Riftbreach

Orcs Must Die by way of an incremental: lay traps down the approach lanes, then stand in them with a crossbow and fight alongside your own killbox. Waves are endless and enemy health compounds, so every run ends; what carries forward is essence, banked the moment a wave clears, and rift shards from collapsing the whole thing to start again harder. The interesting part sits behind the numbers. Four curves govern the game, enemy health, gold income, trap damage and trap cost, and they are not independent: keeping pace with health needs a trap level that cost more gold than the game was paying out, so the first version was not merely mistuned but mathematically unwinnable, flat on wave four forever, with a prestige gate roughly 475,000 runs away. It shipped once a harness that drives the real game loop with the rendering switched off could play ten sessions in a row and show them climbing.

TypeScript · Three.js · simulated economy · no art or audio assets

saves in your browser · essence banks the moment a wave clears · play full screen ↗

How to play

wasd or the left thumbstick moves; the mouse or the right thumbstick aims
auto-aim and auto-fire are on by default so a phone plays one-handed; turn them off in settings to aim every shot yourself
pick a trap from the tray, then click a tile (or tap Place) to build; right-click or tap a placed trap to upgrade or sell it
floor traps do nothing to wraiths: they fly over your walls straight for the rift, which is what arrow walls, flame vents, frost sigils and coils are for
the build phase lists what the next wave is made of, so anti-air can be bought before it arrives rather than after
difficulty tiers shift the whole curve rather than skipping waves: Veteran wave one is fought at wave-eleven pressure, and each tier unlocks by clearing wave fifteen on the one below
twenty traps may stand at once (more via Rift Engineering): the cap is what makes placement a decision and what spare gold is for
arenas have four spawn portals but open one lane at a time: a second at wave four, a third at seven, the fourth at ten, each announced a wave ahead
the Reinforce button levels the weakest traps until the gold runs out, which is the only sane way to spend a build phase on twenty of them
space dashes through a crowd with a moment of invulnerability; 1-7 pick traps; enter starts the next wave early for bonus gold
q/e or right-drag orbits the camera, scroll or pinch zooms, r recentres; movement stays camera-relative so orbiting never inverts your controls
essence is spent between runs but applies immediately, so buying rift integrity mid-wave really does raise the pool you are defending

