“Magic is chaos. Control is progress.”
High-Constructor Tiberius' order worships the logic of the machine. Brass, steam, oath-circuits, and drone swarms. Arcanum is a fuel to be bolted down.
Roguelite arena auto-shooter · Build-crafting
Build the machine.
Survive the Gear‑Dawn.
A roguelite arena shooter where you don't pick a weapon — you build a machine that fires itself while the swarm closes in.
Store page in preparation — until it is live, this opens the Steam search. The Discord gets the store link the day it exists.
- Free demo first
- Windows · Steam
- Built in the open since 2025
[ CONDUCTOR ] ▌
By the numbers
Not a pitch deck. A machine that already runs.
- 24 weapon cores 6 kinetic · 6 arcanum · 12 pure-element
- 94 rig parts across 11 families, unlimited per machine
- 24 hidden resonances 8 of them change how the machine acts
- 60 runed spells learned from the weapons that carry them
- 5 bosses one every fifth wave, then endless
- 280 automated tests run before any build leaves the forge
One forge, 228 commits since October 2025. Nothing on this page is concept art — every frame is the real build.
The idea in three beats
New here? Here's the whole thing.
Ninety seconds, three ideas. Everything below is just detail — read what pulls you.
Veridia · the Gear-Dawn
Magic was forced into machinery — and the machinery woke up.
A century ago, miners struck Arcanum: sapphire, bio-energetic, addictive. Most who touched it became the Forsaken; a rare few Awoke as mages. Refined, it lit a second industrial revolution — steam, brass, and rune-magic fused into the arcanomechanical age.
Now two guilds wage a holy war through the Arena, while above them the Conductor tunes every gear toward one silent end. Gold is worthless here. Only Slag — half-molten metal fused with raw Arcanum — is coin.
“They call it fuel. We hear its weeping in the pipes that drain our world.”Elder Elara, the Arcanum Purity
The signature mechanic
Gearworks — machines you wire, not menus you shop.
A Gearwork is a node graph. A shot is born at a Core, flows down the pipeline, forks at splits, and every part transforms it — ignite, pierce, crit, accelerate. Reroute a pipe and the projectile physically changes path.
Unlimited by design
No slot count caps your build — the screenshot above is 21 weapon circles across 48 nodes, and nothing stopped it. Heat and arcanum are the only governors: a monstrous Gearwork is self-limiting, not forbidden.
Splitting projectiles
Forks aren't cosmetic. Shots physically split, and each shard runs the compiled pipeline from that node down.
Heat & arcanum
Physical Gearworks fire free on heat alone; magic ones spend arcanum per shot. Overbuild and you jam, vent, or run dry.
Hidden resonances
Typed fluids couple through pipes — visible synergies to chase, hidden resonances to discover, bad mixes to avoid.
Eleven families. Any count of each.
- Weapon
- Amplifier
- Infuser
- Regulator
- Splitter
- Muzzle
- Magazine
- Plating
- Reserve
- Frame
- Rack
How a run goes
Fight a wave. Bank it. Rebuild. Again.
Two rooms, traded back and forth. The Arena is where the machine proves itself; the Arsenal is where you answer what just happened to it. A run is twenty to sixty minutes of that argument.
- 01
The wave
Cull the Forsaken, chart the wasteland, take a pump house. Your machine fires itself — your job is footwork, heat and the vent.
- 02
The level-up
Mid-fight, time slows and you pick: player stats or machine boosts. Never parts — parts are looted, never handed out.
- 03
The portal
Step in and the wave is over: the run's loot banks, the round advances, and you are back at the Arsenal. No screen, no pause.
- 04
The rebuild
Stash, shop, bench. Re-wire around what just dropped — or don't, and carry the machine that nearly got you killed one wave further.
Every fifth wave sends a boss. Clear the goal wave and the run is won — then it keeps going, endlessly, until something finally gets through.
Death ends the run, not the progress: the Äther-Kern you earned stays, and the next Gearmancer starts a little less mortal.
