The project
A top-down wasteland roguelike: drive, fight, salvage, bolt modules onto sockets, then take bigger risks for better parts. The loop is built so that upgrades change how you play rather than nudging numbers upward, and the shape of your vehicle tells you what build you are running at a glance.
How it fits together
- A run loop of drive, fight, salvage, upgrade, escalate, with optional threats gating the strongest parts.
- Modules snap onto physical sockets on the vehicle, so a build is legible from its silhouette rather than a stats screen.
- Upgrades grant new behaviours such as mine drifting, ramming and slamming, instead of percentage modifiers.
- Hard roguelike progression: you start weak, and repeated runs make early areas trivial.
The trade-offs that mattered
Driving has to be fun with zero upgrades
If the base handling is not enjoyable, upgrades are compensating for a broken core rather than building on a good one. That pillar set the bar for the first playable.
Behaviours over stat modifiers
A plus five percent upgrade is invisible in play. Giving each module a new verb makes the choice at the shop a real one.
Readable chaos
The genre lives on screen density, but a player who cannot read a threat will feel cheated rather than challenged. Clarity was treated as a feature, not polish.
What I took from it
Writing the design pillars down before building anything made every later decision easier to make and easier to reject.
- Explicit design pillars are the cheapest tool available for keeping scope honest.
- Making the build visible on the vehicle removed the need for most of the UI I would otherwise have written.