Sunshine Heavy Industries

Sunshine Heavy Industries is by Rocket Rat Games and reached version 1.0 on Steam in August 2021 for Windows. You run a new shipyard in a far arm of the galaxy, building ships for a colourful cast of space weirdos while your business partner keeps annoying the local pirates.

Each job is an open-ended design problem. You assemble a 2D ship from more than 100 parts and dozens of subsystems (engines, scaffolds, crew spaces, tractor beams and more) to meet the requirements of each job. There is no single answer: any ship that works passes, and the game rewards clever, efficient designs.

The daily mission is the daily hook. Each day one contract is drawn with its own mix of requirements, the same for everyone, and players try to meet it as cheaply as they can on the daily challenge leaderboard. Players say the daily shows up once the story is finished. Patch notes show how the daily is drawn, with percentage chances for twists such as cloaked missions, extreme heat, import taxes, a tractor beam requirement or keeping the crew connected.

The campaign has more than 50 story levels plus post-credits content. It suits fans of engineering puzzle games who like comparing their solution with everyone else's on the same brief.