val

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

A top-down 5v5 played in a browser. 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.

• 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

• 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.

• No overtime — first to 13 ends it at 12–12 too.
• Sight is a full circle rather than a view cone; top-down 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

WASD move, the mouse aims, click fires, R reloads, F plants and defuses (hold it), C / Q / E / X cast, B opens the buy. On a phone the left thumb walks and the right thumb aims and fires.

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/val.js the browser. The rules are pure functions and the tests play whole matches headlessly.