Geofront

Mecha tactical city defence and management.

Hybrid of XCOM-style base management and Into the Breach-style focused mech combat, with strong emphasis on pilot psychology, synchronization, loyalty, and a single detailed living/destructible city.

Status

• Combat — turn-based skirmish on an 8×8 street grid. Each unit gets move points (orthogonal steps) then one action (attack / wait). Facing, limb targeting, mobility/firepower from limbs, sequential enemy phase.
• Presentation — Quaternius skinned GLBs play Idle / Walk / Punch / Hit / Death via Engine::set_animation. Street lamps and hangar fixtures are raster point lights (cap reserved for attack flashes). Move tiles and facing drawn on the ground. Close-up camera with impact framing.
• City — Kenney surface block + Space Kit underground hangar (pieces abut on edges, no stacked floors).
• HUD — view switcher, N/W/E/S step, rotate, attack, wait, end turn (Blade + egui). Web also has an HTML view strip so Pages stays playable if the in-canvas panel fails to composite.
• Dual target — native + WASM (assets embedded via include_dir + Blade VFS; WASM uses Blade's WebGL2 backend). Pinned to Blade 2348c936 (#380 texelFetch present so the canvas is not a decoded-sRGB dark frame; #381 shadow FS + wasm32 GLES profile; #378/#379 buffer-class and canvas color-space).

See original design notes: https://github.com/kvark/ideas/blob/master/game/eva.md

Setup

Shaders (required for the windowed build):

./scripts/fetch-shaders.sh
# or: cp -r ../redline/assets/shaders ./assets/shaders

Run (native)

cargo run --release

Headless combat smoke test (no GPU / shaders required):

cargo run -- --smoke

Optional ray-traced lighting (needs RT hardware + RT shaders):

GEOFRONT_RT=1 cargo run --release

Capture a view and quit (used by scripts/capture-screenshots.sh):

GEOFRONT_VIEW=battle GEOFRONT_SCREENSHOT=screenshots/combat.png \
  GEOFRONT_QUIT_AFTER=8 cargo run --release

GEOFRONT_VIEW is battle, surface, or underground. GEOFRONT_SCREENSHOT (any value) implies an 8s quit if GEOFRONT_QUIT_AFTER is unset. Pair with Xvfb + import to write the PNG.

Web / WASM

The web build is the game: same Rust crate, compiled to wasm32-unknown-unknown. Blade presents through WebGL2 (not WebGPU).

rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown
bash scripts/build-web.sh
# serve dist/

GitHub Pages (.github/workflows/pages.yml) builds that WASM and deploys on push to main.

Open ?view=battle, ?view=surface, or ?view=underground to pick the starting camera. The top-left strip does the same at runtime.

Controls

Input	Action
WASD / arrows	Fly camera
Drag	Look
Q / E	Up / down
Shift	Sprint
Wheel	Dolly
HUD N/W/E/S	Step selected mech one tile
↺ ↻	Face
Attack / Wait / End Turn	Action economy

Assets

• Kenney city kits (CC0) under assets/models/{roads,commercial,industrial,space}
• Quaternius Animated Mech Pack (CC0) as GLB under assets/models/mechs/ (Stan, Mike, George, Leela)

Core pillars

• One detailed city (protection funding, destructible, living)
• Few-unit close-up mech combat with limb/zonal damage + pilot disobedience risk
• Pilot–mech sync + interpersonal loyalty systems
• XCOM-like facilities, research, hangars under the city

Roadmap (from the design notes)

Priority tags from eva.md:

• (high) GUI — battle HUD, view switch, log. In-canvas egui plus HTML chrome on wasm.
• (med) City — one large detailed block; living + destructible still ahead.
• (low–med) Battle — skirmish + Quaternius clips are in; aliens / more animation still ahead.
• (low–med) Characters — pilots carry sync/loyalty/stress; portraits and dialogs still ahead.
• (low) Base — underground hangar is a stage, not a facility sandbox yet.