Coming soon

About This Game

You run the ship. The drone runs itself.

WARD/EN is a programming and salvage game, played from a Halden Industrial Group terminal. A drone enters a wreck with no one at the controls, follows the directive you wrote, and sends back only what its uplink can carry. You never steer it live. You write a better plan, and later you run a crew of drones that talk to each other.

Write. Dispatch. Read.

• Write a directive. A directive is a small project of .warden source files: a plan, plus the library modules it includes. Route planning, contact response, sensing and the recovery routine are all ordinary source. Every line is yours to change.
  
• Dispatch it. Dispatch freezes the directive. From then on the drone acts alone, inside a wreck you know only from a recovered schematic. Its battery is the clock, and something patrols the corridors.
  
• Read what came back. You get the cargo in the hold, the report, and the map you now hold of that wreck. A drone that runs dry stays inside. Improving your directives is how you survive.

A real language, real tools

The WARD/EN language is a small imperative language with nothing you have to guess at. It has functions, enums, for loops, callbacks, modules and pure functions. The hardware is a handful of calls that each cost a tick and return a result. Everything built on top of them is library code you can read, edit and replace, including move_to and its route planner.

• The briefing: a plan that reads the client's contract can fly on any wreck the client is able to describe.
  
• Crews: send and receive messages over a fitted transceiver. A scout reports what it finds, and a hauler acts on it.
  
• Callbacks: pass a function to move_to and decide, step by step, what a contact means. What to do about a threat is yours to write.
  
• Tooling: completion, hover, go-to-definition, rename and diagnostics are checked against the drone's actual fit, in the game's Workbench or in VS Code with the WARD/EN extension and language server.

Debug it before you risk it

The test bench runs your directive on prebuilt scenarios inside the Workbench. Set breakpoints in your plan or deep in a library module. Step over, into and out of calls. Inspect the call stack and every frame's locals, and watch the drone's position, energy and cargo while it waits. A paused run, when resumed, ends byte-identical to the same run played straight through.

Not every client knows where it is

Investigation claims name an object only by the marking stamped on it. The surviving records don't say where it lies, and more than one unit of that type is aboard. Your directive has to scan the vessel's records, visit what they list and check each marking. Lift the wrong unit and the contract stays open.

Training Grounds: every part, one budget, your problem

There's no campaign, nothing to unlock and nothing to lose. The whole equipment catalogue is open from the start, and the budget is the only limit. Pick one of eight problem types and the generator builds a wreck around it: Unknown Hulk, Infested Hulk, Salvage Run, Search & Recover, Hazardous Hulk, Signal Hunt, Multi-Drone Operation or Anything Goes.

• Shareable: a problem type and a seed reproduce a scenario exactly, so a challenge is a short code anyone can paste in and fly.
  
• Always fair: every objective is reachable within some fit's battery.
  
• Crews: fly up to four drones, each with its own fit and directive, priced together against the budget.
  
• No single score: a run reports spend, drones lost, time, salvage value and instructions executed, each shown beside your best for that code. The cheapest, fastest and safest runs are different solutions.

Sixty-eight parts, no right answer

The catalogue has eight hulls and thirteen module sockets. A dearer part always does something a cheaper one can't. Cheap hardware is paid for with cleverer code, and good hardware can make up for simpler code.

• Sense: a spot scanner, an aimed forward lidar, an acoustic mapper that charts through walls (and is heard doing it), and a seismic sensor that feels what a detector misses.
  
• Act: cutters, breaching charges, a security bypass kit, a grapple and relays. The hardpoint hull carries two tools, and the tracked drive crosses hazard terrain.
  
• Survive: decoys, smoke, a jammer that holds a door shut, stunners, and armoured and low-profile hulls.
  
• Think: buy a navigation co-processor, or write a better route planner yourself.
  
• Power and link: the battery is the clock. Transceivers range from a pager to a laser link, and a telemetry buffer keeps the whole story through an outage.

The ship sees only what the uplink carries

The simulation keeps its own truth, and creatures, hidden geometry and intent stay private. The Mission station shows the packet the ship received, and that packet is all your directive sees too. A corridor behind machinery thins the signal until the feed drops. Outside coverage you get nothing, and the debrief says so.

Learn as you go

A guided tutorial flies the whole loop with you. A seventeen-lesson language course is set on the training wreck, with a pinned expedition for each lesson. Already a programmer? The five-lesson Fast Track covers each idea once. Every training run plays at up to eight times speed.

Under the CRT glass

The display is a real compositor, with phosphor persistence, bloom, scanlines and grain. A high-contrast mode is available across the whole game for long coding sessions.