DET-33 is out on Steam for Windows and Linux, and it runs natively on the Steam Deck, which is what half of the rendering work on this blog was for.
It’s a bullet-heaven roguelite set in what’s left of New London. You take a contract from one of four warring factions, deploy as one of ten classes, build a gun out of whatever the level-ups hand you, and try to reach the evac before the city closes in. Every floor is generated fresh.
The last time I wrote here was June. Since then the repo took 4,655 commits, and very few of them were the fun kind. What I didn’t expect about finishing a game is how much of it is finding things you already shipped that are quietly wrong.
My favorite example: the enemy data is camelCase JSON, and the loader matches snake_case keys. A camelCase key doesn’t throw and doesn’t warn, the property just keeps its C# default. So every enemy in the game ran at a hitbox radius of 16 regardless of what the data said, for a long time, and nothing looked broken. Another one: gameplay timers were stamped against the OS clock, which keeps running while the game is paused, so a status effect could expire while you were reading level-up cards. That pattern was in about 200 places before one build’s push-and-pull rhythm drifted far enough out of sync to make it obvious.
So most of the summer went into gates instead of features. There are 69 validators now, the whole set runs in about two seconds on every push, and each one exists because the bug it catches already happened once. The rest went into art: every combat effect is now a flipbook baked in Blender from the gameplay camera, instead of something assembled from primitives at runtime.
It started as a JS and Phaser game, and I rewrote it in Godot and C# to push the enemy counts the design always wanted. The systems underneath have their own posts: composable bullet behaviors, stat-agnostic skills, procedural levels from my own map library, and the 2.5D rendering trick that draws a thousand enemies in a couple of draw calls.
If you play it, a Steam review helps more than anything else I could ask for. Go make a weapon nobody asked for.