Void Daggers

Arena survival shooter · free in your browser · also on Steam

What is Void Daggers?

Void Daggers is a first-person arena shooter about staying alive. There is one circular arena, one life, and a clock that stops the moment anything touches you. There is no health bar and no armour. Your score is the timer, read to the millisecond, and getting better looks like adding ten seconds at a time. If you know Devil Daggers, you know the shape of it. The look is closer to Geometry Wars: everything is a glowing wireframe solid on a black floor.

The run is scripted rather than random, which is what makes it learnable. Sixteen enemy types arrive in a fixed order across six phases, from THE AWAKENING through THE SWARM, THE HUNT, THE SIEGE and THE CONVERGENCE into THE ABYSS, which starts at 350 seconds and never ends. Towers rise out of the floor and pour out specific enemies. Three bosses cut in on their own schedule: THE SKEIN at 85 seconds, THE MAW at 193, THE NEXUS at 306. Because the order never changes, a death is information. You lost to the same wave everyone loses to, and next run you know it is coming.

How to play

• Shoot: hold fire for a continuous stream of shards. The burst on right click throws a wide spray on a short cooldown, for when something gets close.
• Collect: kills drop shards. They pull toward you when you are close and not firing, so sweeping through your own kills is part of the movement.
• Upgrade: five shards buy the first weapon tier and each one after that costs about half again as much, running SHARD I up to SHARD V. Higher tiers fire faster, hit harder, throw more streams, and from tier four they pierce.
• Dash: at max tier your shards stop buying upgrades and bank instead, up to fifty. Hold the dash and you become untouchable for a moment, in slow motion, moving straight ahead. It costs five shards to start and drains while it is held.

Controls

On desktop it is WASD or the arrow keys to move, mouse to look, left click to fire, right click for the burst, space to jump, Q to dash and ESC to pause. Gamepads work, with the reference sheet in the pause menu relabelling itself for Xbox or PlayStation pads. On a phone the game runs in landscape with twin-stick touch controls: left side to move, right side to look and fire, with jump, burst and dash as buttons. A third finger tapped anywhere also jumps.

Tips from the developers

• Movement is the whole defence. Nothing in the game can be tanked, so circle strafe by default and treat standing still as a mistake.
• Weapon tiers come from kills, not from time. A cautious run that avoids fights is a run that reaches minute three with a tier two weapon and dies there.
• Shards only pull toward you while you are off the trigger. Stopping fire for half a second inside a pile of them collects more than chasing each one down, and turning back for a single shard is how people walk into a chaser.
• Save the burst for clusters rather than single enemies. It is on a cooldown, and a wasted one is the difference at a boss.
• Learn the three boss timings. 85, 193 and 306 seconds are fixed, so you can arrive at them with the arena cleared instead of being caught mid-swarm.
• Once you hit SHARD V, spend the dash. Sitting on fifty banked shards to feel safe is worse than using them to walk out of a corner you should not have been in.

Under the hood

Void Daggers is made by MobX Games, a small indie studio in Germany. It is built on Three.js with no textures and no 3D models: every surface you see is generated at runtime, each enemy a wireframe solid with a glowing core, and the sound effects were generated rather than recorded. Every run you play is recorded as a replay, sampling your camera twenty times a second and the state of the world ten times a second, then compressed. That is what the WATCH button on the leaderboard plays back, in first person, with the real enemies and sounds. We wrote up how that format works in How Void Daggers records every run.

The browser version has its own leaderboard, built on the same survival-time board the Steam version uses. It has three tabs: PERSONAL for your own runs, FRIENDS, and GLOBAL, which shows the top of the board and then a window around wherever you sit in it. Submitting a time needs a free MobX account. Reading the board does not.

FAQ

Is the browser version a demo? No. It used to be, and now it is the complete game, free, with ad breaks. The first five runs have no ads at all, then a break plays after every second run.

What does the Steam version add? It is the paid desktop build, with achievements, Steam Cloud saves and the Steam leaderboard with replay attachments. It is on Steam as app 4551050.

Can I play on my phone? Yes, in landscape, with twin-stick touch controls.

Do I need an account? Only to post a score to the leaderboard. The game itself asks for nothing.