UnderChant

UNDERCHANT | In Development, Early Access

An early-access arena shooter blending precision combat with emergent AI swarm behaviour in a procedurally generated arena.

A hex-grid arena where swarm intelligence meets dark ritual.  Worms and flies combine to form creatures.  When a creature dies, it explodes into more worms, which crawl together to re-combine, unraveling and rising up again until the worms are exhausted.

Arena Combat

Procedurally generated arenas help every run to feel different and unpredictable. Organic obstacle placement, floran and fauna distribution.  Stay alive as long as you can... or as long as you want.

Sandbox Control

Every parameter is tunable in real time. Adjust difficulty, spawn rates, goblin tribe stats, and behavior, and the game responds instantly.  Want more firepower? Need to move a little faster?  Just press the tab key and access hundreds of live-tunable prameters.  Save your experiments.  Load them later.  The game is a laboratory, experiment!

Swarm Intelligence

Goblins use smart pathfinding and flocking, supporting many agents moving in sync. Different tribes have different stats and abilities.  They think as one... until they don't.

Intent Focus

Every goblin carries a focus value representing the weight of its attention turned toward you. High focus: hunting. Low focus: distracted. A debug panel shows this distribution in real time.

Emergent Leadership

Leaders aren't spawned, they emerge.  Goblins influence nearby allies creating organic wolf-pack tactics.  Leaders get health, size, and speed buffs as followers chant their name.  Unravel the leaders and the pack temporarily loses focus until a new leader is chosen.

Procedural Identity and Chanting

Each goblin is named from a tribal phoneme pool and chants in sync with the music. Every playthrough has a unique audio signature. The ritual grows louder as the horde swells.

Dynamic Difficulty

Multiple metrics (kill rate, proximity, health, wealth, damage taken) feed a difficulty director that adapts in real time.

Early Access

In it's current state, UnderChant is a complete, playable game.  Additional goblin tribes are planned.  The game will support as many tribes as wanted, each with their own abilities, sound-sets, and auras that affect other nearby goblins in a number of ways.  Buffs, nerfs, formations, and other goblin attributes can all be changed by a goblin with an aura.

Currently there are four types of fauna included.  Fauna have different behaviors.  Some run away, some hunt goblins, some eat worms.  Try making friends with the flitters!  New fauna types and behaviors can be added as well as additional control over how the animals react to each other, the player, and the goblins.

I welcome your comments, suggestions, feature requests, bug-reports, complaints, criticism, and any other feeddback you can offer (especially if it's in the form of an enormous donation).