BESTAGON

A micro arena survivor built in Godot 4.7.1 and GDScript. Move; your weapons fire themselves. Every third level you pick one upgrade out of three. Survive five minutes and beat what shows up and you have won — keep going, and something worse arrives at ten.

Four minutes in, level 43, 742 kills. Captured from a real run with the in-repo screenshot tool — --shot-frames writes a contact sheet, and the frames are sliced back out into this loop.

No third-party assets. The sprites are drawn procedurally by a Python script (tools/gen_assets.py). The soundtrack is written — 38 original pieces, ~1,125 lines of Strudel pattern code in audio_src/, including the four-stem adaptive structure that lets the music follow the fight without ever restarting. The renderer is a compiler, not a composer. See assets/ATTRIBUTION.md.

And regenerable from a clone, which is a stronger claim than "generated". Sprites rebuild with Python and Pillow; audio rebuilds with one npm install (see Rebuilding the audio). Both generators are committed here, neither contains a path to anybody's machine, and the audio renderer is seeded — re-rendering a stem reproduces the committed file byte for byte.

Built with Claude as a deliberate experiment in AI-assisted development: the code, the generators and the copy are largely LLM-written, and the design decisions, direction and playtesting are not. No image or audio model was used — the art and music are code.

Play it

• Browser — the itch.io page (currently a restricted playtest build)
• Windows — a standalone .exe; unsigned, so SmartScreen will want "More info → Run anyway"

Controls: WASD/arrows move · SPACE dash (earned by beating the 5:00 boss) · ESC or P pause · M mute · R restart.

A web build cannot be run by double-clicking index.html — browsers refuse to fetch the .wasm and .pck from a file:// page. Serve it over HTTP; the packaged zip ships a START-HERE.bat that does exactly that.

Running it from source

You need Godot 4.7.1 stable, standard build — not mono, which ships no web export templates. It is not vendored here: it is a ~120 MB binary and not ours to redistribute. Download it, then point the scripts at it:

$env:GODOT = 'C:\path\to\Godot_v4.7.1-stable_win64_console.exe'

Use the _console executable. The plain one detaches from the terminal and every line of output is lost — which leaves the gate below unable to grep for the errors it exists to catch.

$env:GODOT is an override, not a requirement: the scripts also look in this workspace's engine\ folder and then on PATH. If none of them resolve, they print every location they tried and what to install, rather than failing with a path you never wrote. ($env:GODOT was added after a clone of this repo turned out to fail on all five gate stages with an error that never said "engine" — see tools/find_godot.ps1.)

# THE GATE: error-filter self-test + absolute-path and build-artifact guards + import
# + 128 unit tests + gameplay smoke + the UI layout harness + the tween-orphan
# regression, with the error grep and the known-benign-noise list built in.
# Run this, not the pieces.
powershell -File tools/verify.ps1
powershell -File tools/verify.ps1 soak      # + an 11-minute run clearing both boss events

# build and package both platforms for release
powershell -File tools/package.ps1

A fresh clone with nothing but $env:GODOT set runs the whole gate green from cold — that is checked by actually doing it, not assumed.

Success is exit 0 AND no SCRIPT ERROR/ERROR in stdout — Godot's exit codes do not reliably reflect script failures, so the gate greps.

Rebuilding the audio

Only needed if you want to change the music or SFX — the .ogg files the game plays are committed.

cd tools/strudel; npm install; cd ../..    # once per clone, a few seconds
python tools/build_music.py                # re-renders whatever changed
python tools/build_sfx.py

The renderer ships in tools/strudel/ — Strudel pattern code to .wav, headless and seeded, so renders are byte-identical run to run. Verified: a clean install re-rendered victory.strudel into a byte-for-byte copy of the committed victory.wav. npm install fetches AGPL-3.0 packages from the registry, which this repo declares but does not redistribute (node_modules/ is gitignored); the boundary is written out in tools/strudel/README.md. The game never links any of it — Godot plays .ogg files.

$STRUDEL_RENDERER overrides the location if you keep a checkout elsewhere. Run either script when it cannot resolve and it prints every path it looked in — it does not fail silently, and it contains no absolute path to fail with. verify.ps1 enforces that last part.

Layout

Path	What
scenes/	one folder per feature; each script sits next to its .tscn
scripts/	autoloads and pure utilities
resources/	game data as .tres — enemies, upgrades, waves. Never dictionaries or JSON
assets/	generated sprites, shaders and audio
tools/	the asset/audio/upgrade generators, the verify gate, the packaging script
tests/	GUT unit tests, pure logic only
scenes/dev/	juice lab and the UI layout harness; excluded from exports

Conventions

Static typing everywhere. Call down, signal up. Game data lives in Resources, never in dictionaries. Tests cover logic, never scenes — which is why UI that must fit the 640×360 viewport is guarded by a measuring harness (scenes/dev/pause_layout_check.gd) rather than by eye.

Documents

• BRIEF.md — the spec: prime directive, what counts as a defect, acceptance criteria
• TODO.md — milestones and scope, the source of truth for what is done
• DECISIONS.md — why things are the way they are, with the measurements that forced them

Game 1 of a three-game learning roadmap; its pick-one-of-three loop is deliberate rehearsal for a later deckbuilder.

Licence

MIT — code, art and music alike. Every sprite is generated and every note is composed in this repository, so there is no third-party asset whose terms could conflict with that; see assets/ATTRIBUTION.md.

One boundary worth stating rather than leaving implicit: the audio renderer in tools/strudel/ is ours and MIT like the rest, but npm install fetches AGPL-3.0 packages from the npm registry. This repo declares those dependencies and never redistributes them, and the game links none of them — Godot plays .ogg files. Detail in tools/strudel/README.md.