Cosmiccom

In August 2014, Luke Nickerson spent a Ludum Dare weekend building a game about being the newly hired CEO of an interstellar telecom company. Forty-eight hours later CosmicCom: Connecting Worlds existed: one satellite, one unremarkable rock of a planet, one mothership, and a galaxy of citizens who would very much like their faster-than-light internet now, please. The deadline shows in every corner of the thing, and that is the best thing about it.

What the loop feels like

You look down at Planet Alpha, population one hundred and fifty million, and you start signing up customers. Their subscription fees become capital, capital becomes another satellite in orbit, and the satellite starts earning while you do something else. That's CosmicCom.

Then the departments take over. Engineers build satellites faster, marketing pulls planetary customers in faster, and somewhere in there you notice you have stopped clicking and started managing a telecom empire by exception. When the Mothership refuels, you warp to a fresh world and start the whole cheerful expansion over again, one connected planet at a time. That's CosmicCom.

The systems doing the work

The game runs on four named levers, each with its own panel: Planet Customers, the manual and passive acquisition of subscribers on the world below; Satellites, which cost money to build and scale both passive income and customers-per-click; Engineers, the department that raises build speed; and Marketing, which accelerates customer pull. The Mothership ties it together, holding fuel you spend on interplanetary expansion, warping to new planets once the current one is wired.

It is a compact chain, and the game is honest about its size. The landing page still offers two builds: the original Ludum Dare 30 version, and a post-competition version whose Coming Soon banner has now been Coming Soon for over a decade. The jam build is the complete one.

Where it stumbles

Say it plainly: this is an evening game, and the community has always treated it as one. There is no prestige layer, no deep scaling curve, and the galaxy runs out of new worlds at roughly the point where a bigger game would start repeating itself. The post-competition build was never finished, so what exists is what a weekend produced, however polished the weekend was. And the original home for the game no longer hosts it; the deathraygames.com site is live but the play page is gone, which is why the fan-hosted mirror matters.

Playing it today

Play it free in the browser at the idle-js-games GitHub Pages mirror, which keeps both the LD30 original and the unfinished post-competition build reachable, with the source repo public on GitHub. There is no Steam, phone, or console version and never has been. If the theme lands, Crank turns a similar one-verb opening into a decade-deep sci-fi tree, and A Dark Room remains the classic small-web incremental that hides a whole game behind a single button.

The verdict

CosmicCom is a jam-scale incremental that knows exactly what it is: a charming, thematically tidy loop about wiring the galaxy for FTL broadband, built in a weekend by a developer whose other early incrementals the community still remembers fondly. Finish it in an evening, smile at the mothership, and move on. Not every game needs to eat a month.