./rusttrader
● ActiveA modern Rust port of the classic Space Trader game originally written for Palm OS. Features 120 procedural star systems, dynamic economy, and a custom game engine.
screenshots
about this project
A faithful reimagining of Space Trader — the beloved Palm OS game by Pieter Spronck — rebuilt from the ground up in Rust using the macroquad game engine.
The game features a fully procedural galaxy with 120 star systems, each with dynamic pricing influenced by local politics, resources, and random events. Players navigate between systems via warp travel, manage cargo and fuel, encounter pirates and police, and upgrade their ships.
Built with performance in mind: runs at 60 FPS with ~2-5 MB memory footprint. The entire game loop — economy, encounters, ship systems, save/load — is implemented in pure Rust with keyboard-driven controls.
What makes this interesting: it's a study in systems programming for game development, translating a 20+ year old C codebase into idiomatic Rust while preserving the original game's charm and adding modern quality-of-life improvements.