TEST UNIT 3

A 40-metre salvage mech that takes three people to walk. You are one of them, and you are not the one with the legs.

It weighs 228 tonnes. A single misplaced footfall levels a cottage. Villagers are 1.8 m tall, get punted 200 metres, and always get back up.

You sit in the COMMAND HEAD: you lean the torso, turn the chassis, and ration a fixed hydraulic budget between the two leg operators. You cannot reach the legs yourself. Today those two operators are hired CrewBots, and they are exactly as good at their job as the pay suggests.

Five contracts: SHAKEDOWN, THE CHURCHYARD, THE INSPECTION, CONTAINER NINE, CONDEMNED.

It runs entirely in this browser tab. There is no server, and it keeps working with the network unplugged.

ROUGH EDGES, UP FRONT

This is a prototype, and it is on this page as one rather than as a finished game. Specifically:

There is 12-20 minutes of content in total.

The crew AI is blunt. It executes an order after a fixed delay with a fixed chance of fumbling it, which means it is wrong the same way every time. That reads as latency more than as personality, and it is the main thing that would need rebuilding.

The difficulty does not curve. The three crew tiers do not reliably order themselves by difficulty, and one contract runs notably longer than the rest.

It was built to be played by three people on three keyboards. That mode exists and works, and it is the better half of the idea. It is not on this page yet.

If you bounce off it in five minutes, that is a fair outcome and it is free.

READ THIS BEFORE YOU PLAY

You cannot turn while you are walking. This is not a bug and it is not a missing feature, it is the design. 228 tonnes on two legs has a ten-fold gap between the yaw torque that turns a planted stance and the torque that topples a striding one, with no overlap, so the chassis holds its heading while the legs are being worked. To change direction you have to stop, plant both feet, and turn on the spot. Roughly 7 degrees per second once you are planted.

Small lever movements. Big ones topple you. Slow is easy; fast is genuinely hard.

CONTROLS. W/S and A/D lean the torso, Q/E turn, 1-4 shift pressure, R recentre, F gyro burst. Orders: U I O P port, J K L ; starboard, N both walk, Space all stop. Every order is also a button on the panel, and the backtick key resets the mech if it ends up on its back.

EVERYTHING IS GENERATED

No image, font, model or sound file ships with this game. Every pixel is drawn in code and every sound is synthesised by the Web Audio API, which is why the whole thing is a ~1 MB download and works offline.