torchbearer

Gameplay Mechanics

You are a crownless aspirant descending the Shadow King’s crypt. Five continuous floors, each ending with a Sovereign that must fall before the stair opens.

Move with WASD, aim with the mouse. Click to attack: three taps chain a combo whose third blow is a weapon-specific finisher that deals double damage and staggers. Hold to charge a heavy. Shift dashes, and dashing into a blow within its first 200ms is a parry — time crawls, and your next swing is free, doubled, and staggers.

Nothing can hurt you without painting the floor first. A wedge means a swing, a lane means a charge, a circle means a leap. Those outlines draw above the lighting, so a warning is never lost in the dark.

Clearing rooms raises your power level, which increases damage and attack speed. Killing things that can actually kill you drops provisions; killing trash does not.

Key Features

• Three callings with separate arsenals. The Knight closes distance and carries sword, dagger, axe or spear. The Ranger kites with shortbow or crossbow. The Magister has the lowest health in the crypt and the biggest numbers, wielding ember or frost staves. No calling can find another’s weapons.
• Five-tier gear grades across three slots — weapon, armour, trinket. Common through Sovereign-grade, colour-coded, with better rolls on deeper floors. Uncommon and better arms also roll a named suffix: Ancient Crownbreaker of Venom.
• Five two-phase Sovereigns. Each transforms at half health, has a punish window worth learning, and leaves a gilded hoard.
• A Fury ultimate per weapon eight of them, from Blade Storm to Whiteout.
• Daily Trial. Everyone who plays today gets the identical crypt: same rooms, same spawns, same offers. A leaderboard with no server and no accounts.
• Endless descent. Beat the Crown and ASCEND, looping deeper and faster forever.

What makes the game stand out:

There is not one asset file in this project that the game needs to run.

Every dungeon is carved from a seed. The lighting is a real-time lightmap-multiply pass with flickering torches, moving lights and impact flashes, sitting under a hand-written GLSL shader doing bloom, CRT curvature, scanlines and chromatic aberration that spikes when you are hit. Every sound effect and the entire layered soundtrack are synthesised note by note in the Web Audio API at runtime — the music has a four-bar progression, a drum backbone and a melody, and its layers stack in with your kill streak.

The single CC0 spritesheet is base64-inlined into the source. So there is no build step, no bundler, no server, no network and no install. Double-click a file and it runs. It survives a dead demo-table wifi, which is not a small thing on a hackathon table.

The seeded RNG is the entire backend of the Daily Trial. No accounts, no database, and every player still gets a comparable score.

AI Tools Used

Claude (Opus), via Claude Code.

How AI was integrated

Claude wrote essentially all of the code the dungeon generator, lighting engine, GLSL post-processing, combat and gear systems, the synthesised audio, and every UI screen working directly in the repo across a single extended session.

The part that mattered was verification, not generation. The project carries a 104-check headless test suite that plays a full five-floor run, and Claude used it to catch its own bugs rather than trusting the code it had just written: a crash from a function that was called but never defined, three weapons shipping with no Ultimate while the meter drained anyway, a pause that froze physics but not the scene clock, a progress bar that finished in 80ms regardless of the actual work.

Art is the one exception: DungeonTileset II by 0x72 (Robert Norenberg), CC0. The torch, provisions, urn, rubble, crown sigil, arcane bolt and the Sovereign’s gate are hand-authored pixel maps in code.