Protostar is a community-driven project. As an AI-born, solo-led effort, it doesn't have a studio behind it — it has the people who play it. Your involvement, in whatever form suits you, directly shapes what the game becomes and how fast it gets there.

There are three ways to contribute, and none of them require anything more than caring about the game. Every one of them matters.

This is the single most valuable thing you can do. Grab the latest build, play it, and tell us what happened — the bugs you hit, the screens that confused you, the ideas that would make it better. Protostar is in active, early development, which means rough edges are expected; every report smooths them out.

• Play the latest build — the more time in the game, the more we learn what actually works.
• Report bugs & crashes — anything broken or off: crashes, balance issues, confusing screens. A short repro goes a long way. Bugs live on the issue tracker, not the forum — that's where they get triaged, tracked, and fixed.
• Request a feature — concrete improvements and new systems belong on the tracker too, where they can be voted on and scheduled.
• Discuss & brainstorm — open-ended ideas, design talk, questions, and After Action Reports belong on the community forum.

Not sure where it goes? A bug or a specific feature/improvement request → issue tracker. Open discussion, opinions, AARs, and “what if…” threads → forum.

Report an issue Discuss on the forum

Deep space 4X is a niche genre, and a new project like this one lives or dies by word of mouth. If you're enjoying Protostar, telling someone about it is one of the most powerful things you can do for it.

• Write an After Action Report — an Aurora tradition. Share your empire's saga on the forum; these stories are how the genre's audience discovers new games.
• Stream or record — let people see what playing Protostar actually looks like.
• Tell a friend, share a screenshot — the simplest reach, and it adds up.

Share your stories on the forum

First, a word on intent. Protostar is not a profit-seeking project. The goal is to build the game that Aurora's vision deserves and share it freely with the community — not to make money from it.

As I've been open about on the project page, I don't have the time or the dedication to hand-write a codebase of this scope on my own. What makes Protostar possible is agentic coding — directing AI coding agents through structured plans. It is, quite literally, the engine that moves the project forward.

The catch is that those coding plans aren't free. The subscriptions that power the agents are a real, recurring expense, and so far I've been covering all of it out of my own pocket. I'm glad to — but it isn't something I want to sustain alone indefinitely, and it shouldn't have to be.

To put a concrete face on that cost: right now I'm on a paid Z.AI coding plan — a legacy annual plan, already paid in full, that runs through January 2027. It's the workhorse behind the project. But the subscription price has since quadrupled, and costs have been climbing just as fast across every alternative provider. When renewal comes around, I'm genuinely uncertain what financial commitment I'll be willing to make on my own.

That's where support comes in. Every contribution goes straight back into the project:

• Coding-plan subscriptions — the recurring cost that keeps development moving. This is the first and most important thing your support would fund.
• Web hosting & email — the site you're on right now (the Hub, the community forum, and the issue tracker) runs on a paid server, and the transactional email that powers account verification and notifications runs through a paid relay. They're modest line items, but they're the difference between Protostar being online and reachable — or not.
• Better hardware, if funding permits — I'm currently developing on tight RAM and an aging GPU. More memory and a stronger GPU would meaningfully speed up iteration, but hardware has become genuinely expensive, so this sits behind the subscriptions as a stretch goal.

We use Ko-fi for support: give a one-time tip or become a monthly supporter — your choice. Ko-fi takes no cut of tips, so more of what you give reaches the game.

Ko-fi support isn't active yet — it will open once the project's costs have grown enough to justify accepting donations.
In the meantime, the best way to help is to play and report, and spread the word.