NovaSwift

A from-scratch rebuild of EV Nova, the 2002 space sim, in Swift. It runs on Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV, and there's an early build for Linux and Steam Deck now too. It doesn't include any of the original files, so you need your own copy.

I played EV Nova constantly as a kid and it barely runs on anything modern now, so I set out to make it playable again. I didn't expect that to mean writing a whole game engine in Swift, but that's what it turned out to mean.

For a long time I was working from the outside. I had the resource files, the EV Bible and my own memory of how it all behaved, and I was guessing at the rest. The AI especially was pretty far off. Eventually I went into the original Windows executable itself, decompiled it, and compared everything against it one function at a time: flight, combat, the AI, missions, the economy. That's finished now. It's still a beta and there are definitely bugs, but if something plays differently from the original, I'd like to hear about it. None of the decompiled code is in the repo, just my notes on what each part does.

It's picked up a lot along the way that the original never had. Controller support, touch controls for the phone, a store for community plug-ins, and an editor where you can make a plug-in and fly it straight away to test it. Anything that changes how it actually plays is off unless you turn it on.

Multiplayer sits on top of your own save, so everyone keeps their own galaxy and you only sync up when you're in the same system. On Apple devices it goes through Game Center. The Linux and Steam Deck build is very new and pretty rough, and there's a small dedicated server people can run themselves. Windows isn't built yet, and Apple and Linux players can't play together yet either.

Most of the engine, and the reverse engineering behind it, was built working alongside Claude Code. I'd rather say that outright than have someone assume otherwise.