Rogue Shooter

A roguelike survivor played front-on rather than top-down, where the meta-progression is not a menu of stat boosts but a forge for the next run itself.

What you do

Hold a line against escalating waves, hoover up the gems they drop, and level up in the middle of the fight. Six weapons fire at once if you stack them that way, and the movement is a platformer's rather than a twin-stick's: jump, sprint and dash out of trouble. Every fifth round is a boss that heals, accelerates and enrages as you wear it down.

The Timeline Forge

Between runs you ascend to the Higher Dimension and spend editing points rebuilding the run you are about to play: add a boss, delete one, insert elite waves, duplicate a hazard, corrupt an event, shift a biome. You are not picking upgrades, you are designing the gauntlet — and a sufficiently corrupted timeline fractures into something the game does not otherwise contain.

The god problem

Aetherius presents himself as a mentor guiding you to restore a shattered world. He feeds on what you kill, he grows as you grow, and the restoration is a lie: the meta-progression is the conditioning. The campaign runs fifty rounds to a hidden fight at the heart of a black hole, and an endless mode continues past it.

Where it stands

In development and unnamed. Rogue Shooter is the working title it has carried since the first prototype, and not the title it will ship under.