The Army

A top-down game about a growing army, alone or with up to three others over the internet. You are one little runner at the centre of a few thousand of them, and the world is a 1000 x 1000 tile meadow, broken up by ice, lava and swamp, full of things that want to stop you: nests, raiding hordes, and eight bosses (the last one, the Sovereign, comes back after you fell it). Pick up the babies that enemies drop, grow the army to the thousands, point it at whatever is in the way, and wall in whatever you can't fight.

Written in Rust with macroquad. Every sound and the music are synthesised in code, so the only assets are the fonts.

What you do

• Grow. Enemies drop babies (little toddlers that wave and run to you when you come near), villages are freed into more army, and barracks you take send recruits and sometimes a champion. The army fights on its own around you. Walk where you want it to be.
• Send squads. Click an enemy to send part of the army at it, sized to what it takes to win. R recalls them. Three formations (F) change how the rest of the army follows you: a ring with you safe in the middle (the usual one), a wedge, or a line. Playing alone there is also Free, where the units just pile up on you; in a hosted or joined game that one is left out, as it costs too much with several armies.
• Survive bosses. Seven bosses with several phases each, plus the Sovereign. They raise barriers, call meteors, charge, slam and mark the ground. Each kind of warning has its own colour and hatching, and not all are circles: the later phases add a ring that is safe in the middle, a fan of beams with gaps, a cone and a lane. Each boss has signature attacks: the Hive Mother's acid rain, the Iron Warden's shield rush, Warlord Grakk's whirlwind and leap, the Eclipse's sweeping beam and black hole, the Swarm Queen's twin slams, the Bastion's barrage and the Sovereign's four-part Judgement. Three bosses enrage before the end, and bosses crack as they lose their phases. The warning says what to do, it ticks faster as it comes due, and a big one off the screen gets an arrow at the edge. Slaying a boss gives you a choice of relics.
• Learn the new enemies. Once the army is a few hundred strong, six enemies each teach a rule: the Executioner's cleave (step out of it), the Sniper's line, the Hexer's curse that makes your units take more harm, the Blinker that appears behind you, the Sapper's faint mines, and the Overseer that marks a champion for a heavy blow. Elites can carry up to three affixes (vampiric, thorned, teleporting, magnetic, blazing, frigid and more, more of them the harder the game), shooters back away from the army, healers keep out of reach, packs come round the sides and elites go for your champions. The wild enemies come in a tide: a lull, then a surge that is announced.
• Learn from your deaths. The defeat screen lists what killed the army, and the menu's Bestiary fills with every enemy, boss, attack and affix you have met, with what to do about each. A boss makes an entrance: the camera goes to it and back, with its name across the screen (Space skips it). Playing alone the world crawls meanwhile; with others it can't be slowed for one of you, so you keep steering and the entrance ends early if your army is in trouble.
• Break hordes. Hordes (Swarm Tide, Iron Column, Wildfire, Stampede, Titan March and more) are announced on screen and an arrow shows where they come from. Break one and it drops a bronze, silver or gold chest: wall points, recruits, a champion and, from gold, a choice of relic.
• Collect champions. Eighteen special units won as loot, each drawn as itself: Juggernaut, Medic, Pyromancer, Stormcaller, Phoenix, Frostweaver, the elemental Emberlord, Chronomancer, Venomancer and Gravitron, and eight more, each with a power of its own that is a share of what the whole army does. Kills and a second of a kind raise its level, up to 10; the shooters fire longer bursts, rings and spirals as they rise, and at level 10 you choose its final form, once. Five have an ultimate you set off with Q (Absolute Zero, Meteor Storm, Tempest, Fault Line and Rapture), and elements react: burning and frozen make steam, shocked and burning overload, poisoned and burning spread plague fire. The roster on the right shows each one's power coming round; click a row to find it in the world.
• The front fires. The front 60% of the army shoots ahead of it, the way it is going, at anything in front of it (never behind), and sees further the bigger the army grows: past the width of the screen at 10,000 units, and further still at 50,000. Past a couple of thousand at the front, each bolt hits lighter, so big enemies still reach a huge army.
• Build. Earn wall points by destroying enemies, then spend them on walls, gates, towers you can man, spikes and tar. Enemies path around what you build, and walls decide where a fight happens.
• Pick relics. Whetstone, Iron Resolve, Muster, Bloodlust, Aegis, Freezing (frozen enemies shatter in a burst of frost), Venom, Kindling (fire that spreads), Mire (a slow), Static (shocks that make champions hit harder), Volley Drill, Chain Shot, Tracer Rounds and many more stack across the run. The elemental ones set off reactions together: fire and frost make steam, fire and shock an overload, fire and poison plague fire.
• Combos. Chain kills for a MASSACRE, then a RAMPAGE, and watch the numbers climb.
• Climb the Insane ladder. Past Brutal are ten Insane tiers. Slaying the Sovereign on Brutal opens Insane 1, and slaying it on each tier opens the next. Every tier is harder again and adds a rule to the ones below it: Veterans (elites twice as common, each with two affixes), Faster Fate (shorter boss warnings, attacks sooner), Crossfire (faster shooters, snipers and lancers in the hordes), Hunters (enemies go for your champions), Wrath (bosses cast two attacks at once at the end, enemies enrage when low), Famine (fewer babies), Ruin (longer burning ground, more mines), Echo (every warning comes twice), Nightfall (the world goes dark) and The Last Army (the Sovereign returns stronger each time). The settings show a card with the rules in play. In a game with others the host chooses the difficulty for everyone.

