The Bitmap Brothers' 1996 robot RTS, rebuilt in Godot 4. Twenty missions,
five planets, 49 headless test lanes — green in the editor and inside
the exported binary.
One file, no installer. The Mac build is unsigned, so the first launch
needs right-click → Open.
Production is a LINE, not a queue
Z has no build queue, and it never did. The five-slot FIFO in every
build up to now was invented. Select a factory, pick one unit type,
and it turns that out indefinitely until you pick something else.
- Each unit is charged as it starts, so a stalled line costs nothing.
- Switching keeps the build clock and refunds the abandoned unit.
- Cancel stops the line and it stays stopped.
- Every producer starts on the first entry of its own list, so a captured
factory earns its keep immediately. - Three things pause a line without dropping it — no money, the
population cap, and a fort with all four cannon mounts full — so it
resumes by itself.
Nothing enters a building
The fort garrison is gone. A unit inside a building cannot be seen,
selected or counted. A fort now defends itself with its four tower
guns: real cannons, on real cells, that fire, can be shot back off the
fort, and free their mount for a replacement when they die.
Tanks can finally attack an HQ
Two bugs, one symptom.
- Every explosive weapon had no anti-structure damage at all. A heavy
tank needed 341 seconds to raze a fort that a pyro robot razed in
14. Now 18 seconds. - No crewed vehicle or cannon could fire on a fort, ever. Their range
gate measured to the fort's middle — about 80 px inside its own wall,
further than a medium tank's entire reach. It would drive up, track the
fort with its turret, and never pull the trigger.
Cannons also take attack orders now, so the howitzer — the longest reach
on the map — is no longer the one unit whose fire you cannot direct.
A CPU opponent that manoeuvres
- A strategic layer: a zone graph with adjacency, depth from its own
fort, per-sector strength and value, and four stances (turtle,
consolidate, expand, press). - Squads that muster behind the line, advance as a body with laggards
closing up, and break off when beaten instead of feeding themselves in
one at a time. - Turrets are no longer manoeuvre units. A cannon has speed 0, so
drafting it into a squad dragged the squad's rally point onto an
immobile gun and parked the whole army around it on one bridge. - Hardware needs a crew. Vehicles and cannons roll out unmanned, so
the brain keeps infantry in reserve instead of building a car park. - Its cadences run on game time, so pausing no longer fires every
timer at once on unpause.
Pathing, and the things you could see
- Units path around buildings. Cells next to a wall now cost more, so
a route prefers open ground instead of grinding along a factory wall —
a vehicle's hull is exactly as wide as the gap a wall-hugging route
leaves it. - A captured factory no longer inherits the previous owner's rally
point (which, taken from the AI, marched everything you built at your
own HQ). - Unit shadows are rasterised on the pixel grid instead of being
smooth antialiased ellipses under 16 px sprites. - Fixed: the missile cannon and the fort battery were firing in complete
silence, and medium/heavy tanks fired a missile sprite.
Verify your download
SHA256SUMS.txt is attached. Fedora users can install the RPM directly;
it carries a build stamp, so a rebuild always upgrades in place.
The binaries embed the original art and sound, so they are not MIT —
only the code is. They are a convenience for people who already own the
game.