you want bleeding edge builds, feel free to subscribe to that beta channel. Just be aware that it will be builds we’re currently testing, and they could well have issues.
  Read full article on Community Announcements (Elissa)

• Announcements·1 Sept 2026Official

  BURST TRANMISSIONS - Deck & Conn is OUT

  There is something easy about designing BIG games. I mean, it's not easy to make GOOD big games, but if you're designing Star Citizen, the answers at a very high level are often pretty simple. Building a giant life sim in space... do we allow players to buy new ships? Yes. Upgrade ships? Yes. Buy properties and start business? Yes. Visit bars and buy drinks? Yes. Change the colour of the fuzzy dice on your ship? Yes. Do insider trading in the functional in-universe global stock market? Of course!I'm being hyperbolic here, but when what you're building is an everything-game, the problems you run into are worlds different from when you're a team of just one or two people making a pixel art space game. So much of the time, the answer of "should the player be able to do X?" ends up being "no", and you have to make sure that "no" is the correct answer for design reasons, rather than solely for resourcing/scope reasons. That can mean you're answering 'no' for production reasons, which is an easy thing to do when you're wearing multiple hats and know what your very strict budget and timeline is.But sometimes, despite knowing it's, as my producer friends would say loudly and drunkenly on a Friday, 'scope creep'. It's a thing I've tried to avoid more and more as I continue to make indie games, but sometimes, when fresh eyes land on your game you learn something and need to add a feature that seems so obvious you can't believe you didn't think of it before.In this case, what I'm talking about is Burst Transmissions. Until fairly late in the development of Deck & Conn, you could fly around in the dynamic campaign, take out enemy ships, protect merchant ships, and even fight along side other friendlies - all while the only communication was via the intentionally-vintage green-hued comms computer in the Captain's Cabin. At the time, to try and bring the world alive, messages would bounce around between ships and stations via this system. Testers probably noted that without fail ...
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• Announcements·21 Aug 2026Official

  From EGA Trek to Deck & Conn

  Building the Spacecraft I Imagined as a ChildDeck & Conn has probably gone through more iterations than any project I've developed. This is it here, in its first form - a pico-8 prototype of what was then a sort of "Super Star Trek with bells added". From there, it went through three complete re-writes or ports across two more languages, until it ended up as its current C++ iteration with a custom engine.  So, why did it stick with me for so long? Why was I constantly trying to make it or some version of it? If I broke down what prompted designing most of the games I've made, they mostly come down to one origin story: Games I played when I was young that weren't quite what I wanted them to me. Maybe they weren't bad, per se, but the promise of what they could be wasn't really there. This was more common in decades past, where hardware limitations often meant what you might want to do as a game designer and what you COULD do in a few megabytes or less of memory were light years apart. Sometimes, it was games I loved as a child, and when I'd go back to them, they just weren't as complex as they were in my memory. EGA Trek was one of those for me, along with other iterations of this game formula. It's still a great little game, and you can see how it directly inspired so much of Deck & Conn. Even the interface has a similar pane-based breakdown, though in Deck & Conn they're more diegetic-looking. But when you go back to most of these amazing versions of the original mainframe Star Trek game, they retain the simplicity of the original. Not a bad thing, but as a child I made up in my head all the complexities of shipboard life that were going on beneath the EGA exterior, and by the time I had grown older and gotten into aviation, submarine warfare, and read half the Aubrey-Maturin books, I kept seeing a project in my future. I imagine my version having all the things I was a sicko for. For one thing, startup procedures. The practice of them was never my thing (have you ...
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