Health survives a run now, so a character sitting on the select screen can be nearly dead -- and the screen was still printing only the ceiling. "level 11, 2000 hp" for a character on 160 is a lie told at the exact moment it matters most, because the next thing that happens is the player walks it into a dungeon under permadeath. The roster message carries current hit points alongside the maximum, and the screen shows a fraction only when it means something: a healthy character still reads "1300 hp" rather than "1300/1300". The field is inserted mid-record, which shifts every field after it, so the protocol version goes to 10 -- a mismatched client would read the active flag out of the middle of a health value. tools/screenshot.gd had no capture for this screen, which is how a UI change to it could have shipped unlooked-at. It now shows a made-up roster of three characters -- whole, badly hurt, nearly dead -- for the same reason the upgrade screen is fed a made-up offer: the point is the layout, not a dungeon run. Getting there needs the player walked off the quartermaster first, or the game scene re-opens the upgrade screen over the top of it every frame. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Transcience
Top-down twin-stick bullet-hell with a dedicated, server-authoritative backend. Godot 4.7, GDScript, no external runtime dependencies.
Play
tools/server.sh # dedicated server on :27015
tools/client.sh --join --name ada # connect a client
Or run one client and press Host and play for a listen server.
Controls — WASD move, mouse aim, LMB fire, E to pick up loot and to use the hub's portals and quartermaster, 1–4 use an inventory slot, shift+1–4 drop one, hold F for one second to escape a dungeon, Esc menu, F1 hitbox overlay. Every one of those is rebindable in Settings.
What is here
| Twin-stick bullet hell | Server-simulated bullet field, ~300 concurrent bullets at 0.28 ms/tick — around 60x headroom against the 60 Hz budget. |
| Authoritative multiplayer | Clients send input and nothing else. Hits, damage, death, loot, upgrades and instance transfers are all server decisions. Prediction and reconciliation for the local player. |
| Enemies | Five readable movements (static, drift, orbit, approach, strafe) composed with bullet emitters. Nothing deals contact damage; every threat is a bullet you can see. |
| Two bosses | The Warden of the Fold stands still through four phases. The Cantor of the Vault walks a circuit, chases, orbits, and marks the floor before it strikes. Both are pure data. |
| Three dungeons | Two real runs, one per boss, plus a Proving Grounds: the same content at a fraction of the health and ten times the drop rate, for testing by hand. |
| Characters | Up to five living per account, permadeath, levels 1–15, experience shared across the party undivided. |
| Inventory and loot | Four slots, always on screen. Loot is either world-shared or instanced per player, and the instanced kind is filtered on the wire rather than hidden in the client. |
| Upgrades | Seven, drawn three at a time and spent at a hub NPC. Damage, fire rate, extra projectiles, splitting, poison, and a legendary that deletes enemy bullets. |
| Emergency escape | A one-second channel back to the hub that damage does not interrupt — because if it did, quitting the process would be the better escape. Dropping your connection runs the same channel. |
| Settings | Rebindable controls and volumes, and an in-game credits screen. |
Develop
tools/check.sh # parse-check every script ~5s
tools/test.sh # 468 GUT tests, headless ~4s
tools/smoke.sh # server + 4 bot clients over ENet ~40s
Read CLAUDE.md first — it is short, and the Godot CLI gotchas in it will otherwise cost an afternoon.
Docs
- docs/ROADMAP.md — what is built, what is next, where each feature lives
- docs/DECISIONS.md — settled design decisions and their reasoning
- docs/ARCHITECTURE.md — code map and the node-free simulation
- docs/NETCODE.md — replication model, hit validation, known gaps
- docs/WORKFLOW.md — agent-assisted Godot development, and the verification traps this project has actually hit
- docs/ASSETS.md — asset packs and their licence findings
- CREDITS.md — third-party attribution
- CLAUDE.md — commands, invariants, Godot CLI gotchas
Not ready for the internet
LocalAuthProvider lets any client claim any account id. It exists to have the
same shape as Steamworks so swapping is one class, and it must be replaced
before this is reachable from anywhere untrusted. There is no transport
encryption either. See docs/ROADMAP.md.