EVENTIDE

playable, right here

Tank Farm — play it in the browser.

Four zones, his two real weapons, and the Skitterling. Clear the quota, secure the cache, move on. Drops fall off what you kill and the propane vessels are the best weapon on the map once you shoot one. Works on a phone too — left thumb moves, right thumb aims and fires.

four zones

The yard, in, and out again.

The Yard, the Facility, the Proving and the Wreck Field — named for the scenes that exist in EVENTIDE itself.

loot

A quarter of them drop.

Kills drop glowing gear at four rarity grades, with rolled modifiers, and a power number off everything you carry.

the fight is the gate

The cache costs something.

The chest does not appear until the quota is paid — which is the flow the real build intends.

what it is

Third-person sci-fi looter shooter.
Bounded zones, co-op.

You wake up somewhere you did not go to sleep. You go out into a small number of hand-built places, and you come back with things that make the next trip different — and you can take somebody with you.

bounded, not open

Places you learn.

Not a generated wilderness. A short list of built spaces you go back to until you know where the shots come from.

co-op

Bring someone.

The loop is built to be run together — small enough that you can actually find each other in it, rather than needing a raid roster.

loot that changes things

A grid, not a list.

Weapons and gear come out of chests and off bodies, land in a grid inventory, and carry their own rolled modifiers.

where you go

Five places, each with a job.

Every one of these is a hand-built scene in the game right now. The list is short on purpose — that is what "bounded" means.

HUB

The Hub

Where you stand between runs. Its own sky, its own scenery pass, stairs and a layout authored rather than dropped.

FAC

The Facility

Interior level plus a surface exterior, so inside and outside are one continuous place rather than two loading screens.

PRV

The Proving

Where a weapon gets tested. It has its own grid shader, which is the tell — it is built to be measured in, not decorated.

GAL

The Gallery

A room that exists so the maker can stand a new model next to a finished one and see whether it holds up.

AWK

The Awakening

The opening. A containment pod, an orbital station, a salvage ship and a wreck field — a cutscene with its own camera and its own audio pass.

the arsenal

Two weapons, modelled to the millimetre.

Two, finished, rather than twenty in grey. Each one carries its own muzzle, sight, grip, foregrip, butt and ejection point as measured offsets — which is how the hands, the recoil and the shell ejection all know where to be.

MARKSMAN RIFLE

Phung 42

Equipment data — PHG-42

class: marksman rifle
overall length: 0.9965 m
triangles: 5,180
muzzle offset: −0.569 m

ENERGY SHOTGUN

Willbringer

Equipment data — WLB-01

class: energy shotgun
overall length: 0.9656 m
triangles: 6,160
cell & vent: modelled

The Willbringer has a vent and a power cell as real points on the model. Not a texture detail — the game knows where they are, which is what lets heat and charge come out of the right place.

the yard it gets made around

Built between shifts, in a propane yard.

EVENTIDE is not made in a studio. It is made in the hours either side of a working day spent around bulk tanks, transfer hoses and shut-off valves — and the fingerprints of that are all over this page on purpose.

The gauges on this page are not decoration.

Every number about the game — the shader count, the script modules, the audio samples — is read off a pressure gauge, because that is the instrument its maker reads all day. The bollards, the yellow kerb striping, the stencilled asset tags and the vessel standing behind the title are the same borrowing.

It turns out to be a good fit rather than a joke. A propane plant and a science-fiction facility want the same things from a picture: cold light on painted steel, one hazard colour used sparingly, and equipment that looks like it has a job.

bulk tanktransfer hoseshut-off valve pressure gaugebollarddata plate

how it is made

Thirty-two shaders, written by hand.

The look is not an asset-store post-processing stack. The sky, the planet and its rings, the atmosphere, the engine cores, the rifts, the ichor, the muzzle flashes and the title itself are each a shader in the project, with their constants tuned in comments that explain why.

shaders 32

hand-written shaders

modules 138

script modules

samples 251

audio samples

surfaces 6

footstep surfaces

the body knows

Foot IK, arm IK, cloak.

Feet plant on what is actually under them, arms solve onto the weapon, and the cloak is simulated rather than animated.

it sounds like somewhere

Footsteps that read the floor.

Concrete, dirt, gravel, grit, metal and stone are separate sample sets. Weapons are layered rather than one-shot, with their own reload passes.

damage is a system

Types, zones, modifiers.

A damage calculator with typed damage, a colour palette per type, hit zones on the enemy and a modifier stack that gear feeds into.

enemies

The Skitterling.

Its own brain, animator, voice, hit reactions, nameplate and a ragdoll for when it stops having opinions.

the interface

Built in code, not a scene.

Boot screen, menu, inventory grid, tooltips, damage numbers, hit markers, reload ring, objective panel and loot cards — all drawn from script.

the sky

A planet you can look at.

Ocean, land, ice, cloud, aurora, night-side city light and a terminator, with rings and a fracture pass. It is a shader, not a skybox photo.

the title

“A signal being received, not text being drawn.”

That is the first line of the comment at the top of the game's own title shader, and the wordmark at the top of this page is that shader rebuilt for a browser — the same four layers, using the same numbers out of the file.

layer 1 — always on

Chromatic aberration.

Red and blue sampled a fraction apart, at 0.0009 of the wordmark's width and 0.0030 during a burst. The shader's own note says this layer does most of the work and must never switch off.

layer 2 — bursts only

Slice displacement.

Twenty-two rows; only those above a 0.86 threshold move, so a burst tears the word into a few bands instead of smearing all of it.

layer 3 — felt, not seen

Scanlines, rolling.

Strength 0.035, drifting slowly upward. Faint enough that you notice it only when it is taken away.

layer 4 — the colour

A cold energy bloom.

Tinted to the same blue as the engine cores and the planet's limb, so the title belongs to the world rather than sitting on top of it.

And the restraint is written into it. “A permanently glitching title stops reading as an effect within about four seconds and just looks broken.” So it assembles, settles, and then only twitches now and then. This page does the same.