A twilight factory-RTS. It is 93 kelvin outside and nothing you own will run in that. Light a fire, build your factory inside the warm, and get the Aperture lit before the maintenance swarm finishes bringing every surface to specification: flat, uniform, inert.
Free, no install, no account. Needs WebGL2 and a mouse.
The moon sits at 93 kelvin. Every machine has a temperature below which it slows down, and then seizes. Heat conducts through rock and bleeds off fastest where the sky is open, so ground that looks sheltered is sheltered.
Which means waste heat from a furnace is an asset rather than a penalty, and the best place for a delicate assembler is right next to a fire. Your factory is not a sprawling optimal grid. It is a tight warm pocket a few hundred metres across, and you can see its exact shape.
Cableways. You place pylons and cargo rides the wire between them. A span only exists if the loaded cable actually clears the ground, so where you can run freight is a terrain question. Slope costs nothing, which is the entire reason to build one.
A mass driver on a fixed rail that solves a real ballistic arc to a catch basin on the far side of a canyon. If the basin is gone the crate still arrives. It just arrives on the ground, and lies there until something picks it up.
A thermal field over the whole map, with conduction and radiation. It is the same multiplier as a power brownout, applied in the same place. Machines frost over and stop.
Construction consumes filament, and filament is the output of a five-step chain. Your ability to build is a throughput number. Cut the Loom and your Weavers stand in the dark with their beams lit, laying nothing down.
Light is not a stockpile. It is a flow network with geometry: relays link only where there is line of sight over the heightfield, and a shortage browns out one valley while the next one over runs fine.
The Concord's maintenance swarm never received the shutdown order. For four
hundred years, in the dark, with nobody checking, it kept doing its job. A
thousand lossy generations later, restore this surface to the tolerances in
schedule 9
has degraded, one small reasonable approximation at a time, into
flat, uniform, inert
.
WORK ORDER 8891-K. SECTOR TESSELLATE-NORTH.
SURFACE BROUGHT TO SPECIFICATION. NO DEFECTS OUTSTANDING.
AWAITING NEXT ASSIGNMENT. PLEASE ADVISE.
It is not angry and it cannot be discouraged. Killing the crew does not close the work order. Its heavy machines do not attack your buildings at all: they flatten the ground, erasing the sheltered basins that keep you warm. The enemy mechanically attacks the cosiness.
The Ninefold Concord put nine artificial moons in a resonant ring around the gas giant September. There is no surviving record of what the machine was for. There is a great deal of record about how carefully it was maintained.
the first true surface
A cracked plain of hexagonal basalt. Wake up. Build a fire.
where the ring is kept in time
Canyon country. You cannot walk it. Learn to throw.
the moon that remembers
Ice over a thin crust. Your furnaces melt the ground out from under you.
the small sky
the moon that counts
the moon that says no
the far shore
the moon that is sorry
the moon that is kept
Total Annihilation's terrain was lit offline and shipped as flat imagery plus a separate heightmap for gameplay, with true 3D units drawn on top. That mismatch is the look, and this game reproduces the pipeline literally.
A bake step ray-marches hard sun shadows, horizon-scan sky occlusion and one real bounce of warm light off lit ground, and writes a finished plate. At runtime the ground is never lit again.
The sky-occlusion field computed for the lighting is reused as the thermal radiative-loss coefficient, so the art and the mechanics are the same array. And the sun is deliberately cold: a warm low sun makes the whole plate read as tan desert, and then amber machine light has nothing to contrast against.
The soundtrack is synthesised too, and the factory drone's amplitude and harmonic content track your actual production throughput. You learn to hear a stall a second or two before you see it, the way you can hear a workshop go quiet.
