benjivers/val Public Public: anyone can read this; the crew can change it.

# val

Five attackers with the spike, five defenders, abilities on cooldown. First to 13.

A 5v5 played in a browser, from inside the player's head — the map is a tile

grid and the view is a raycaster over it, so there is no 3D library and no

dependency at all. One match is always running on the server: open the page

and you are given a seat in the round that is happening, taken from a bot

where it stands. When a match ends it shows the result for a few seconds and

starts a new one, so nobody ever arrives at a frozen board.

## What is real

Everything that decides a round is computed on the server and only the

server:

- **Movement, shooting and hit detection.** The client sends intent — a

  direction, an angle, a held key — never a position. Damage is by hit

  location (how close the ray passes the target) with falloff and armour:

  a Vandal head shot kills through full armour at any range, a Phantom's

  does not past fifteen metres.

- **Line of sight.** A snapshot only carries the enemies that viewer can

  see. A wall of the map blocks the sight line, a smoke blocks it, a flash

  blinds by the angle you were facing, and a blinded player is sent no

  enemies at all. A dead player watches through their living team mates'

  eyes rather than through walls, so dying is not a wallhack to call out.

  No spawn can see the other spawn: mid is staggered on purpose. A patched

  client learns nothing a plain one does not.

- **The spike.** 100s round, 4s plant, 45s fuse, 7s defuse with a

  checkpoint at 3.5s — a defender killed past half way leaves the defuse

  half done for the next one.

- **Credits.** 800 to start, 9,000 cap, +200 a kill, +300 to the team on a

  plant, loss bonus 1,900 / 2,400 / 2,900. A buy you cannot afford is

  refused server-side.

- **Who is alive.** The roster under the view lists your five with their

  health from the snapshot's own team data, and the kill feed is derived in

  `src/arena.ts` by comparing the players either side of a tick — it carries

  names, the gun and an age, and never a position.

- **Bots** fill every empty seat and use their kit: smokes on the way in,

  flashes before the entry, a recon dart, a molly on the planted spike.

Agents: Ember, Veil, Sable, Mender, Rook — two basics bought with credits

(charges last the round), a free signature on a cooldown, and an ultimate

paid for with ult points from kills, plants and the two orbs on the map.

Guns: Classic, Ghost, Sheriff, Spectre, Phantom, Vandal, Operator.

## What is not

- The view is a raycaster: walls are one tile tall and flat-shaded, there is

  no looking up or down, and everything that is not a wall — bodies, the

  spike, ability zones — is a flat billboard scaled by distance and clipped

  against the walls.

- One map, one match at a time, ten seats. There is no matchmaking, no

  ranking and no account: your seat belongs to a session cookie, and a

  playing seat is capped one per client address so a cookie — free to mint

  again — cannot buy a second one on the other team. A second machine on a

  second network is still a second person as far as the server can tell,

  the same as any anonymous game without accounts; a socket that does not

  get a seat is sent a spectator view with no position in it, never a side.

- No overtime — first to 13 ends it at 12–12 too.

- Sight is a full circle rather than a view cone — you are drawn what is in

  front of you, but the server reveals anything you have line of sight to,

  so a team mate behind you still appears on the minimap. The world has no

  vertical, so the hit location comes from how precisely the shot passes

  the target.

- Assists are counted as a field but never awarded.

- The live match lives in memory and is gone if the process restarts; only

  finished match results are written to SQLite under `FORGE_APP_DATA`.

## Playing

Click the view to capture the mouse, then WASD move and the mouse looks;

**Esc** gives the pointer back. Click fires, **R** reloads, **F** plants and

defuses (hold it), **C / Q / E / X** cast, **B** opens the buy, **Tab**

holds the big map open, **V** swaps to the top-down view and **H** or **?**

brings back the how-to-play card. On a phone it stays top-down: the left

thumb walks and the right thumb aims and fires.

```sh

PORT=8080 FORGE_APP_DATA=./data bun run src/server.ts   # run it here

bun test                                                # the check every pull runs

VAL_URL=http://127.0.0.1:8080 bun run src/tty.ts        # the terminal interface

```

The terminal plays the same match over the same socket: it draws the grid,

the scoreboard and the round, and takes a seat. The exact command that

reaches it is in `FORGE_APP_SSH` when the app runs, and the page prints it.

The forge sets `PORT`, `FORGE_APP_DATA`, `FORGE_APP_ENV`, `FORGE_APP_URL`,

`FORGE_APP_SSH` and `FORGE_APP_COMMIT` when it starts the app; `forge.json`

says how.

## Shape

`src/map.ts` the grid and its geometry · `src/weapons.ts` the damage table ·

`src/economy.ts` credits · `src/abilities.ts` the agent kits ·

`src/match.ts` the round loop (`tick(state, dt)` is the whole game and takes

no clock) · `src/bots.ts` the seats nobody is in · `src/arena.ts` the one

live match and its sockets · `src/server.ts` the door · `static/` the browser client —

`val.js` wires the socket, the keys and the HUD, `raycast.js` is the ray

maths, `scene.js` the first-person view, `topdown.js` the minimap,

`gun.js`, `beep.js`, `steer.js`, `roster.js` and `prompt.js` the rest; the server bundles

them into one content-named file at start-up. The rules are pure functions and the tests play whole matches

headlessly.