The game is built for a lot of units: 15,000 by default (the settings take it anywhere from 5,000 to 50,000), drawn as instanced ships (small darts that point the way they are going, drawn in the shader, with plain circles as a setting) with the army's work shared over all your processor cores. It runs at your display's refresh rate (it was developed on a 120 Hz screen). The ground is a meadow drawn by a shader: blades of grass at every zoom, bending as gusts of wind roll across it. Patches of other ground break it up, and each one changes the fight. On ice the army slides and enemies are chilled until they freeze. Lava burns units and sets enemies alight, so lure them across it and keep the army off it. In a swamp everyone wades at a crawl. The minimap shows where they are.

You are a stick figure that runs: facing you going down, showing its back going up, in profile going across. Zoomed far out, you, the ships and the champions stop shrinking past a point, so the army is easy to see at any zoom.

The Eclipse, one of seven bosses	A MASSACRE combo with three hordes closing in

Controls

Key	Does
W A S D	move
mouse wheel	zoom
click an enemy	send a squad
R	recall the squads
Q	set off the champions' ultimates that are ready
F	change the formation
click, drag	build walls
right click	delete a wall
1 - 5	what to build
G	man a tower
Tab	minimap: near or world
M / N	mute / music on or off
F5 / F9	quick save / quick load
F11	fullscreen on or off (the game always starts fullscreen)
Space	skip a boss's entrance
1 2 3	choose a relic
1 2	choose a champion's final form, at level 10
click a champion in the roster	find it in the world
Esc	menu (settings, controls, save, load)

The game also saves on its own, and the title screen offers to carry on from where you left off.

Playing with others

Up to four players share one world over the internet. One of you hosts: the host's game runs the world, and everyone else sees and plays in it with their own army of up to 12,500 units, their own relics and their own walls. Each player's colour tints their army, their names float over them, and an arrow at the edge of the screen points at whoever is off it. Nothing is needed but the host's password: games are found on the lobby list, and nobody types or sees an address.

Hosting. Press M on the title screen for Multiplayer, then Host a game: pick your name, a password (4 characters or more) and a port (47821 unless you change it), and Start hosting. Your game goes on the lobby list (below) so that friends can find it. Friends who join appear in the lobby; press New run (or Continue party, below) when everyone is in. Players can still join after the run has started.

• Forward the port. The game uses UDP, not TCP. On your router, forward UDP port 47821 (or the port you chose) to the machine that is hosting. Friends then find your game on the lobby list. Without the forward, only a second window on the same computer can join (Join local, below).
• Firewall. The first time you host, Windows asks whether to let the game through its firewall: allow it (private networks is enough for the same network, tick public for the internet). On Linux, open the port, for example sudo ufw allow 47821/udp.
• The password is never sent: a joiner proves they know it, and the host keeps no more of it than that proof needs. The connection is encrypted, but it can't prove it is the host you meant (there is no certificate authority for it), so use a password you do not use anywhere else.

Joining. M on the title screen, then Join a game: give your name and press Find games, pick a game from the list, and type its password. There is no address to type, and none is shown.

Join local. To try the game out, or to play two at one computer, host in one window and choose Join local in the other: it joins a game hosted on this computer by its port (47821 unless the host chose another), with the name and password.

Coming and going. A player who drops (or closes the game) has their army held where it was, out of reach of everything, and shows as AWAY in the list. Joining again with the same name gets it back, and a guest whose connection is lost tries to rejoin for a minute by itself. The host saves the whole party (F5, the menu, or on its own); next time the host's lobby offers Continue party, and each friend takes their army up again by joining with their name. Only the host saves and loads. If the host ends the game, it ends for everyone.

The lobby list. Every hosted game is on a list of open games, and every other player joins from it. It is a tiny web service (in lobby-server, written for Vercel and a free Redis database) that only holds the list: the games themselves are still played straight with the host. The game already knows where it is, so there is nothing to set up. lobby-server/README.md has the steps to run a list of your own.

Download

Builds for Windows and Linux are attached to each release. They need nothing installed.

Windows: unzip it and run TheArmy.exe. Windows may say "Windows protected your PC" because the program isn't signed. Click "More info", then "Run anyway". (Or right-click the zip, choose Properties, tick Unblock, and extract it after that.)

Linux: extract the tarball and run ./TheArmy. It needs the usual desktop libraries; on Arch and CachyOS:

sudo pacman -S --needed alsa-lib libx11 libxi mesa

Saves and settings live in %APPDATA%\TheArmy on Windows and ~/.local/share/TheArmy on Linux.

Build from source

You need Rust (edition 2024, so a recent stable toolchain).

cargo run --release

On Linux you also need the development libraries:

# Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt install libasound2-dev libx11-dev libxi-dev libgl1-mesa-dev pkg-config

Use --release: a debug build is much slower with thousands of units. Set THE_ARMY_WINDOWED=1 to start in a window instead of filling the screen.

cargo test --release

The multiplayer tests open real connections on this machine (they need loopback networking, nothing else).

The code is one file for each part of the game; src/main.rs has the map of them, and every tuning constant is in src/config.rs. Pushing a tag like v0.1.0 makes GitHub Actions build the Windows and Linux downloads and publish a release.

Credits

The fonts are Audiowide and Chakra Petch, both under the SIL Open Font License (the licenses are in assets/fonts).