the lift
costs nothing · the easy one
Pop green smoke, stand in it, and a bird comes in over the treeline with a rope. Free, and quick. It also puts a helicopter directly above your head.
click anywhere to throw the smoke
what it is
A 2D isometric extraction shooter, in pixel art.
You go in for whatever is worth carrying, then you have to get home with it. Die out there and you lose the lot. Leaving is the expensive part, and it is the part the whole game is built around.
Transit is the first place. A sealed district behind a fence its wardens call the wire. It is not the only one. Everywhere after it is built to be nothing like it: different ground, different trouble, and its own reason the edge will kill you.
transit — the first district
A map built to be learned, not re-rolled.
The same district every raid, not a fresh maze each time, so the roads, the courtyard, the scrapyard and the rail line are all things you can learn. The weather and a full day and night run on their own clock, whether you're in there or not.
the three ways out
Three ways out. They ask for different things.
Three of them, and they cost different things. Which one you can actually use is usually settled long before you reach it.
the toll gate
costs 30 brass
Pay the warden and the wire stops caring about you for the rest of the raid. He never asks what is in the bag. Asking costs you money.
the night freight
costs time
One train, at midnight, once a night. It stands in the yard about a minute and then leaves, whether you made it aboard or not.
how it is made
Every pixel generated from code.
No asset packs, no drawn files. One script and one set of colours make every sprite, tile, letter and painting in the game, the same way every time. The art is hand-painted. In Python.
- palette
- 46 colours, one set, used by everything from the character sheet to the menu paintings.
- engine
- Godot 4, rendered at native resolution on a strict pixel grid.
- the district
- 256×256 cells, fixed by seed, so quests can point at real addresses.
- team
- One person. Every version's notes are readable in game.
and it speaks six languages
Translated end to end, and it switches live — change it mid-raid and the world changes under you. The font was drawn glyph by glyph to cover them.
six years later, people still go in for what is left.
where it is
In development, in the open.
The world is finished and walkable. Everything after it is still being built, in this order, by one person, most days.
01a walkable world done
The district, the barricade ring and the marksmen past it. Weather and a full day and night on their own clock. Driveable cars, interiors with second floors, the map screen, all three ways out, and the debrief that ends a raid.
02guns, tunnels, the opening up next
Mouse aim, hitscan with tracers, muzzle flash, screen shake and props that come apart. A second district underneath this one — passages behind bookshelves, two street manholes, ladders down and back up, and corridors lit only by whatever fixtures still work. Plus the opening: a painted cinematic that dissolves through dawn mist straight into the game, and a voice on the radio talking you in.
03the loop planned
Grid inventory with real footprints, containers to search, a gear doll, and the stash — the first thing that carries between raids, and so the first thing worth losing. Value is scarcity, condition and weight. No rarity colours. This one comes before the enemies on purpose: a firefight is only tense when you're carrying something, and until the stash exists there's nothing to lose.
04enemies planned
Two kinds, so a raid is not the same fight twice. People — and not all of them want to shoot; some run, some want paying first. And the machines the wardens left behind when they sealed the place: still running a route six years later, logging what is on it. One of those you outfight. The other you have to time, because it was always coming, and being seen by it costs you more than being shot at.
05crafting planned
Repair what came back damaged, make ammo, and upgrade the stash itself. It needs the loop first for a plain reason: the things you craft with are the things you found out there. No separate crafting currency and nothing to grind. If you want to build something, you have to have carried the parts home.
06things happening out there planned
Events you can start, and then have to survive. Fuel the scrapyard crane and it digs for minutes, loudly, until it stops and you strip what it pulled up. Cut into the old service seams underground, where the parts worth having are thickest. Both take time you might not have, both pin you to one spot, and both make enough noise to bring company.
07work worth doing planned
Quests. The first one is already standing in the world: one house has its power box hanging open and arcing, and no working light inside.
08somewhere else entirely planned
A second district, built to be nothing like this one, with no reruns of roads and houses. It might be a single colossal interior of halls, catwalks and furnaces, or somewhere that water owns the map, or an alley warren with a road running across its roofs. What it will not be is this district with the paint changed.
091.0 — the release the line
Everything above, finished, and balanced against each other. Guns, enemies, tunnels, the opening, the loop, crafting, events, quests, and a second district to take it all into. Somebody to sell to, which is what closes the economy. Until there's a buyer, a haul is only weight.
Bots, so a raid is never empty when nobody else is online. The full lighting pass. And the dull half of shipping: it has to run on the machines people own, every key has to rebind, and six languages ship in the box. It already runs without Vulkan. That call was made early and on purpose. A game that won't start on day one is a refund.
10other people, for real direction
Co-op and pvp. The server decides what happened: where you are, whether that shot landed, what was in the container. A cheat that works by lying to it has nothing to say. And your machine is only told about things you could actually see or hear, because you can't draw a wall-hack around information you never got.
On top of that sits the assay: it watches rather than swings. An account gets flagged, observed, and acted on later — never yanked mid-raid on a hunch, and never told which of its tricks gave it away. No kernel driver. None of this needs one. Shipping one is exactly what shuts Linux and handhelds out, and that's a door this game means to keep open.
Deliberately undated, and honestly so: it changes how the game keeps time. This one is a foundation, not a feature, so it gets built with the netcode or not at all.
Numbered because it's a real sequence — each stage is gated on the one before it. 01 to 09 is the game you buy; 10 is where it keeps going after that. No dates. It ships when it's done, and every version's notes are readable in game.