Volt & Valve

⚙ THIS GAME WAS BUILT END-TO-END BY AN AI.

Every script, every shader-free _draw() routine, every procedurally-synthesised sound effect, every wave definition, every UI button and every test was written by Claude (Anthropic's assistant model) in a single series of prompts. I (the uploader) wrote zero lines of code. I provided design prompts, ran the builds, and shipped the result. Credit and responsibility for the game logic, for any bugs still present, and for the procedural art pipeline all belong to the AI. If you're curious about how far an LLM can take a from-scratch Godot 4 project in a conversation — this is that experiment.

The theme (signal) was taken from the Ludum Dare game jam and this was done in parallel with it but was not uploaded to the jam for obvious reasons. 

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⚡ Volt & Valve

A steampunk tower defense where your towers have no power of their own. You defend the central Aether Generator, which emits a single continuous electrical signal. Bounce it through brass relays to reach your towers. When the beam is touching a tower, it fires. The moment the beam is interrupted, every tower downstream goes dark.

🔧 How it's different

• The signal is physical. It travels in straight lines, bounces 90° at relays, and is blocked when a Heavy clockwork enemy walks through it.
• Towers attenuate the beam. Instead of stopping the signal, a tower passes it through at reduced strength — downstream towers fire at proportionally less damage. Upgrade a tower's efficiency to feed a stronger signal onward.
• Every tower can also rotate the beam. Shift-click to send the signal 90° left, 90° right, or reverse it. Turn a Tesla coil into a relay. Turn an entire row into a zig-zag.
• Relays upgrade too. The Prism Coil splits the beam (bounce + straight-through). The Aether Capacitor adds +15% damage to every downstream tower. Chain them for compounding output.
• Your Generator is an upgradable core. Reinforce it for more HP, fit Twin Coils to emit a second beam in the opposite direction, and install the Overdrive Flywheel to speed up every powered tower.

🏗 What's in the box

• 10-wave campaign with hand-designed enemy mixes and a boss finale ("The Brass Crown"), followed by endless mode with procedurally generated, ever-harder waves.
• 3 hand-made maps (Classic Plateau, Crossroads, Southern Gauntlet) plus a seeded procedural map generator plus a Daily Challenge that uses today's date as the seed.
• 3 tower types, 3 upgrade tiers each — Gatling (rapid-fire), Tesla (chain lightning), Mortar (splash).
• 7 enemy variants — Fast beetles, clockwork automatons, Heavy signal-blockers, Shielded plates, Regenerators, straight-line Flying drones, and a boss clockwork.
• Active abilities — targeted EMP (stun enemies in a radius) and Pulse (force-power every tower for 5 seconds).
• Metaprogression — earn Aether per wave cleared; spend between runs in the Forge on permanent perks.
• Run mutators — pick Iron Current, Swarm Protocol, Frugal Engineer or Glass Cannon to reshape a run.
• Difficulty presets (Easy / Normal / Hard), independent of mutators.
• Accessibility — colorblind-friendly palette, reduce-flashes toggle, fullscreen, per-channel volume, efficiency readouts on every tower.
• 8 achievements, versioned save/load, and a full run-summary screen.

🕹 Controls

Action	Input
Build	Q relay · W gatling · E tesla · R mortar (or the build bar)
Start next wave	Enter or the Start button
Rotate a placed relay	Left-click the relay
Rotate a tower's signal	Shift + left-click the tower
Open upgrade menu	Left-click a tower · right-click a relay or the generator · long-press on touch
EMP targeting	Click the EMP button, then click the map
Pause / 2× speed	Space / F
Pan / zoom	Middle-mouse drag · scroll wheel · two-finger pinch on touch

🛠 Tech & credits

• Engine: Godot 4.6.1
• Code & design: Claude (Anthropic). Every script under scripts/, autoload/, ui/ is AI-written. The human uploader wrote zero lines of gameplay code.
• Art: procedural. No imported sprites. Every enemy, tower, relay, explosion, and UI element is drawn at runtime with Godot's _draw() primitives.
• Audio: procedural. Every SFX is synthesised into AudioStreamWAV buffers at boot. The looping clockwork background track is generated in-engine too.
• Tests: 121 integration tests covering beam routing, relay rotation, tower passthrough, signal rotation, adjacency synergy, the wave manager, save/load round-trips, procedural map determinism, active abilities, and achievements.