v0.0.1: the first one you can lose

2026-09-18T00:00:00Z

There is now a version number. The build at /play/ is v0.0.1, the first one tagged and kept, and the first that holds together from the first frame to the moment you die.

That last part is the whole story of this release. Until this week Cog Wars had enemies, a grid, weapons, cogs and a score, and no way to lose. You could be hit. Nothing happened. The arena had an edge that did nothing, and the death path ran all the way to the end and then quietly did nothing either. A game you cannot lose is a screensaver with controls, so v0.0.1 is mostly the unglamorous work of closing that loop.

What is in it

A contained arena whose edge you can see coming and which will kill you. Enemies that chase you and kill you on contact. A shield that absorbs one hit, gives you eight tenths of a second to react, and comes back six seconds later if you stay clean. A phase dash on Space that makes you briefly untouchable and, as of this version, actually moves you. Weapon pickups and cog fragments drawn with their real art instead of coloured circles. A HUD with score, multiplier, wave, run timer, kills, fragments and a session band. And when you die, something that says so, plus a NEW GAME button and R to go again.

The Game page lists the full control set, the weapons, the cogs and the enemy roster. It is generated from the game’s own design data, so it describes where the game is going, which is ahead of what v0.0.1 actually does.

Five things that were broken

The features above are the boring half of the release. Here is the interesting half.

The projectiles that were never missing. The first bug reported against the new build was that projectiles stopped appearing after a second or two. They had not. What was happening is that the player was leaving the arena — walking clean past the boundary into empty space the camera could not follow — so the world scrolled away while firing carried on working perfectly, off-screen, at nothing. The fix was not in the weapon code at all. It was making the boundary real: the arena now pulls you back inside as the last act of every movement step, and the grid brightens toward the wall about two and a half seconds before you would reach it. You can see the edge now, which is why you now die at it on purpose instead of vanishing through it by accident.

A white disc on a grid we had just made brighter. Once the world stopped scrolling away, the projectiles were still hard to see — because the same week’s work had brightened the grid, and the projectile was a pale disc on top of it. Nothing was broken; the contrast had just been quietly spent. They are magenta now. That is not a taste decision: the grid takes its colour from whichever cog you have deployed, and magenta is a hue no cog owns, so it is the one colour the background can never drift into.

A dash that ran perfectly and moved nothing. The dash was reported as not feeling like a dash. It turned out the dash was computing itself correctly every single frame — the burst, the duration, the cooldown, the invulnerability window — and then the result was being dropped on the floor instead of handed to the thing that moves the ship. Every test of the dash logic passed, because the logic was right. Nothing tested whether anybody was listening to it. One line.

The weapon that switched off your trigger. Every fifth weapon pickup used to hand you the Ray Projector, which is a sustained beam. Nothing in the game draws a beam yet, and nothing consumes beam damage yet. So picking it up left you holding a weapon that fired zero projectiles at zero speed: the trigger became a no-op, and it read exactly like the game breaking. The Ray Projector is now held out of the drop rotation until something draws it and something takes its damage. It is still on the Game page, because it is still a real weapon in the design — it is just unreachable rather than broken, and those are different things worth being honest about.

Enemies that all died in one hit. Every enemy had a health value and none of them mattered, because the weakest weapon in the game did enough damage to one-shot the toughest enemy. Health was a field that had never once decided anything. It decides now: with the starting Pulse Emitter, a Drone takes four hits and a Splitter takes twelve — which, because that weapon fires three projectiles per pull, is two trigger pulls against a Drone and four against a Splitter. The ratios between the five enemy types were already designed and were left exactly as they were; only the scale moved. A Splitter finally feels like the thing the codex says it is.

What v0.0.1 is not

Nothing is saved. Your lifetime score, runs and kills reset the moment you reload the page. The save path exists and is a declared no-op. If you set a number you like, screenshot it.

The visual identity is not built. No particles, no post-processing, none of the sacred geometry the game is aiming at. The grid runs one hand-written shader and that is the extent of it. What you are looking at is a clean, readable, deliberately plain version of a game that intends to look like something else entirely.

No bosses. The Fracture, the Escapement, the Bloom, the Cascade and the Observer are written, costed and sitting in the data. None of them has ever appeared in play. Neither have Void Entities or Cosmic Spirits.

The HUD can sit on top of you at some window shapes. Known, measured, not yet fixed.

How versions work from here

Every release from now on gets a version, a tag, and a changelog entry with four headings: what was added, what changed, what was fixed, and what is still missing. That last heading is not optional and will not be a footnote. It is easy to write release notes that make each version sound more finished than it is, and the people reading them are deciding whether to spend an evening on this. Finding out that nothing saves after a good run is worse than being told first.

So: v0.0.1 is an early build of an arcade shooter that you can now genuinely lose. Go and lose it at /play/, and if something breaks — or if it is broken in a way this post did not admit to — the feedback page takes bug reports with no account and no captcha.

The fabric is open

2026-09-18T00:00:00Z

Cog Wars has a home. This site is where the game, its lore, its art and its development log live from now on.

What Cog Wars is

A top-down twin-stick arcade shooter. You scour the multiverse, destroying enemies and collecting cogs to upgrade your weapons and abilities. As you get stronger you unlock new universes and technologies to travel through, explore and use, and you chase the high score. Online leaderboards against other players and your friends are planned.

Under the arcade loop sits one idea. The omniverse is woven from a fabric of sub-quantum golden cogs, and each cog holds an infinite set of omnipotent observers. That is the secret framework of the multiverse, and the Cogverse page goes into it.

Cog Wars is also an art project, built in the Unity engine. The gallery holds the Cogverse art series.

Where it stands

The game is in active development as of September 2026. The build at /play/ is an early one and will change often: systems get added, numbers get rebalanced, and things break and get fixed. The Game and Universes pages are generated from the game’s design data. That describes where the game is headed, which can be ahead of the current build.

Talk to us

If something breaks, or there’s something you want in the game, use the feedback page. It takes bug reports, feature requests, general feedback and press enquiries, with no account and no captcha. Every message gets read.

New posts will land here and in the RSS feed.

Cog Wars devlog