Raptor: Call of the Shadows meets Tyrian, with corporate-themed bosses and a between-mission shop. Enemy AI is data, bullet patterns are data — every wave should feel choreographed. Smaller game. Currently paused. Render-wiped. Queued.
Vertical scrolling shmup. Push up against the scroll, dodge bullets, fire back. Six waves per level, three levels per contract, boss at the end. The genre that taught a generation that moving sideways is survival.
Raptor: Call of the Shadows pace. Tyrian's shop economy. No bullet-hell density — this is the older, slower lineage. Pattern recognition and muscle memory.
Nine commands: MOV, FIR, SPN, WAIT, PHS, LOP, ROT, DIE, STK. Twenty-one programs. A dispatch table. Each enemy ticks one row per frame and acts. Want a new behavior? Add a row.
The CHAPLAIN summoner spawns drones; the RAILGUN sniper telegraphs and fires; bosses chain through phases via PHS. None of this is hardcoded combat AI — it's content. Krystman's lazydevs lesson, applied straight.
You finish a level. The shop opens. Credits in pocket from kills. Buy a spread cannon, a homing missile pack, two bombs, a hull repair, an energy cap upgrade. Without the shop, this is Galaga with scrolling. With it, it's Raptor.
The CHAPLAIN runs the counter — billing by the hour, you know. Loadout decisions matter because levels are tuned around what you brought. Skip the homing pack, fight the next boss without it.
Three contracts, three bosses. Each boss has three phases — HP thresholds trip a brain swap (PHS command), idx and timer reset, the fight shifts. The COLONEL is corporate procurement. The VP is demolitions. The QUARTERLY REPORT is a live spreadsheet that tries to kill you with KPIs.
Corporate bosses as game bosses. The bit is fully committed. Phase 3 of the QUARTERLY REPORT renders procedurally because the gag wouldn't work as a sprite.
Four-game portfolio. NOLTS is the one that ships first. MechaTank is next. Thalassocracy is the dream game. Raptyrian is the one I work on when I want to make a shoot-em-up. Currently paused. Render layer wiped April 2026 for an Arch 9 sprite-first rebuild. Gameplay logic survives — the game ticks, draws nothing.
No Steam page. No dates. No promises. When attention returns it returns. The shmup is the reflex game in the lineup — pattern recognition, muscle memory, twenty-minute runs. That's the whole pitch.
Raptyrian is the small game I'll come back to when NOLTS ships and MechaTank pays. Brain library is built. Shop is built. Bosses are built. The render layer is wiped — by choice, not accident. If you like Raptor, you'll like this when it's playable. Until then, watch the studio.
Back to the studio.→