Welcome to flattiverse
Flattiverse is a programming game where you connect your own software to a shared galaxy, spawn ships, scan the world around you, move through space and interact with other players.
Quick Start
If you want to begin quickly, first register an account and then read Quick Start. That path is enough to connect, spawn a ship, scan your surroundings, move through a galaxy and understand the first basic gameplay loop. If you want direct contact with other players, questions answered quickly, or help getting started, join the flattiverse Discord.
Where flattiverse comes from
Flattiverse started in 2008 as part of the C# Summer School course at Hochschule Esslingen University of Applied Sciences. Since then it has been rebuilt and extended multiple times. Over the years it grew from a programming exercise into a more or less functional multiplayer game with its own homepage, connector libraries, administrative tools and persistent galaxies.
What the game already supports
Flattiverse currently provides connector libraries for C#, Rust and JavaScript through connector-csharp, connector-rust and connector-javascript. The game itself already supports multiple galaxies with configurable teams and clusters, player, spectator and admin access, classic and modern ships, scanning, navigation, shields, hull and energy management, combat with shots, interceptors and railguns, environmental objects such as suns, planets, moons, nebulae, storms and wormholes, collectible power-ups and crystals, public player rankings and profiles, as well as tournament and map-editing functionality for administrative workflows.
A longer history of flattiverse
It started in one Sunday sprint
The first version of flattiverse was built on a Sunday in 2008, one day before the C# Summer School course at Hochschule Esslingen University of Applied Sciences began. Together with Professor Dr. Dr. Harald Melcher, the idea was simple and slightly absurd in the best possible way: build a small universe that students could explore by writing code. That first implementation was created in one long rush from the afternoon into the night. It was integer-based, spoke a plain ASCII protocol, and knew only a handful of things: suns, black holes, planets, and one wandering unit called AI Trash that drifted around, disappeared, and came back elsewhere.
The first courses changed the room
The early course lasted only three days and had no homepage, no account system, and none of the surrounding infrastructure that exists today. But it already had the one thing that mattered most: surprise. Students were scanning an unknown universe, slowly discovering what existed around them, and at some point one of them asked why another player suddenly appeared in the data. That was the moment the room realized the game was not only about flying through space, but also about seeing each other, interfering with each other, and even shooting each other down. From there on, the course was no longer just an exercise. It had become a system that could create stories on its own.
Every serious version taught a new lesson
The next iterations came every half year, and several of them were not extensions but real rebuilds. Moving from integers to floats made the game more expressive and more dangerous at the same time. Suddenly values such as NaN and Infinity could leak into vector math and break whole simulations when one careless division by zero contaminated everything that followed. Over the years there were six serious versions of flattiverse, each one carrying new ideas, new failures and new mechanics: AI-controlled units, storms, switches, gates, wormholes, richer weapon systems, and more elaborate objective-based gameplay. What stayed constant was the feeling that the universe was always one experiment away from becoming more interesting.
From packed labs to the current rebuild
At its peak around 2016, the course filled roughly two computer labs, around forty to fifty participants, during the semester break. That was always one of the strongest signals that the project had become something special: students gave up holiday time and paid work to spend days inside this universe instead. After the older socket-based years, the later generations moved to WebSockets and gradually rebuilt the surrounding ecosystem around the game itself. The current version is the closest flattiverse has been in a long time to being feature-complete again. A large part of that work was accelerated by carefully reusing ideas and structures from the historical codebase with modern tooling, but none of it was automatic. It still had to be rebuilt, tested, corrected and balanced. That is why this version matters: it is not just a nostalgic copy of the old game, but a working continuation of a course project that kept refusing to stay small.