Voidforged
 Build channel live // Vertical slice 001
Vertical Slice · v0.15.0 · 27 Oct 2026 04:06

VOIDFORGED

Forge your build.
Breach the Void.
Extract — or die.

A loot-driven extraction bullet-heaven set aboard a derelict megastructure overrun by a corrupted machine intelligence.

Launcher — Windows

Windows 10/11 · 64-bit · 272 KB

The launcher checks for new builds, installs them, and starts the game — and when the launcher itself changes it replaces itself, so you only ever download it once.

Linux: grab the Linux launcher — updates the game and itself, then starts it.

No launcher? Extract the .tar.gz and run ./Voidforged.x86_64. Shell version if the window misbehaves.

Or grab the build directly — Windows ~36 MB / Linux ~53 MB
Single-player Top-down swarm combat Windows · Linux 64-bit Self-updating launcher
[ 01 ]  Manifest

What’s in this slice

Eight systems · one run loop
01Movement

Aim & auto-fire

WASD steers, the rig fires where your cursor points. Momentum is survival — plant your feet and the void takes them.

02Pressure

The swarm adapts

Chasers and brutes first. Then spitters that hold range, bombers that detonate in chains, and flayers that blink behind you — all telegraphed before they land.

03Economy

Salvage that must be extracted

Loot isn’t yours until it clears the ring — and the ring only opens in timed windows. Everything carried is a bet against the clock.

04Build

Level-up build choices

Every level forks the run: stack damage, widen the spread, or buy the seconds you’ll need later. Choose fast.

05Threat

Breach the Warden

An elite guardian seals the deep sectors. Break it for the richest haul in the slice — or route around and stay poor.

06Stakes

Death costs you everything

Die in the dark and the haul dies with you — unless you’ve already paid the Forge for insurance.

07Meta

The Forge remembers

Banked salvage buys permanent modules between runs: plating, weapon calibration, thrusters, and a bigger slice of the next haul.

08Depth

Rare and relic augments

Sixteen augments across three tiers. Relics only surface once your bank runs deep enough — and they change how the rig fights.

[ 02 ]  Evidence

From the slice

Captured in-game · not mockups
Third-person swarm combat in the derelict arena: muzzle flash, salvage orbs and a closing swarm
Contact — the swarm closes while you spend the seconds you needed
A late-run swarm massing around the player
Pressure — density climbs the longer you stay
The hangar screen where banked salvage is spent on the Forge
The Forge — banked salvage becomes permanent

Captured on the 0.4 deck — the three 0.5 layouts are charted below.

[ 03 ]  Deck plans

Three decks, not three arenas

Top-down · generated from the game's own bitmap

Every deck is rooms joined by six- to ten-metre passes, with pillars that break sightlines. The swarm routes through the same gaps you do, so a corridor is both your escape and its funnel. The extraction pad is never next to where you spawn.

Top-down plan of the Crossfire deck: a central plaza with four bridges to four chambers

CROSSFIRE

421 plates

A plaza and four bridges. Every route crosses the middle, so every fight does too.

Top-down plan of the Foundry deck: a long hall flanked by two bays with narrow doors

FOUNDRY

420 plates

One long hall, two bays, two doors. The doors are the only safe ground — and the only way out.

Top-down plan of the Spine deck: three rooms joined by three narrow passes

SPINE

474 plates

Three rooms, three passes. The pad is at the far end, so extraction is a decision, not a wander.

[ 04 ]  Interface

Controls

Mouse aims, keys move
W A S D Move
MOUSE Aim & pick target
SPACE Dash
E Hold to extract
CLICK  /  1 2 3 Pick upgrade
R Redeploy
M Mute audio
ESC Pause · volume · quit
F8 Report a bug
[ 05 ]  Briefing

First run

Risk / reward in three moves

Get in

Keep moving and let the auto-fire work. The opening minute is about not dying, not about looting the floor.

Grab salvage

Walk over drops to collect. The deeper you push, the richer the haul — and the further you are from the extraction ring when it goes wrong.

Decide when to leave

Hold E at the ring to bank the run. Greed is the only enemy you carry back.

⚠ Unsigned build

Windows SmartScreen may warn on first launch. Click More info → Run anyway.

No installer required — unzip the archive anywhere and run Voidforged.exe. Your saves and settings stay local to that folder.

