Aurora 4X proved something important: that players exist who want real strategic depth — the kind where you design every component of every ship, manage civilian economies across dozens of star systems, and guide your empire's growth and prosperity across centuries of game time. Its creator, Steve Walmsley, built something genuinely unique, and this project exists because of that inspiration.

Aurora was also never just about strategy. It was a role-playing experience — commanders with personalities and careers, empires with distinct identities, and emergent stories that players shared as sprawling After Action Reports. The game was a story generator as much as a strategy game.

But Aurora was always one person's passion project. It was never designed to be approachable, moddable, or performant at scale. And that's okay — it was never meant to be. The result is a game with unmatched depth but a learning curve so steep that most players never get past the first screen, an interface of dense spreadsheets with no visual feedback, and a completely closed architecture that forbids community modification.

Protostar exists to make Aurora's vision accessible to everyone. Same depth. Same attention to detail. Same emergent stories of interstellar empires. But built on a modern engine that performs in real-time, with a browser-based UI that's approachable and visual, an open modular architecture designed for community extension, built-in tutorials so new players can learn at their own pace, and a focus on onboarding so more people can discover what makes this genre special.

• Real-Time Performance — An ECS-based engine built to handle thousands of entities simultaneously, eliminating the long waits between turns in mid to late game that Aurora players know all too well.
• Approachable UI — A browser-based interface with visual feedback, tooltips, clean layouts, toast notifications, and a quick command palette for fingertip access to frequent commands, so the depth lives in the gameplay, not in navigating the controls.
• Built-In Tutorials — Integrated tutorials that let new players learn at their own pace, lowering the steep learning curve that keeps most people away from this genre.
• Moddable Architecture — A modular design where the core game is itself a module. The community can extend, modify, or replace systems — the game grows with its players.
• Cross-Platform & Multi-Window — Runs anywhere .NET and a browser can reach. Multi-device support lets you open multiple tabs — system view, galaxy map, logs — all connected to the same game.

Hi! My name is Pascal Blanchet. I'm a software engineer based in Montreal, Quebec, with a Bachelor's degree in software engineering and nearly 20 years of experience in web and game development. I've always had a strong focus on how to engineer software — and a weakness for creativity. Aurora provided the game design vision I couldn't have come up with myself, and I provided the engineering to carry it forward. I'm a married father of four children.