Tick-Tock-Take

A closer look at what it is, what is in it, and what I built.

The heist

Every level hides a relic. Take it, and every spawner in the level fires at once while enemies start arriving faster and in greater numbers.
Grab the loot, survive the backlash, and fight your way to the exit portal. Make it out and you are one step closer to home.
Go down and you are busted, left to await your sentence at the end of time.
A guaranteed legendary powerup is hidden somewhere in every level, if you are willing to go looking for it.

Wallrun along walls with the camera tilting into the run, then kick off into a wall jump.
Fire a grappling hook into the level and it reels you in on an elastic rope, letting you swing across whole rooms.
Dash in whatever direction you are looking, carry the momentum out of it, and slide along the ground to keep your speed up.
Automatic ledge mantling means a missed jump becomes a scramble up the edge instead of a fall.

Enemies drop glowing loot in three rarities. Grab one and time stops while you pick one of three cards.
Commons stack your basics: speed, attack speed, bigger magazines, double jump, and the Ankh, which shatters at low health to refill your whole health bar.
Rares reward how you move: Gung-Ho hits 30% harder while sliding, High Ground crits more while wallrunning, and others freeze, ignite, or explode enemies on kill.
Legendaries change the whole run: Excalibur adds true damage equal to 10% of a foe's max health, The Gae Bolg unleashes a wave of barbs on kill, The Thunderbolt chains lightning, the Macrowave Emitter fires a burning beam of light, and the X-13 Matter Condenser can open a singularity that drags enemies in.
Crit chance past 100% does not cap out - it rolls again, so a stacked build can crit two or three times on a single shot.

21 enemy types. The Time Police show up dressed for the era - Greek, medieval, or modern - with batons, pistols, and shotguns.
The past fights back too: dragons that dive-bomb, charge, and breathe fire, floating fire mages, rock golems that hurl boulders and call down rockfalls, and brutes that leap in for a ground slam.
The future sends drones, missile mechs, heat-seeking attack bots, alien torpedo ships, and laser turrets.
Enemies warp in through a ticking clock face, giving you a split second of warning before they arrive.

Enemies are not placed by hand. A spawn director earns a budget over time and spends it on whichever room is closest to you.
Every enemy has a price, so early fights are cheap swarms and later ones bring mechs, golems, and dragons.
The longer you play, the more it earns: difficulty starts climbing within seconds and never stops, and every enemy levels up once a minute.
Taking the relic pushes it into overdrive, with a bigger budget and shorter gaps between spawns.

Ancient Greece: a temple of columns and statues, with patches of floor that burst into flame under your feet.
The Middle Ages: a castle keep of gateways, hanging chains, and an armory stocked with weapon racks.
The far future: a space station of laser walls and a spinning laser array you have to time your way through.
Every level was built by hand, with five or six spawn zones and around a hundred spawn points woven through it.

I built all three levels, the adaptive spawn director and room spawners, the relic objective, the laser hazards, and most of the enemy roster, including the dragons, rock golem, fire mage, jump slammer, and turrets.
Ben Smith built the movement system, the powerup and buff systems, and the custom cel-shading, outline, and burn shaders. Michael Chambers built the mech, the drone, the laser turret, the Time Police officer, and the clock spawn-in effect.
Enemies are pooled and reused rather than created on the fly, and powerups hook into on-hit, on-kill, on-crit, on-dash, and low-health events so each one is a small self-contained script.