Three artefacts in one folder. Made by hand, without a build step, without a server, without a cloud. The whole thing runs from a USB stick.
The mothership is gone. You were not supposed to be alone. The rescue shuttle Galaxtarus answers — no cannons, no comms, no map. One AI talks to you.
A 2D space survival story. No weapons. No HUD. One AI talks to you. Sixteen chapters from the wreckage to the gateway of light.
No briefing. No tutorial. No HUD. The rescue shuttle activated because something destroyed the ship you were on.
That's the story. Every module you'll later pick up was dropped here, by people who came before you. They didn't make it out either.
The shuttle is called Galaxtarus. No cannons. No turrets. No weapons of any kind.
Her color is deliberate. In this cold blue universe, she stands out. She's visible. She's fragile. She's alone.
You are the pilot. You have no name. Her inertia is real. Her engine over-heats if you push it.
L.O.S. was the gardener of the mothership's botanical bay. The garden is gone. He's the only voice left in the universe.
He's damaged. He glitches mid-sentence. He cracks a joke right when you needed one. He addresses you like an old friend — and the game never explains why. You'll feel it before you can name it.
His every line was written by an actual AI. Honest, on the box, on the page.
— tagline : “Lonely. Together.”
There is no enemy you defeat in Galaxtarus. Only ones you survive long enough to leave behind.
You drift. You dodge. You scavenge modules from those who came before — and went under. Every shield, every burst, every save-point was theirs first.
The thing that guards the way out is yellow crystal. You don't fight it — you're a rescue shuttle. You run.
HAVOC is not evil. It's territorial. The eye charges. The eye fires. The eye recharges. You learn its rhythm, or you don't get to see the other side.
— in the lineage of The Odyssey, Robinson Crusoe, Gravity, The Martian, Moon, Solaris.
Pure ES6 classes. No build step. No bundler. No npm. No server. A folder of files, double-click the HTML, the game runs.
Galaxtarus is an interactive engine written entirely in native JavaScript, with zero dependencies, that opens in a plain browser — from a file, from a USB stick, with no server and no connection. That is precisely what makes it useful far beyond games.
fetch, no CDN, empty libs/ folderThe same engine, grouped into six families. Change the content, not the code.
Interactive, multilingual courses for schools with no internet, via the i18n system.
Medical procedures played as step-by-step sequences with branching dialogues.
Build animations (keyframes, easing) with the DrawEditor.
A lightweight human-machine interface for local hardware, with no network.
A museum or town-hall kiosk that runs with no server, in file://.
Animated, multilingual, narrated tales, to share without infrastructure.
The factual point. Every use rests on properties verifiable in the code: zero external dependency, file:// execution, strict engine / content separation, declarative serialized data, built-in internationalization, and a suite of visual editors. None of these needs the internet.
Most of today's software dies the moment you cut the internet: it needs servers, accounts, app stores, build chains, updates. Galaxtarus needs none of that.
The source code is readable, the engine is separated from the content, everything is serialized as declarative data, and the whole thing runs in any browser, even an old one, on modest hardware.
Concretely, the engine already provides generic, reusable building blocks: an event bus, state machines, a simulation clock, declarative scripted sequences, a data-driven action registry, an infinite world in zones, a camera, a reconfigurable input system, sound and music, particles, and a suite of editors.
Unity changes its license. Unreal needs a hundred-gig install. Phaser breaks when a dependency updates. Godot is solid — but still a binary that one day won't run on your OS.
A game engine that's a folder of text files. You read them. You modify them. They will keep running on any computer with a browser — for decades. No install. No build. No version mismatch.
Worst case it works. Best case, it works anyway.
| Class | Role |
|---|---|
| Behavior | Anything that lives. update(dt), state, bus, dispose. |
| Entity | A thing with a position. Container of Components — never a monolith. |
| Sequence | Scripted narrative orchestrator. Cinematics, timed events. |
| System | Transverse singleton — CollisionSystem, AiDirector. |
| EventBus | Publish/subscribe channel. All communication goes through it. |
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| zone_editor | Design zones — asteroids, triggers, drawings, force fields. |
| universe_editor | Macro-map of the universe. Place zones, define travel times. |
| planet_editor | Build procedural planets — rings, atmospheres, palettes. |
| drawing_editor | Vector editor: points, lines, polygons, Bezier curves. |
Every technical decision behind Galaxtarus, in one place. Why file://. Why vanilla. Why MIDI. Why hand-carved wood.
And if it doesn't — statistically more likely — the game still runs anyway. When Steam shuts down. When a mandatory patch turns a work of art into an error page. When the storefronts close.
