AUGUR

What it is wearing is what it will do.

AUGUR is a vertical cute’em up in which every enemy is assembled from parts, and each part is an honest promise about what that enemy is going to do. You learn to read a ship in the half second before it fires — and you fly one built from the pieces of the ones you shot down.

Play the whole first reach free in your browser, right here on this page. The full game is the paid download.

Four families. Four promises. No exceptions.

Every gun an enemy carries is bolted to the OUTSIDE of its hull, so it breaks the silhouette, and its colour is the same in every reach:

• Pink slot — a BEAM. No travel time at all. When it fires the whole column is lethal instantly, so the only way to survive one is to already be somewhere else. The windup is the entire warning you are ever going to get.
• Yellow barrel — an AIMED shot. It locks onto your column at the moment it fires, so the answer is to be moving when it does.
• Cyan fan — a SPREAD. Wide and slow.
• Green drum — a MINE. Slowest of all, and it will still be there when you turn around.

A hull tells you how it moves, a wing tells you how fast, a crest tells you how tough. None of it is hidden in a menu. There is no behaviour table: the game asks the same part list the renderer drew, so a ship cannot lie about what it is holding — that is not a rule anyone has to enforce, it is the only thing the code can express.

Salvage: the gun you pick up is the gun you just read

Kill a ship and it drops the pods you watched it shoot with. Fly over one to bolt it on: more firepower, more lanes of fire — and a bigger ship, which means a bigger target.

A bolted-on part never protects you. A hit costs you health AND knocks a part loose. That is deliberate. When parts absorbed hits instead, reading an enemy stopped mattering and the game became about hoarding.

Three reaches, three fleets, three captains

• 1/3 THE MEADOW REACH — five waves and the capital ship HARROW. This is the free browser demo, in full.
• 2/3 THE DROWNED HARBOUR — tougher hulls, shorter cooldowns, its own fleet and its own captain.
• 3/3 THE BLACK SCARP — the last reach, and the one that puts the most in the air at once.

Each capital ship is three hulls bolted together, so reading one means reading three silhouettes at the same time. Shoot a section apart and it loses the guns it was advertising — permanently, for the rest of the fight — and drops them for you. It gets angrier as it sheds them, and after a minute it starts coming down on you, visibly and slowly, because a stalemate is not an ending.

Numbers, because they are measurable

• 40 hand-drawn pixel motifs — 6 hulls, 6 wing sets, 6 crests, 6 engines, 16 pods.
• 17,412 distinct ships in 20,000 draws from the shipped generator.
• 3 reaches of 5 waves, 3 sectioned captains, 4 original music cues.
• Reading the fleet is worth 3x the clear rate of ignoring it — measured over 40 seeded runs per arm with a bot that reads pods against one that does not (37.5% vs 12.5%), and beams account for 19% of a reading player’s damage against 87% of a blind one’s.

What you get

• Plays in the browser — keyboard or touch, no install, no account.
• The paid download is an offline archive. Unzip it, open index.html in any modern browser, and it runs straight off your disk with no server and no internet connection. That is measured, not assumed — the shipped archive is extracted and opened by file:// URL as part of the build.
• Full raw source ships with it. One game.js, readable, not minified. Hand-written HTML5 canvas: no engine, no framework, no template.
• Original score, written as note data and rendered by oscillator. No samples, no soundfonts, no generative-audio service.
• Ground art from CSAF’s own Verdant tile packs, licences shipping beside them.

Controls

Move: arrow keys or WASD · Fire: Z or Space · Pause: P · Sound: M · Restart: R · Title: Esc · Touch: drag anywhere to fly, firing is automatic.

Sound does not start until you press a key. That is a browser rule, not a bug.

More from Core Systems Asset Factory

If you want the same idea on real hardware, ROSE ENGINE is our Game Boy shmup. LANTERNBOUND is a story JRPG with active-timing combat, and PLUMBLINE is a metroidvania whose gates are things you know rather than things you carry. The whole catalogue is here.

AI disclosure, given honestly. The code is AI-written, the graphics are AI-generated and the text is AI-written. The audio is not — it is self-contained procedural synthesis from hand-written note data, which is not generative AI.

© Core Systems Asset Factory.