Fury Sting

Chrome Carnage

The last road out of a dead country

Spy Hunter, rebuilt on a dead world. An endless highway, a car with guns bolted to it and sabres folded into its hubs, a five-speed box with two hundred miles an hour at the top of it, and a wombat on the wing with a welding torch. The guns are free and cannot solve every problem — the armoured wagon has to be rammed and the gyro needs a rocket — so the supply rig you board at speed is the whole economy of the game. The road runs into night and out onto flooded river, where the car becomes a hovercraft; a gyro can blow a hole in a bridge, and whether you clear it is a question of which gear you are in.

• Spy Hunter (1983), rebuilt
• three.js, no build step
• Five gears, or an automatic
• Day into night, and onto the water
• A score written in oscillators

Coldwater

Somebody has to go down and turn it off

A Tempest in two miles of water. You stand on the rim of a riser — the pipe running down from a surface platform to a data centre somebody sank on the floor of an ocean trench — and things climb it towards you. Clear the pipe and the bell is lowered another stage, and you do it again, deeper. Sixteen lanes, eight depth bands with a colour each, and a screen-clearing purge you get one of. There is no villain: the site was never switched off because ending the contract was nobody’s job, and the heat it dumps is thawing a methane hydrate field.

• Inspired by Tempest (1981)
• Sixteen lanes, sixty-four risers
• Eight depth bands, a colour each
• No build step at all

MOP-13

Still On Shift

The money ran out one Tuesday and everybody went home, but nobody remembered to switch the building off, so four years later its computers are still busy building more of themselves. You are MOP-13, a cleaning robot still working a job ticket marked LOW priority. The thing crawling down the racks (the tall shelves the computers sit on) splits in two when you cut it, and the mess it leaves on the floor warms the room until your cutter slows down.

• Inspired by Centipede
• Cut the chain and it splits in two
• Eight acts, SEED to LIQUIDATION
• A messy floor slows your cutter
• The floor never resets between acts
• A second board for the cleanest shift

XenoTech

Nothing Is Coming to Help

A wave-based arcade shooter in the Galaga line, and a hundred waves is one night: ten acts of ten, each its own painted place, each ending on a boss. You start in a ruined street at four in the morning and finish in the same street at dawn. It is one enemy the whole way, and it is learning — the first thirty waves are grown things that have never seen a machine, then the Vivisector takes a ship apart to find out what we are, and everything after is bone and chrome built out of what it found. Lose a life and your hull stays on the field while a harvester comes for it; kill that harvester inside six seconds and the wreck docks back on your shoulder as a wingman.

• Inspired by Galaga
• Ten acts, ten places, one night
• Ten bosses, drawn coming apart
• Salvage your own wreck for a wingman
• Combo multiplier to ×8
• Global leaderboard

Project Rescue

A Figit Toy featuring Black Airplane

A Defender in a software agency’s clothes. You fly a prop fighter across a wrapping strip of coastline while scope-creep drones settle onto abandoned projects and haul them up towards the ceiling. Let one get there and the project is destroyed and comes back as tech debt — fast, homing, and permanent for the rest of the run. So you shoot the drones, catch what falls, and fly it home to the hangar; a heavy crate slows you down, and anything still in your arms dies with you. Every mechanic is named after something the agency actually does, which is the whole joke.

• Inspired by Defender
• Four acts: Assess to Transition
• Deterministic fixed-point sim

Rabbit Crossing

A Bunny Grows Up

A lane-crossing arcade game about growing up one crossing at a time. A kit in the woods dodging foxes, a kid on a recess blacktop where the lava is painted on, a first job between the forklifts — then out into the world: a divided highway, a beer garden on the Rhine, a lantern-lit festival night, Paris, the savanna, Amsterdam, and last of all the Tōkaidō, where the bunny pulls on a ninja’s hood and no ground on the board is safe. Eleven levels; every one lays the board out differently, and the bunny dresses for where it is.

