You can play the demo and find out more at phosphor-game.com, or wishlist it on Steam.

Phosphor is a real-time-with-pause tactical fleet game drawn in glowing wireframe on a CRT. You command a small convoy of named capital ships through a ten-node run across the dark, fighting to reach the end of the chart while something that can’t be killed hunts you all the way there. You score on how much of your fleet arrives intact, so every battle is really an escort mission for your own ships: the skill isn’t just winning, it’s winning cheaply.

It’s FTL in structure, Battlestar Galactica in feel, with combat inspired by Star Wars: Armada.

The idea at the heart of it is commitment. These are heavy ships and they can’t change their minds. You click a destination and a ship arcs toward it along its turning circle, overshooting tight turns and taking real time to come about. Facing is locked to movement, so your guns point where you’re going, and keeping fire on a target means orbiting it, which makes where the guns are bolted on - a nose arc or a broadside - the thing that really distinguishes one hull from another. Main weapons fire on their own when a target is in arc and in range, so the skill is all in positioning rather than your trigger finger.

You can pause at any time to read the board and issue orders across the fleet. The thinking happens in the pause; the tension lives in the unpaused stretches where you can’t correct a bad call in time. Each ship draws on a single reactor for its hard burn, its guns and its shields, and there’s never quite enough to go round. Hull damage carries from node to node, and if you lose a ship she’s gone for the rest of the run.

The look is deliberately restrained: three colours, each with one meaning - green is friendly, magenta is hostile, amber is a warning - and phosphor persistence on everything that moves. A heavy ship’s move order smears into a glowing arc of where it’s just been, so commitment is something you can actually see on screen. Getting that to feel right was a lot of fun; nearly every big decision about how the ships handle was settled by building it and flying it rather than arguing about it on paper.

Between the fights the run is a freshly drawn route map with hubs to repair and refit, and each jump is a choice of which danger to take next: minefields, debris canyons, nebulae that blind your sensors, gravity wells, and more.

Phosphor is coming to Steam for macOS, Windows and Linux / Steam Deck. You can play the demo in your browser right now and, if you enjoy it, wishlist it on Steam.