About This Game

The Cold Prospect is four days out from Titan Refinery and her drive is starting to go. The Steady Return is sitting at Ceres Station waiting for a cargo, and somewhere out past the Belt a solar flare is on its way. You're the dispatcher. You decide where each ship goes and how hard it burns, and the captain flies it.

MANIFEST is a hard-SF freight tycoon set in one solar system.

You start as a small company at one of the ports in the system. Freight comes up on the board from all over, from the smelters at Caloris to Phoebe Far Terminal out beyond Saturn's rings, and every consignment has a deadline. You pick the ship and plan the flight. Fusion torch ships burn the whole way, flip at the turnover point and brake into port; what you choose is how hard. Burn hot and you arrive early with a light tank and a worn drive. Take it gently and you're counting on nothing going wrong. Meanwhile the planets carry on round the Sun, and the lane that paid well last month might be the long way round now.

Ships come from five yards, and you can tell them apart across the dock. Meridian Yards hang cargo rings off an open truss. Harkon builds a submarine bow and stern round an open, hooped hold. Dragan & Sons push a barge with a tug and keep the crew behind a shadow shield. Every hull is put together from its parts, the drive, tanks, holds and crew decks, and in the yard it turns on a stand so you can look it over before you buy.

Refits happen in dry dock. You pick the work bay by bay (flank tanks, bracing for hard burns, cargo gantries, a manipulator arm) and the yard lays it out the way a yard would: dock and block, cut, fit, pressure test, sign-off, undock and trials. The parts go on while you watch. When she comes out, the ship on your map is her silhouette at her own length.

You run all of it from a screen laid out like a flight deck, with three or four displays and a column of keys down each side that double as warning lamps. On a good day the room is dark and quiet and the ships crawl across the map. When something breaks its key flashes and an alarm sounds, and the lamp stays lit until you've dealt with it.

The planets keep moving. Mercury goes round the Sun in three months and Mars takes nearly two years, so two ports that sat side by side drift apart, and a lane that's short this month is long in three. Every route you draw bends to meet its port where it will be when the ship gets there, not where it is when you plan it. Some crews weren't so lucky out there, and what's left of their ships can be salvaged. It shows up on the notices board, and you decide whether it's worth the detour.

As the company grows you buy operating rights at ports, and with them you can book every cargo a port handles from anywhere in the system. The hulls get bigger, up to XL, and you can refit one for a different cargo or lease a ship while you're one short.

MANIFEST is in active development by one person. The demo is the current build and it gets updated often; this month the ships got drawn. I expect a lot of the numbers to move once more people have played it. If you play this genre seriously I'd like to hear from you, especially about whether planning a flight feels like a decision or like homework.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

- **Code.** Exempt under the rule, but disclosed anyway. Most of the implementation is written by AI coding tools, working from my design and under my review.
- **Arts and visuals.** Inside the game, none. The UI is drawn by code, there's no image art, and the logo is text-art. The **store capsule and header art on Steam and itch is code.**
- **Audio.** No generated audio that I know of. Sound effects are a licensed Bluezone "Cargo Spaceship" pack plus a few Kenney CC0 clips. The seven ambient music tracks are licensed from Pixabay. None carries Pixabay's AI-generated label, and that's as far as I can attest to how they were made.
- **Text and writings.** There's no story or dialogue in the game. The in-game UI labels, notification lines and the guide steps were written alongside the code by the same AI coding tools, then reviewed and edited by me. I'm listing them here even though they could arguably sit under the code exemption.
- **Marketing.** My devlogs, the store description and this post were drafted with AI help and edited by me. The trailer is raw gameplay capture. Screenshots are straight from the game.
- **Live-generated content.** None. No model runs inside the game and nothing is generated at runtime.