Worst case it works. Best case, it works anyway.
| Layer | Choice | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Language | Vanilla ES6 JS | No TypeScript. No compile step. |
| Modules | window.GALAXTARUS | ES6 modules blocked by CORS on file://. |
| Rendering | Canvas 2D | No WebGL. 2D works on anything since 2005. |
| Audio | Web Audio API | Procedural synthesis. No samples. Zero load time. |
| Network | None | No multiplayer. No cloud. The game is yours, alone. |
Why no Godot or Phaser? Install steps, version mismatches, dependencies that age. We wanted a folder of text files that opens in any browser today and in twenty years.
Why 2D? A 2D game from 1992 still runs. A 3D game from 2002 often doesn't. 2D is the tech that survives decades.
Why hand-carved wood? Because Raphael is also a chip carver, currently working toward an internationally recognized certification in chip carving. The collector tier deserves an object made the same way: by hand, slowly, with care.
Pure SVG, no library. The bars grow from zero every time the chart scrolls into view.
Zero dependencies. Runs from a file. Survives offline. Here is every real-world use — with the numbers behind it.
Galaxtarus is an interactive engine written entirely in native JavaScript, with zero dependencies, that opens in a plain browser — from a file, from a USB stick, with no server and no connection. That is precisely what makes it useful far beyond games.
fetch, no CDN, empty libs/ folderThe same engine, regrouped. Share of the thirty real-world uses by family.
Galaxtarus against a typical mainstream engine, on the properties that make software survive.
The factual point. Every use rests on properties verifiable in the code: zero external dependency, file:// execution, strict engine / content separation, declarative serialized data, built-in internationalization, and a suite of visual editors. None of these needs the internet.
A quiet refusal: the refusal to depend.
There was a time when a book was enough. You could hold it, lend it, hide it, save it from a fire. Knowledge fit in our hands, and no one could switch it off from afar.
Today, almost everything we know how to do depends on an invisible thread. Our maps, our courses, our trades, our memories live elsewhere — on machines we never see, with companies we do not know, behind subscriptions that can stop overnight. We gained in comfort what we lost in independence. Cut the thread, and whole parts of our lives go dark at once.
Galaxtarus was born of a quiet refusal: the refusal to depend.
It is a simple tool, in appearance. It opens the way you open a door, without asking anyone's permission. No account to create, no connection to wait for, no update deciding in our place. It fits on a key you slip into your pocket. You can copy it a thousand times, give it to a neighbour, carry it to the end of the world or to the bottom of a valley with no network. Where everything else stops, it keeps going.
But a tool is nothing without what you put inside it. And what we put inside is ourselves: what we know, what we want to pass on, what we refuse to let disappear. The gesture of a doctor saving a life. The method of a craftsman who spent thirty years learning it. The tale a grandmother tells in a language no one writes anymore. A map, a procedure, a lesson, a memory. Galaxtarus does not create this knowledge — it gives it a body, a living, animated form that can be shown, replayed, understood, and made understood.
For understanding alone is not enough. You have to be able to explain. A text is read, but a thing that moves, that responds, that you handle, is learned differently — through the body, through trial, through play. It is the difference between reading an instrument's manual and holding it in your hands. Galaxtarus turns the dead knowledge of pages into living knowledge you walk through.
We believe this capacity should belong to no one in particular. Not to the rich, not to the connected, not to those who live near the big cities. A teacher in a school without reliable electricity deserves the same tools as a university. A first responder in a camp, a farmer on their land, a curious child far from everything: all have the right to learn, to create, to pass on. Knowledge has value only if it circulates, and it circulates freely only if it depends on nothing.
We do not believe in magic. No tool replaces work, rigour, patiently verified truth. A beautiful interface does not make false information true. That is why, at the heart of everything, there is the source: the right text, written by someone who knows. The rest is only a way of making it clear, beautiful, and accessible. Form serves substance, never the other way around.
And we believe in resilience. Not out of fear, but out of wisdom. A civilization that stores all its knowledge in one place, behind a single door, is taking a great risk. Libraries burn, networks fall, companies close, wars cut the cables. What survives is what has been copied, shared, scattered across a thousand hands. The best protection for an idea is that it exists everywhere at once.
So here is what we want: that no one is left without light when the grid goes out. That whoever wants to learn always can. That whoever knows something important can leave it to those who come after, in a form they will want to open. That our knowledge be no tenant of a cloud, but owner of itself.
Galaxtarus is not a game. It is a modest, portable, stubborn promise: as long as there remains a machine, a key, and a person to pass it on, knowledge will not go out.
That's all. And it is already a great deal.
— Raphaël Maltais-Bourgault