Voidcall

About the game

Voidcall starts in the middle of a fight. A landing party has come down in a dark alien valley, something has already killed one of them, and the six who are left are panicking over the radio. Within a few lines of chatter the mission is off: the only goal now is to get back to the ship and leave. The problem is that the ship has no power for the launch, and the only source nearby is a handful of glowing energy wells scattered across the valley.

You see the valley from above at an angle, lit by the blue glow of the wells, the white beacon of the lander and the muzzle flashes of your crew. Each of the six has a job. The two technicians, Bowman and Floyd, build things. The three soldiers, Cooper, Miller and Peck, open fire on any creature that comes in range while they stand still. Dr. Brown, the medic, patches up whoever is standing close by, but only while standing still.

The technicians have two blueprints. A harvester has to go on top of an energy well and adds to the blue bar in the top right corner. A turret can go almost anywhere and shoots at the creatures on its own, but it draws power while it stands, which shows up as the white mark on the same bar. When the bar is full the crew says so, and every survivor has to walk back to the lander for the launch. Meanwhile the creatures keep coming out of the edges of the map, more often as time passes, and they go for the nearest member of the crew, harvesters and turrets included. If a harvester is destroyed, its share of the power is lost until someone builds it again.

Dominic Szablewski made Voidcall for js13kGames 2019, a year after Underrun. Everything had to fit in a 13 kilobyte zip, so the game builds its terrain from a noise function with a fixed seed, stores its few 3D models in a packed format of his own, finds paths with a small A* search and synthesizes the soundtrack in the browser with a rewritten version of the Sonant-X synthesizer.

Playing it here

This is the original competition version, unchanged. Click Play and then click inside the game: the browser switches to fullscreen and the radio chatter begins. You take control after the introduction, when the energy bar appears. In fullscreen, pushing the mouse against an edge of the screen scrolls the map too; press Esc to leave fullscreen. There is no save: every round starts from the landing.

Controls

To build, select a single technician. Two icons appear in the bottom left corner: click the harvester or the turret, then click the spot on the map.

A few things worth knowing

Five wells, five harvesters. The bar starts nearly empty and each harvester fills a large share of it, so the ship can only take off once every well in the valley has one. Plan a route for the technicians that covers them all.

Keep the technicians covered. They are the only ones who can build, so send a soldier or two with them. A soldier on the move does not shoot: stop them near the technician and they will defend the spot.

Turrets cost power. A turret needs some free power to be built and keeps drawing it afterwards. One near a lonely harvester is worth it; a field of them can stall the launch.

Bring the doctor along. Wounded crew heal only while Dr. Brown is standing right next to them, so when a fight is over, gather the group around the doctor for a moment before moving on.

Credits and licence

Voidcall was created by Dominic Szablewski (phoboslab), who did the graphics and programming. The music is by Andreas Lösch (no-fate.net). The game, including its music, is released under the MIT licence in Dominic Szablewski's repository on GitHub, and the synthesizer that plays it, Sonant-X by Nicolas Vanhoren, Marcus Geelnard and Jake Taylor, is under the zlib licence. The licence texts are linked from this page.