[ 06 ]  Build log

Patch notes

Newest first
v0.15.0 27 Oct 2026 04:06
  • +CRASH REPORTS THAT SURVIVE THE CRASH: the game keeps a small session file on disk — current phase (menu, run, forge, extraction), time in the run, level, salvage, a stats snapshot and the last 60 log lines — refreshed every few seconds and deleted on a clean quit. If the game dies hard, the next launch sends that file automatically, exactly once. So if the Forge crashes for you, we finally get the stack instead of a shrug
  • +Sharing is still yours: with SHARE RUN DATA off, a crash keeps its report on your machine and nothing leaves it
  • +KILLER CREDIT: a run that ends in death now records which creature landed the fatal blow, so Run Intelligence can name the swarm's most lethal unit ("BRUTE: 10 Salvagers") instead of only counting deaths
  • +FORGE SAFETY PASS: buying and upgrading with a broken or maxed bank was rehearsed branch by branch — zero balance refuses without throwing, the ceiling clamps, prices are never negative. The reported Forge crash could not be reproduced in the shop code, which makes the new crash capture the thing that will actually find it
v0.14.0 27 Oct 2026 03:44
  • +YOUR SALVAGE CANNOT GO NEGATIVE ANY MORE: a long run banked more money than a 32-bit counter can hold, the number flipped to -2147483648 and the Forge stopped selling you anything. Banking now saturates at a sane ceiling instead of wrapping, and a balance that is already negative is repaired the next time you launch — if you were the one who hit this, your salvage comes back
  • +THE FREEZE IS FOUND AND FIXED: every impact spawned a flash of light, and each flash quietly created a material that was never released. A long, high-fire-rate run leaked about 5 MB a second until the machine started swapping — which is why it froze after 50 minutes rather than immediately. Impacts now draw from a fixed pool, so memory stays flat however many creatures you kill
  • +Damage and chaos maths can no longer flip negative when they overflow either — same class of bug, same fix
  • +REPORTS NOW CARRY EVIDENCE: when you send a report, it attaches the last 60 log lines and a snapshot of what the game was doing — frame rate, enemies alive, bolts in flight, fire rate, bolt speed, damage, level, chaos, salvage carried. Home paths, email addresses and IPs are stripped before anything leaves your machine, so a freeze can be diagnosed instead of guessed at
  • +AUTO-TRIAGE: a report that shows a crash, a freeze, corrupt money or broken save is approved for fixing immediately and you get told why — no waiting for a human to read it
  • +FIELD NOTES on Run Intelligence: the social-post layer — machines destroyed by type, the creature with the most salvage-kills to its name, how much money has been banked, the longest survival, the biggest swarm ever on screen, where people deploy, and which augment is actually taken
  • +A private triage dashboard: reports, bugs, feedback and ideas at a glance, what was auto-approved, what got fixed and how fast, crashes by build, and the last crash dumps
  • +Your phone gets a nudge when a bug is reported, fixed, or a build is deployed
v0.13.1 27 Oct 2026 02:33
  • +RUN INTELLIGENCE SHOWS THE SWARM AGAIN: the power panel carries the median live enemy count on its own right-hand axis, so build progress and swarm pressure can be read together in real units — creatures on screen, not an invented index. There is no crossing callout, because those two lines cross in the first minute of nearly every run
  • +Fixed singular counts on a fresh window reading "1 RUNS" and "1 deaths"
v0.13.0 27 Oct 2026 02:30
  • +RUN DATA: every run now records itself — how long you lasted, the layout, the build you were carrying, every augment you were offered and took, what killed you, the damage you dealt and took, and how big the swarm got. Nothing personal is captured: no name, no account, no address, just a random tester number. SHARE RUN DATA in the pause menu turns it off, and RESET IDENTITY gives you a fresh number
  • +RUN INTELLIGENCE: a private dashboard built for tuning, not for show. It draws the power curve against the swarm's attrition, ranks every augment by what it is actually worth against runs where it was offered and skipped, splits by layout and build, and names the outlier runs that broke the game
  • +Augment lift always shows its sample size, so an augment with four runs cannot pass for evidence — where the data is thin the line fades instead of pretending
  • +The pause menu gains SHARE RUN DATA and RESET IDENTITY, and the feedback panel now says plainly what is shared
v0.12.0 27 Oct 2026 01:58
