Unbound, the game

Spectranext will come with a companion multiplayer game, called Unbound, which will be available for free for everyone to play with Spectranext.

This article covers the setting and mechanics of the game.

Setting

Congratulations, you are now responsible for managing a new branch for an interplanetary enterprise! You have just landed on a new planet, in an effort to make a profit.

At its core, the game is set in a hard-edged frontier future where corporations drive expansion. Players arrive not as explorers or chosen heroes, but as contracted workers.

The world feels bureaucratic as much as hostile: every outpost is an asset, every mistake a cost, and survival is tied directly to debt, performance, and quotas.

About the planet

The planet itself is unforgiving. Air is a managed resource, shelter must be secured, and the surface turns lethal when temperatures drop. Life on this world is defined by systems that make basic existence possible: oxygen tanks, power generation, enclosed habitats, heat, and regular supply drops. That gives the setting a constant pressure; even routine work carries the sense that the environment is waiting for a lapse.

The landscape is alive in unsettling ways, with hostile local life and signs that the planet resists being carved into a supply chain. The result is a setting that blends survival, labor, and low-grade dread: a lonely industrial outpost on a cold alien world, where profit, maintenance, and self-preservation are never really separate.

The mining

Economically, the setting is built around extraction and industrial processing. Players mine raw materials, refine them into usable goods, automate production, and send valuable cargo off-world through company logistics. The colony is not there to become a civilization in its own right. It exists to feed a larger economy, especially through the harvesting of rare resources important enough to justify the danger and expense of maintaining such a remote foothold.

Automation

At some point the pressure to deliver will grow so much that you wouldn't be able to make it, unless you automate. This is done with computers.

Things you can work with

• Stationary computers
• Factory
• Oxygen tank
• Power station
• Door(s)
• and Forward Operation Base (FOB)

Although you can operate the above equipment manually, using automation to have the operation sustain itself is where your company survives.

Programming

The automation is done with Computers.

Computers are a literal 48k ZX Spectrum computers themselves, so you might find yourself using a computer while using a computer, to assist you in automation.

Those computers have access to IO ports, which you can use in BASIC, or any other means, to perform the task. Need a steady supply of coal? Then you need to write up a mining bot.

If that was not obvious, the player opened a computer which behaves much like a typical virtual machine

The fighting

The planet is hostile for your presence, so you must defend yourself.

As dying is expensive for the company.

Multiplayer

With help of Spectranext (or Spectranet), players can cooperate on the same task simultaneously. This can be done both on physical machines, and with Emulation.

Because the game has a server component, players are free to create their own game sessions and experience them throughout.

Intended game session should span weeks, when players would join, check things, add some automation and leave.

Contracts

The point of the game is to satisfy contract requirements, but beyond that the goal is to have the company survive for as long as possible.

And the primary metric of survival is positive cash flow and balance in bank account.

Star Store

If you don't have something, you can buy it, for the right price. Assuming, you have the capital.

Furthermore

The game is in an active development, so feel free to subscribe to get updates about it in the future.