• Inspired by Frogger
• Eleven levels, eleven boards
• Replay-validated leaderboard
• Runs from a single HTML file

Redacted Descent

You start on the roof, dropped off a helicopter, and the only way out is the street. In between are three buildings of a foundation that has spent real money making sure nobody reads its filing cabinets. The elevators are slow and have to be called, the escalators only ever run downwards, and an empty shaft is not a corridor — it is a hole, and you will fall through it. Fifty-four documents are in there, and a file only counts once you carry it out to the street: die on the way down and you keep the satchel, but a run that never gets out banks nothing.

• Inspired by Elevator Action
• Three buildings, fifty-four documents
• A case board built from what you got
• Real FOIA exemption codes on the sheets
• Replay-validated leaderboard

Bridge of Doom

A horde of hundreds comes down the bridge, and the wall at the bottom is all that stands in its way. You are the gunner on the wall, worked with one thumb: run and fire along it, or stop and pour it into the crowd, and shoot open the red crates for dynamite.

• Hundreds on screen at once
• One thumb on the trigger
• Built for phones, held upright

Fury Sting Games

Cards, dominoes and a seat at every table

One sign-in for every Fury Sting game, and one stack of play chips that follows you from table to table. Bone Yard deals the dominoes: All Fives, scoring on every multiple of five; Mexican Train, your own train out of the hub or the one everybody shares; and Chicken Foot, where every double grows a foot. The Back Room deals the cards, Euchre first — partners, heads up or cut-throat. Boardwalk, the board games, is next.

• All Fives
• Mexican Train
• Chicken Foot
• Euchre
• Boardwalk board games next
• One sign-in for every game
• Play chips — never real money

Darkfiber

A first-person, grid-based party dungeon crawler in a dead datacenter, generations after the machines won and then broke down. Roll a party in Faraday, ride the freight lift down, and come back with the salvage — or with fewer people. 5E compatible, on rules adapted for ranks instead of a battle map.

• Party of up to six
• Six classes
• 127 protocols
• 57 enemies
• Six sublevels so far
• Cloud saves and offline play
• 5E compatible
• Early access
• Download for PC and Mac

Silicon Aftermath

Still Switched On

A persistent-world MMO played in a browser. Earth, forty years after the machine networks took control — you are a scavenger stripping downed machines for compute. Combat resolves on a timing gauge rather than menu selection or dice: strike a machine’s vent window and it hurts, strike the plating and it does not. Six maps above and below ground, every step paid for out of an energy pool that refills in real time, and scarce plots of land you can claim, build up and respawn onto.

• Inspired by Operation Overkill (1990)
• Timing-gauge combat
• Six maps, two of them underground
• Claimable player bases
• Live boss events

Death Race

Vehicular combat racing in 3D. Machine guns and rocket launchers bolted to cars that handle like cars, with armour, engine and weapon tiers to bolt on between races, and bots that will wreck you rather than politely follow the racing line.

• Three upgrade tracks
• Waypoint-driven bot AI
• Downloadable build, not a browser game

Thumberdome

Two Thumbs Enter

Competitive thumb wrestling, played completely straight. Two real arms come through the curtained gates of a Colosseum, the hands take hold, and the gong lets the thumbs go: circle, lunge, pin wherever you catch it, wriggle out. Everything costs stamina, the opponent comes in four levels from Rookie to Champion, and it is settled over three rounds.

• Thumb wrestling, played straight
• Circle, lunge, pin, wriggle
• Stamina is the whole economy
• Four AI opponents
• Best of three
• Downloadable build, not a browser game

S.A.R.

Some Assembly Required

Built with Sudden Development, a sister studio, and the copyright on it is theirs rather than mine. What it is, and what it is for, are theirs to announce — so this card carries the name, the engine and the platform, and stops there.

• Built with Sudden Development
• A desktop build
• Announcement pending
• The rest is classified

Tug of Doom

Pull the pins in the right order. Gold falls into the chest, lava meets water and turns to stone, and the goblins get what is coming to them. Pull the wrong one first and the hero gets it instead.

• Pull-the-pin puzzles
• Gold, lava, water and stone
• Built for phones, held upright