  • +WALLS STOP SHOTS: player bolts, the drone's bolts and spitter fire all collide with arena geometry now. On SPINE you could kill creatures two rooms away through solid wall; cover finally works in both directions
  • +Spitters only wind up when they can actually see you, so they stop firing into a wall you are hiding behind
  • +Chain lightning no longer arcs through walls either: if you cannot shoot it, you cannot arc to it
  • +THE CODEX HAS CREATURES IN IT: every entry is a photograph of the real model, rendered in-engine when the game starts, so the picture can never drift from the enemy it describes
  • +QA: a new test flies a real bolt and a real enemy bolt at a real wall on every build, and fails the build if either crosses it
v0.11.0 27 Oct 2026 01:45
  • +THE HANGAR IS A HUB: DEPLOY is the big obvious action, and three consoles — FORGE, LOADOUT and CODEX — open focused screens instead of putting twelve tiny cards in front of you at once
  • +The Forge reads one branch at a time: three tabs, four large rows, and every row carries its own name, effect, price and state, so nothing you are deciding about is described somewhere else on the screen
  • +LOADOUT is new: every tier you own, by branch, so you can see the build you are about to deploy with
  • +CODEX is new: the six contacts, what each one does, and how to answer it
  • +The game uses real typefaces now — Chakra Petch for headings, names and prices, Barlow for the copy you read — the same two the launcher uses, instead of Unity's built-in Arial. That is most of the reason the screens finally look like their mock-ups
  • +Buying, the prices and the capstones are unchanged: same tree, shown one decision at a time
v0.10.2 27 Oct 2026 01:36
  • +The Forge no longer opens with a tier already "selected": before you hover anything the strip explains the screen, shows your purse and offers DEPLOY — it used to show SECOND WIND, a locked capstone, which read as though buying anything else were impossible
  • +A tier you cannot afford now says how much salvage you are short and its button stops pretending to work, instead of just playing a refusal sound
  • +Locked tiers read LOCKED · TIER 2 FIRST, so the chain is explicit rather than implied
  • +Insurance buys exactly as it always did — verified by buying BULWARK 1, then 2, then SALVAGE INSURANCE and checking the price comes off correctly (2,000 → 550)
v0.10.1 27 Oct 2026 01:30
  • +Fixed text being cut off on the Forge: every label is now sized from the height it actually renders at, so names, effects and prices sit fully inside their node
  • +Forge nodes are taller, which gives the effect line its own breathing room instead of crowding the price
  • +Fixed the same clipping on the level-up cards and the SYSTEM UPGRADE banner
  • +Small windows no longer squeeze text past the box it belongs in — if a node is ever too short to hold its effect line, the effect is dropped to the strip below rather than half drawn
v0.10.0 27 Oct 2026 00:51
  • +The Forge is a tree now: three branches — BULWARK, ARMAMENT and DRIVE — four tiers each, and a tier only opens once the one above it is bought
  • +Each branch ends in a capstone that changes a run instead of a number: SECOND WIND survives one lethal hit, VOLLEY turns every fifth shot into a piercing seeker, WAKE leaves a damaging trail when you dash
  • +Prices are scaled to what a run actually banks — 150, 400, 900, 2,000 — so one branch is a few good runs rather than thirty
  • +Every tier is bought once and kept, so the old five-rank percentage grind is gone
  • +Salvage you spent on the old flat upgrades has been refunded in full, automatically, on first launch
  • +The tree shows what you own, what you can afford and what is still locked, and explains the highlighted tier before you spend anything
v0.9.0 27 Oct 2026 00:27
  • +The run now ends with a debrief instead of four numbers: outcome, time survived, swarm destroyed, augment level, peak chaos, and the salvage line
  • +Your loadout is listed, so the build that got you there is visible instead of guessed at
  • +Beating your own best run is called out, even when the run itself ended badly
  • +REPORT THIS RUN sits on the debrief and sends your build and run numbers with the report, so a bug arrives with its context attached
  • +A report filed from the debrief returns you to the frozen debrief, not to a swarm that quietly starts moving again
  • +The Escape menu stays out of the way while the debrief is up, so panels no longer stack on a finished run
v0.8.1 26 Oct 2026 23:16
  • +Reporting a bug now freezes the game while you type, so nothing can kill you mid-sentence
  • +The report opens from the Escape menu too, and closing it puts you back in the menu rather than straight into the swarm
  • +Pausing on a level-up card no longer resumes the game behind the card when you close the menu