Changelog

2026-08-08·A playtest report with four things in it, all of them fair. Losing to the Rift Titan: the titan now walks out of a portal that is marked in red through the whole build phase, because a boss whose lane is chosen at random and never announced is a stat check rather than a problem you can prepare for. The sixteen-trap cap hurting: sixteen across four open lanes is four apiece, which left no way to answer a third or fourth portal without first tearing down another lane, so the base is twenty. Not enough time between rounds: the build phase was ten seconds, which was chosen to keep runs short and was simply wrong once the cap made the build phase the place where all the decisions live. It is twenty-five now, and there is a Reinforce button that pours spare gold into the weakest traps in one press, because upgrading twenty traps at two taps each is not something any timer can accommodate. And the mobile overlap: the wave roster had grown to three lines as flyer and portal warnings were added, and it was sitting directly on top of the icon buttons. It is one scrollable line below them now, and the action buttons wrap two-up rather than running off the right edge of a phone.
2026-08-07·Difficulty tiers, which is the thing the game had been missing all along. Both of its reference points pair getting stronger with content that rises to meet you: Dungeon Defenders gates you behind tiers you choose, Orcs Must Die moves you to the next handcrafted level. Riftbreach had one endless curve and permanent multipliers that slid you along it, so wave fifteen on a stacked save was the same fight as wave eight with nothing, and the measurements agreed: a maxed save took no rift damage anywhere in twenty-two waves. A tier now adds a fixed offset to the effective wave feeding every curve, health, gold, essence, spawn budget, which enemy types are in the pool and how many lanes are open, so Veteran wave one is fought at wave-eleven pressure with all four portals already live. Best wave is tracked per tier, so the record stops inflating. You still open every tier with a bare arena and one build phase, because permanent upgrades carry between runs and gold-bought trap levels do not, which is the same split Dungeon Defenders draws between your character and your per-match mana. Starting gold scales with the tier for the same reason health does: a flat three hundred is a proportionally smaller stake the deeper you go, and at the deepest tier it bought a killbox that needed fifteen hits to kill a grunt and died on wave two. Measured over the first five waves, a strong save takes nothing on Warden, a little on Veteran, and fifty-nine on Nightmare; a maxed save sails through all three and finally bleeds on Riftfall. Every save strength now has a tier that fights back.
2026-08-07·Prestige is gone. Collapsing the rift had been rebuilding the save from defaults, which quietly took back Flame Vent, Frost Sigil, Arcane Coil and Grinder — sixty to seven hundred essence apiece — and handed over a times-1.08 multiplier instead. It deleted the only progression that changed how you play and replaced it with a bigger number. Saves holding shards get them refunded as essence. A wave-skip went in alongside it and came straight back out: letting you start at a wave you had already cleared removed the arc of a run, since the whole point of an opening is that three hundred gold and four traps feel precarious, and it made the best-wave record self-inflating. The problem it was aimed at is real though, and measured: a strong save now takes three rift damage across waves one to ten and a maxed one takes none at all across twenty-two. Difficulty tiers are the answer, in the shape Dungeon Defenders uses, and they are next.
2026-08-07·Playtest: cleared wave fifteen, 4,300 gold sitting unspent, arrow traps on nearly every wall, and the verdict that it was on autopilot. The measurement was worse than the complaint. Across fifteen waves of a saturated build the rift lost exactly zero integrity, and the reason was that nothing limited traps except floor tiles, of which an arena has about two hundred and seventy, plus a hundred and twenty wall mounts. Blanketing the map was not a strategy, it was the only strategy, and a saturated arena has no questions left to ask. Traps are now capped at sixteen standing at once, raised by a new Rift Engineering upgrade. The same build policy measured against the same waves goes from two hundred and sixty-eight traps at level two to seventeen at level nine; the rift goes from losing nothing to losing thirty-eight of its sixty across twenty waves, escalating late and healing back on a clean wave; and the share of kills made by traps rather than the hunter goes from a fifth to well over half, which is the partnership the game is supposed to be about. The cap is also where the spare gold goes: uncapped it bought more traps until the tiles ran out and then piled up, capped it buys depth. The Rift Titan dying halfway up the lane at wave twenty was the same bug wearing a different coat, and needed no separate fix: it had been walking through hundreds of traps rather than a killbox.
2026-08-06·Four approaches turned out to be a fine destination and a terrible starting point. Three hundred opening gold buys six spike traps, which is a real killbox across one lane and a rounding error across four, and since the camera follows the hunter, three of those four lanes were off-screen the whole time anyway. Portals now open one at a time: a single lane for the first three waves, a second at four, a third at seven, the fourth at ten. Sealed portals look sealed, dim and barely turning with their light off, and the build phase warns you the wave before a new one breaks open, because a lane opening is the largest thing that can change between two waves. The arena still ends up as a four-way siege; it just stops opening on one.
2026-08-06·The first playtest verdict was that the Rift Titan simply could not be killed, and the numbers agreed: at wave ten it carried 11,705 health and reached the rift in under seventeen seconds, against a hunter who needed a hundred and twenty-four seconds of unbroken fire. The culprit was armour modelled as flat subtraction, which is the worst possible shape for a fast, low-damage weapon: the Titan's twelve points removed forty percent of every bolt while barely inconveniencing a levelled spike trap. Armour is now a fraction of damage rather than a lump off the top, the Titan is a quarter of its old size and hits the rift for half as much, and wraith squads are capped at four, because nine of something that ignores every trap you own is not a fight, it is arithmetic. Also: the death shake decayed inside the simulation step, which stops running the moment a run ends, so the camera rattled behind the game-over screen forever.
2026-08-06·First build. Everything is generated at runtime: enemies are merged primitives, the arena is instanced boxes lit by a custom shader, and every sound is synthesised by WebAudio, so the game ships with no art or audio files at all. The economy went through a harness before it went to a player, which turned out to matter. The original curves were structurally broken rather than simply mistuned: tracking enemy health needed trap levels costing 1.236^wave against gold growing at 1.085^wave, a gap compounding to twelve times short by wave twenty, and the meta upgrades priced their sixtieth level past all the essence the game could ever produce. Ten simulated sessions all died on wave four with trap level stuck at one; after retuning, the same ten climb to wave twenty-three and first prestige lands around session eleven. Wraiths were then caught dealing double breach damage while immune to every trap a new player owns, and the wall-mounted arrow traps meant to counter them had both their left and right faces aiming into the wall instead of out of it.

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