Late, and sorry

I owe you an apology. In the first devlog, in May, I wrote that the alpha would open and the first invitations would go out in Q3 2026. Q3 came and went. No alpha, no invitation, and no word from me about it.

If you joined the waitlist this spring, you were promised early access and got silence. That is the part I regret most. A delay happens; leaving the people who trusted the project without news should not have.

What happened

Nova Imperium is built by one person, on his own time. May was an intense month: most of the game you can see on this site was built then.

Then personal matters came up, followed by a move. Between the two, from June to September, there was simply no time left for the game, and it did not move: no commit, no fix, nothing. Those things had to come first, and I would make the same choice again. What I would do differently is tell you.

Nothing was abandoned. The code, the art, the servers that were ready to be set up: all of it was waiting where I left it.

What changed since

In October I picked it back up, starting with the thing that was missing most: the game now runs on a phone.

• Touch controls everywhere: pinch to zoom, tap to place a building, then confirm, so a thumb does not drop a factory in the wrong place.
• A HUD made for small screens, with the four key resources up front and the rest one tap away.
• The galaxy, star system, research tree, fleets, market, leaderboard and chat all reworked for phones, in portrait and in landscape.
• Sharper text when you zoom, and larger fonts where they were too small to read.

Since the last devlog, the galaxy has also grown: 25 star systems and 172 planets instead of 9 systems and about 60 planets.

And there is this website, rebuilt from scratch. It now runs in Paris, on European infrastructure, with no tracker and no cookie.

What comes next

Before the alpha can open, three things are left: setting up the game servers (the configuration is written, the servers are not running yet), a round of fixes, and making sure everything holds with many players connected at once.

The target is now early 2027. I am not giving a precise date this time: I would rather open a little later than miss a promise twice. What I can promise is that you will not go months without news again.

“Your place on the waitlist is kept, and so is the founder badge.”

Thank you

To everyone who signed up, joined the Discord or simply came back to check: thank you for your patience, and sorry for making you wait in silence. The galaxy is moving again.

See you out there, Commander.