The three forces of Veridia
Two guilds built the cage. You are the third thing loose inside it.
“The machine wounds the soul. Harmony heals it.”
Elder Elara's circles revere Arcanum as a living force. Elemental fury, mutated beasts, raw magic — and a bitter, forced dependence on Covenant tech.
You — the Gearmancer
“Understand the chaos. Master the control.”
An ordinary human who left a guild and refused its dogma. You fuse magic into the machine — which is exactly why both brand you heretic. Both secretly know you matter.
Something is watching
You don't enter the Arena. You enter the Conductor.
It has no body and no face. It is the walls and the spawns, the traps and the turning gears — and the wasteland that rearranges itself around every step you take. It doesn't watch the Arena; it is the Arena. What it was built to do, no one living remembers.
Subject detected. The test begins.
It does not hate you. To the machine you are a variable — and variables get optimized out.
The roster
Eight defined. Two playable now. More through Early Access.
The Berserker
Close, relentless, steel-first. A Covenant defector who kept the armour and threw out the doctrine. His machines are physical: they fire free on heat alone, so the only thing that stops them is the vent.
The Elementalist
Ranged arcane fury, rerouted through cold machinery. A Purity exile who caged the fire she once set free. Her machines drink arcanum per shot — build one too greedy and it starves itself mid-wave.
Weapons carry runed-in spells, and you learn one for the run — castable only while a weapon of that make is still in your machine. Swap the gun and you lose the spell with it.
Duelist, Mechanist, Scavenger, Resonant, Sentinel, Sharpshot — locked, and unlockable as the machine grows.
Screenshots
A look at the machine.
Straight out of real play on the current build — no concept art, no staged shots, nothing final. Click any frame to open it full size.
Closed playtest · September 2026
Ten seats. One board. Highest wave wins.
Ten testers on ten machines, one live leaderboard. Every run reports its build, its damage, its best second — and the wave it ended on. Reach wave 20 and the game asks whether you want to keep going. Say yes.
- Highest wave reached ranks the board; sustained DPS breaks ties.
- Records on the side: best burst second, highest single hit, highest shard hit, most damage in one run.
- Every build you fire is logged with the run — the board shows which machine did it.
- Found a bug? F8 in-game. The report lands with your wave, hero and build attached.
Seats are handed out in the Discord, Windows only, a fresh build every few days.
Release plan
From a free demo to paid Early Access.
You are here
-
Now · September 2026
Closed playtestLIVE
Ten testers, one live leaderboard, a fresh build every few days. The Gearwork system, two heroes and the Arena–Workshop loop are in and being hammered on.
-
Autumn 2026
Steam page + free demoFREE
A full slice you can play for nothing — the demo comes first. The store page goes up before it does, and the Discord gets the link that day.
-
Winter 2026 / 27
Early Access · Windows
The full loop, more of the roster, deeper Gearwork content — priced fair and shaped by what the playtest and the demo teach.
-
2027
Content updates
New heroes, bosses, Gearwork parts, synergies and balance passes — steered by the community in the forge.
-
When it holds
1.0 release
The full game, once the machine holds under its own weight.
-
After 1.0
Co-op
Building the machine together is where this is going. It needs networking the game does not have yet, so it comes after 1.0 rather than before — a goal on the plan, without a date on the calendar it could not hold.
Dates are honest targets, not blood-oaths — a solo forge bends to reality.
Before the Gear-Dawn
Three moves. The first one costs a click.
One solo forge, building in the open. Come watch it happen — and be first through the door when the demo lands.
- 01
Wishlist on Steam
Wishlist it
Steam tells you the day the free demo lands — and every wishlist moves the game up the lists other players see.
- 02
Join the Discord
Join the forge
The store link, the playtest seats and the dev-log all land in the Discord first.
- 03
See the playtest
Take a seat
Ten machines, one board, your name on it. Ask in the Discord — seats go to whoever shows up.
Free demo → Early Access · Windows
Store page in preparation — until it is live, this opens the Steam search. The Discord gets the store link the day it exists.