About

I'm one person and this is a game I wanted to play. It comes out of the old tabletop westerns, where a gunfight was a couple of rolls against a chart and a character you'd got attached to could be dead before your coffee went cold. I don't miss the charts. I do miss how little it took to get killed.

What I kept coming back to is that a gunfight doesn't happen in turns. Nobody stands about waiting for their go. So in this one you write down what you're doing for the next five seconds, the other side does the same, and then you watch it happen and find out. Some nights your careful aim lands. Some nights he got two shots off while you were still lining one up.

The odds are on screen because hiding them never made a game tense for me, it just made me guess. If you lose I want it to be because the other fellow's plan was better than yours, and you could see what you were risking the whole way through.

How it's built

The rules are a separate program written in Elixir and the game itself is Godot, which is an odd way round, but it means the rules get tested and measured on their own and they know nothing at all about the screen. There's a harness that plays a few thousand fights to tell me whether a weapon has got too good. Most of my week goes on that. Very little of it goes on anything you can look at.

If you want to follow along, the devlog is where I write about what broke. The Discord is small and quiet and you're welcome in it.