Halcyon Dawn

Halcyon Dawn is fan fiction inspired by John Scalzi's excellent Old Man's War book series. This game will not be distributed; I have the only one that will ever exist. All names, characters, species, settings, and other elements of the Old Man's War universe are the property of John Scalzi; no ownership or affiliation is claimed. Go buy the books. They're fantastic.<br>&times;

Halcyon Dawn

I started reading (listening to) Scalzi's excellent Old Man's War series last summer (2025). I listen as I take a lot of long roadtrips from Colorado to Utah for canyoneering slots, camping in the desert, photographing the stars... just... enjoying the beauty of the desert. I've got a long software and hardware background; I've been in software for 45 years (now retired) and I'd been pondering what kind of game to build for my arcade/bar. I was camping out near Escalante and fell asleep listening to "The End of All Things." I woke up with a startle at 3AM with the realization: I can build a fully functional starship cockpit! Now, Scalzi is very gracious about allowing fans to make derivative works, with two particularly strong cautions:

1) "If you play in my universe, you implicitly accept I have the right to come around, say “mine!” and then stomp off with all your pretty toys." Great! I'd be honored. (Er, maybe not the simulator frame itself. Fight me.) As for the plot, I can't say that canon-Szilard (the game's protagonist) would actually do these things, but it was a fun story to come up with. I've always had a soft spot for the poor Special Forces soldiers. And to be honest, the CDF are dicks.

2) "[...]don’t try to make any money off my universes[...]" Also great. I spent a year building a very expensive toy for my own amusement; it can't ever go in the arcade. To be fair, that's the last thing I'd want to do anyway; the thought of someone spilling a beer on it, or an ADHD six-year-old frenetically slapping screens and buttons... that mental picture gives me The Fear. Maybe I can show it off at cons or something, who knows.

Anyway, for the last year this thing has been my labor of love. I designed and built every detail of the hardware and software from scratch, including:

1) An entire family of USB console interface boards called "Enigma". They're deliberately generic (some panels have up to 3 Enigma boards inside them) rather than purpose-built so that I can use them on future projects, including escape room puzzles. I love escape rooms. The Enigma hardware is all open source, so if someone builds puzzles I get to play, all the better.

2) An associated Python-based game infrastructure library also called Enigma that includes the USB interface abstraction, in-game device simulation infra, remote pub/sub display screen integration, and an extremely robust multi-layer audio mixing system with haptic support. This too is open source.

3) The Halcyon Dawn game itself, a complex starship systems simulator with all the aforementioned features and easter eggs. Far in the distant past I wrote commercial video games and adventure game development languages. Halcyon Dawn is vastly, vastly more complex and I'm quite proud of it. The game itself will never be released, in part because nobody else has the expensive simulator frame it requires (there is no way on this blue Earth I could be convinced to build another), and also going back to Scalzi's "don't make money off my stuff" rule.

I've made the game's details as canon-consistent as I can after 5-some full end-to-end listens of the books (barring some deliberate departures to make gameplay more interesting, like skip gravity well depth, the existence of shields, Szilard himself, and so forth), but I'm sure I got some details wrong. Did I mess up an allegiance? A species description? Something else? Probably. Will it get fixed? Almost certainly not. Sorry.

A Note from the Maker

How we got here.

The Game

A deep dive into the game's features and implementation.

Document Library

Original non-canon fan fiction. The ship's own on-board reference archive: operations manuals explaining to bridge crew how to fly the ship, species dossiers, and classified CDF briefings, set in Scalzi's Old Man's War universe. Open the library.

Cutscene Cinematics

Since nobody reading this is ever likely to play the game for real, here are the three cinematics from the game.

Trailer/Attract Mode Video Loop:

When enemy (Human/CDF) troops board the Halcyon Dawn to take her back, you get to see what the CDF does with people they really dislike:

And if you can win the game by making it to Halcyon Prime and deploying the colonial autofactory (I still haven't even managed that myself), you get to see the future of the Halcyon people that you've won for them:

Enigma on GitHub

The underlying Enigma framework, board designs, and firmware are open source and free to build on. The game that runs on top is derivative IP and can't be distributed; only the tech beneath it ships.

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