v0.8.0 26 Oct 2026 23:10
  • +Escape opens a menu at last: resume, music volume, effects volume, fullscreen and quit to desktop
  • +The world stops while that menu is open, so reading the controls cannot get you killed
  • +REPORT A BUG lives in the menu too — the F8 tool no longer depends on remembering F8
  • +First launch explains the job: what you are, that dying costs most of the haul, every control, and what to try in this build
  • +The briefing can be reopened from the pause menu, so it is never lost once dismissed
  • +Volume and display settings are remembered between sessions
v0.7.0 26 Oct 2026 22:05
  • +Press F8 any time to send us a report without leaving the game — it attaches the build, the deck, where you were standing and your frame rate for you
  • +The report is stored the moment you send it, so a crash right after does not lose it
  • +Reports that cannot be sent keep your text: press RETRY and it goes again
  • +The tester page has a report form too, so a broken launcher or a download that will not open can be reported without the game
  • *Nothing about the report can reach the game while you are typing in it
v0.6.0 26 Oct 2026 21:35
  • +Hull integrity bar over your salvager, so damage is readable without looking at the corner
  • +Enemies flash when hit — a hit that lands now looks different from one that misses
  • +The hangar calls out your salvage balance on its own line
  • *Pillars stop bolts; shots no longer pass through solid cover
  • *Fixed cadence: the gun fires at a steady rate and shows it, instead of going quiet while the swarm closes in
  • *Aiming turns far faster and snaps when you whip the cursor to a new target
  • *Fixed a softlock where deploying on SPINE could drop you into the void with no way back
  • +If you ever end up off the deck you are walked back onto it; press R to do it yourself
  • *Release notes and launchers now show the build time, not just the date
v0.5.1 26 Oct 2026
  • +Linux build: 64-bit x86, ships as a .tar.gz you extract and run
  • *Direct downloads now list Windows and Linux side by side under the launcher button
  • *The Windows launcher still installs and updates the game; Linux players grab the archive
v0.5.0 26 Oct 2026
  • +Three decks instead of one open circle: CROSSFIRE, FOUNDRY and SPINE
  • +Real chokepoints — rooms joined by six- to ten-metre passes that you and the swarm both have to use
  • +Pillars and cover, so a fight has lanes to play with instead of one big furball
  • +Deck edges are solid: rails stop you, gap, and the void stops anything that gets past
  • +The Warden now has three phases — a telegraphed ground slam, a radial bolt volley, then reinforcements
  • +The Warden breaches in next to you instead of strolling in from the far side of the map
  • *The extraction pad is never beside your spawn now, so leaving is a decision
  • *The swarm routes through the passages rather than grinding along the edge of the world
v0.4.0 26 Oct 2026
  • +Spitters: ranged swarm that holds an 11-16 m ring and telegraphs every shot
  • +Bombers: rush you, light a 0.8 s fuse, and detonate — and they chain-detonate each other
  • +Flayers: blink behind you on a 3 s cycle, telegraphed 0.55 s ahead
  • +Elites: 2.8x integrity, a gold crown, triple salvage, and they turn up more often the longer you stay
  • +Extraction is now windowed — the docking pad is only live for 12 s of every 55 s
  • +The pad counts down, warns you 5 s ahead, and visibly wakes up when a window opens
  • *The swarm's composition now evolves over the run instead of only getting denser
v0.3.0 26 Oct 2026
  • +Mouse aiming — the gun follows your cursor instead of picking targets for you
  • +Soft target lock: enemies inside a 12 degree cone of your aim take priority
  • +Ground reticle shows where your shots land, and turns amber when a target is locked
  • *The gun holds fire when the arena is empty instead of chattering into the void
v0.2.1 26 Oct 2026
  • -Fixed level-up cards being picked automatically on some launches
  • -Level-up cards now ignore input for their first 0.5 s, so a stray click cannot choose for you
v0.2.0 26 Oct 2026
  • +The Forge: six permanent upgrade tracks paid for with banked salvage
  • +Rarity tiers — common, rare and relic augments, relics unlocked by lifetime salvage
  • +Fully procedural audio: weapon, impact, kills, dash, ambience and a chaos layer
  • +Synthwave soundtrack, mute with M
  • +Hangar screen, augment cards and a proper end screen
v0.1.0 25 Oct 2026
  • +First vertical slice: swarm survival, salvage collecting, extraction and level-up augments
  • +Phase dash with invulnerability frames
  • +Loot orbs, the Warden mini-boss, procedural starfield arena