GORGED

About

A digging game, built from the physics up

GORGED is a multiplayer arcade game about tunnelling through rock, growing on what you eat, and using the holes you leave behind to cut everyone else off.

The idea

Most competitive arcade games hand you a map. GORGED hands you solid ground and makes the map the thing the players produce. Every tunnel in an arena was dug by somebody, which means the terrain is a record of where everyone has been and a weapon anyone can use.

That produces the one mechanic the whole design hangs off: there is no attack. You kill by forcing a rival into something solid. So the interesting question is never "can I hit them" — it is "what is behind them, and can I make them go there".

How it is built

The game's rules live in a single Rust simulation crate with no external dependencies, which runs identically on your phone, in your browser, and on the server. Not approximately identically — bit-for-bit identically. There is no floating-point arithmetic anywhere in the simulation; positions are fixed-point integers, angles are integers, and even the trigonometry comes out of a committed lookup table rather than the platform's maths library.

Every version of the world state can be hashed, and recorded games are replayed across every target architecture on every build. If an ARM phone and an x86 server ever disagree about a single tick, the build fails.

This is expensive and it is worth it. A game where the terrain is player-generated and collisions decide everything cannot afford the client and the server to have slightly different opinions about where a wall is. Determinism is what lets the game feel instant on your screen while remaining authoritative on the server, and it is the difference between a rewind that looks like lag and a rewind that looks like a lie.

The rule the codebase is organised around: the game engine layer never computes anything that affects an outcome. It draws what the simulation returns and plays sounds for the events the simulation emits. If a line of presentation code ever needs to decide something, it belongs in the simulation instead.

Where it actually is

GORGED is playable, free, in your browser, right now. It is not on a store yet, so nothing on this site is a listing for a product you can buy — and this section stays because a project that has shipped something is not the same as a project that has shipped everything, and it is worth being able to tell which parts are which.

Done The simulation core: fixed-point maths, seeded deterministic randomness, the occupancy grid, tunnel carving and collision, growth, boost, the five death causes, and the endgame's closing boundary. Verified across x86, ARM and WebAssembly.
Done The game you can play on this site: nine countries and nine diggers, the campaign and the ladder that unlocks the crew, the board, and exploration that persists per country against an account.
Done The networked arena: server, wire protocol, ten seats, and a shared simulation both ends run and both ends check — every deploy replays a committed tape on the server's own hardware and refuses to swap the binary if the two builds disagree about the rules by a single number.
Now Playing against other people, in soak. It works and it is switched on behind ?online rather than by default, because the honest order is to watch it carry real players before it becomes the thing everyone lands in.
Next Making online the default, and a mobile store release.

The build on this site is the game, with one part of it held back. Tap Play and you get the real simulation — nine countries, the digger roster, the campaign, the board — against nine bots. What you do not get by default is other people, and that is the only line above still open. This paragraph used to say the opposite, at length, because for a long time it was true.

Who makes it

GORGED is developed and published by Beacon Light Investments. It is a small operation, which is most of why the site says what the game is instead of what it will be.

Questions, bugs, and anything about your data go to the contact page.

The name

A gorge is a deep cut in the earth. To be gorged is to have eaten past the point of sense. The game is both of those at once, which is the entire reason it is called that.