Space News Network is an in-development exploration game from solo developer GeekZebra that pitches you as a starpilot reporter hopping between procedurally generated worlds in search of the next scoop — think No Man's Sky, but your laser is for filing copy as much as fighting pirates.
A work-in-progress build is already up on Itch.io. You gather news two ways: fly around scanning planets and space anomalies yourself, or lean on informants for leads and quotes. Each informant has their own personality and profession, and they'll send you on errands — mining asteroids, running odd jobs — before they'll talk. Once you've got your material, you lay out the finished story using a simplified InDesign-style tool, dragging text and images onto a template. There's also a subscriber system baked in, with readers demanding increasingly hard-hitting reporting as your audience grows.
The game sits in obvious company with No Man's Sky on the exploration side, and shares some DNA with News Tower on the journalism-sim side — though it looks considerably lighter on editorial depth than the latter. It also calls to mind Noctis, the cult 2000 space exploration game where players documented planets in a shared database. Whether Space News Network lets you exercise any real editorial judgment — choosing angles, burying sources, or actively defaming a man called Huge Hands Gasmask Man — isn't clear from the current build.
No firm release date has been announced for the full version. The Itch.io demo is available now if you want to get a feel for the loop before GeekZebra locks in a launch window.
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