Rebuilding EV Nova, the game that ate my childhood

EV Nova is a space sim from 2002. I played it constantly as a kid — flying around, trading, fighting, and messing with the mission computer and plugins way more than a normal kid probably should have. I've loved this game for a long time.

A while back I saw people using Claude to help rebuild old games — stuff like Command & Conquer Generals, but for iPad. I thought that was a genuinely cool idea, and EV Nova doesn't really run well on anything modern anymore, so I figured I'd try the same thing with it.

I did not expect that to mean building an entire game engine, natively, in Swift. But that's what it turned out to mean, so that's what I'm doing.

I don't actually know how a lot of this works

I can't reverse-engineer the original game especially well. I don't know how its AI works internally, and honestly there's a lot else I'm just as unsure about — mission logic, pricing, all of it. Nobody wrote any of this down anywhere I can find. What I have is the EV Bible, the original .rez resource files, my own memory of how the game behaved, and whatever Wikipedia and old forum posts still exist. A lot of this has been reconstructing behavior from the outside by watching what the original game actually did and guessing at the rest.

That's genuinely the hardest part. Not the flight physics, not the rendering — figuring out what the game is even supposed to do when I can't read the source.

Because I'm working from data I don't have any rights to, NovaSwift doesn't ship any of the original game's files. You bring your own legally-owned copy of EV Nova and the engine reads it at runtime — the same model OpenMW and OpenRA use for Morrowind and Command & Conquer. It felt like the only honest way to put this out there.

Performance was rough for a while

Decoding the resource files and running ship AI at the same time was slow enough to be a real problem early on. I ended up adding a caching layer for decoded resource data so it's not re-parsing the same files over and over, and that alone fixed most of it.

While I was in there fixing performance, I also built out a pretty extensive set of debug and profiling tools. As a side effect, those same tools let you fully control the game and cheat as much as you want — something the original EV Nova never had. That wasn't really the plan, it just fell out of needing good instrumentation.

Where it's at

It runs natively on Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Apple TV, with controller support.

I've got full multiplayer working, though "working" is generous — it's still kind of buggy and finicky and I wouldn't trust it for anything serious yet.

There's a pile of other stuff in there too: an in-game plugin store so people can install community content without digging through folders, and a Godot port for Linux and Windows I'm building on the side, sharing the same Swift engine underneath. There's a public TestFlight beta if anyone wants to poke at it.

I should also just say plainly that most of the engine, and the digging through resource formats behind it, was built working alongside Claude Code. I'd rather say that outright than have someone assume otherwise.

Honestly, the whole thing has just been really fun to build. It's also very clearly not done — the biggest gap right now is getting it to actually feel like the original game, not just run like it. AI behavior especially still has a long way to go.