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GUARDIAN LOOP key art CRT-04
● RECCH-04
PLAYABLE ROGUELITE 4XIDLE

GUARDIAN LOOP

A 1993-style space 4X compressed into 30-minute roguelite galaxy runs. Lose the galaxy, keep the data.

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ABOUT THIS GAME

Every run starts the same: one homeworld, a hostile galaxy, thirty minutes on the clock. Explore, expand, exploit, exterminate — then die to the Guardian and bank everything you learned as Guardian Data. The permanent meta tree spends that data to automate pieces of the 4X, until the strategy game you were losing plays itself while you sleep.

ART & ASSETS

CURRENT RELEASE

v0.14

2026-10-20
  • Dragging a colony's sliders on the starmap is now smooth. Only the colony panel redraws while you drag, and the map catches up once when you let go.
  • Reopening an old turn's summary from the LOG now locks the rest of the screen: the bottom navigation bar greys out and Space does nothing, so the game can no longer move on underneath the turn you're reading.
  • END TURN is a little snappier, because the starmap now redraws once per turn instead of twice.
  • Under the hood, the game's code was reorganised from top to bottom without changing how a run plays: the same galaxy and the same choices play out exactly as before. Your existing save carries over.

ROADMAP

NEXT UP

  • Take manual control of a space battle instead of watching it play out, with the auto-resolving Tactical AI becoming something you upgrade — and never quite as good as flying it yourself.
  • A full difficulty and reward balance pass across the whole run: how fast the rivals escalate, what a galaxy pays out, what the Loop's nodes cost, and a re-tune of combat, espionage, diplomacy and the species personalities.
  • Colony Governors: save a slider preset to a colony and let it manage itself, then push policies out across the whole empire.
  • Monsters that grow with the galaxy and keep the scars of every fight, instead of meeting you at one fixed strength and healing between battles — and fleets of your own that carry their damage home to repair and re-arm.

LATER

  • More of the automation ladder — auto-scouting, colony ships that settle without asking, automatic troop transports, a ship designer that drafts for you, spy networks that re-fund themselves, and envoys that keep your treaties alive.
  • A galaxy that comes to you: rivals delivering peace offers, tribute demands and threats to your door, and galactic events you can answer (pay to fight a plague or research its cure) instead of only watching them land.
  • Two more roaming monsters, a crystal entity and a space dragon, already drawn and waiting for their stats.
  • The other five races made playable, with unlocks and talent ladders of their own — they already fight you as rivals.
  • The art still outstanding — portraits for the ten species, the neutral worlds and pirate nests, orbital defence stations, the planet you are fighting over, the ground battlefield, and the starmap's own icons.
  • Polish pass — a proper soundtrack in place of the current short loops, sounds of its own for war and peace, readable big numbers, alerts for the things worth interrupting you, keyboard routes through every screen, and a guide lesson for every system as it lands.

MAYBE

  • The Galactic Council, a vote you can win (or refuse, and fight the entire galaxy over), and Orion itself, guarded, as a boss worth building a fleet around.
  • An Advisor AI that plays a whole run for you while you are away, and challenge modifiers for when you want the galaxy to fight dirtier.

Plans, not promises — no dates, and any of it can change.

RELEASE NOTES

v0.13

2026-10-18
  • You now found your colonies yourself. When a colony ship reaches a world it can settle, the game stops and asks: name the new world and FOUND it, or HOLD and keep the ship parked. Your homeworld is named for the race you play, and so is every rival's.
  • The first 50 turns are quiet. No monsters, pirate nests or galactic events arrive before turn 50, so you can learn the board first. Your rivals are exactly as dangerous as before.
  • Every turn now leaves a record. A short RIVALS MOVING strip confirms each END TURN, and the LOG on the starmap reopens any of the last 20 turn summaries. Click a line to jump to its star or its research, or to replay the battle it describes.
  • Fleets confirm before the sends you can't take back: starting a war, flying into a monster or a pirate nest, or spending a colony ship. A fleet you launched waits at the top-left of its star until the turn ends; click it to call back the whole fleet or just the ships you sent by mistake.
  • The space amoeba and the derelict warship now appear as real sprites on the map, in battle and in the codex. Battles you watch now show every beam shot with its damage, and unarmed scouts flee an armed fleet instead of sitting still to be destroyed.
  • Smaller fixes: colonies with unrest, rising pollution or plague get a red marker on the map, the industry slider shows where your factories hit their cap, and scrapping a ship design tells you which colonies it stopped and refunds their unspent build progress. Your existing save is reset by this release.

v0.12

2026-09-24
  • The galaxy is alive. Things now happen that no empire chose: a space AMOEBA and an ancient DERELICT warship drift in from the edge of the map, pirate nests bleed the income of every colony near them, and GNN headlines announce mineral strikes, depletions and plagues. They hit your rivals exactly as hard as they hit you.
  • Monsters crawl from star to star slower than any ship you can build, announce where they are heading, and bomb an undefended colony until nothing is left. Meet one with a fleet and it is a full tactical battle you can watch. Whoever kills it collects the bounty, and your rivals are hunting it too.
  • Every threat you destroy pays Guardian Data on its own THREATS DESTROYED line at the end of the run, and like everything else it banks even when you lose.
  • Medium galaxies now hold independent civilizations: named worlds that grow and dig in the longer they are left alone. Your rivals load troops and race you for them.
  • Planets run from ULTRA POOR to ULTRA RICH, and a rare ARTIFACT world hands a research windfall to the first empire that scouts it, then doubles the research of whoever settles it.
  • A new ADVANCED section on the new-run screen sets each of these systems to OFF, NORMAL or ABUNDANT. Leave it closed and you get the intended galaxy; turning a system off costs nothing but the bonus its threats would have paid. Your existing save is reset by this one.

v0.11

2026-08-11
  • Every rival species now has a personality of its own, not just a sprite and a stat line. The KHARRAV pick fights on a five-turn clock and attack the moment they are merely even with you. The LITHOX would rather settle another rock than fight you for one. The UMBRYN buy the odds long before the shooting starts. Which neighbours you were dealt is now the first thing worth knowing about a galaxy.
  • Rivals finally research like themselves. Until now every AI empire quietly split its science six ways forever, so they all ended up the same. Now the KHARRAV pour it into weapons, the TALVYN into engines, the CHIRIX and DURVEK into construction, the UMBRYN into computers — scout a rival and its fleet tells you what it has been reading.
  • All ten species have new names: MENTARI, KHARRAV, TALVYN, DRASSK, CHIRIX, DURVEK, URSOTH, LITHOX and UMBRYN alongside the HUMANS. Same kits, same feats, same ladders — new identities of their own. Your existing save is reset by this one.
  • You can read a rival's TEMPERAMENT straight off the DIPLOMACY tab, and the codex now says what each species is like to live next to. Neither of them quotes a number — the personality is meant to be recognised from what a neighbour does, and then confirmed.
  • They expand differently too. A DRASSK colony ship goes out barely escorted and always toward the best ground on the map, so a DRASSK neighbour beats you to the good worlds rather than taking them off you later.
  • None of this made the galaxy safer: a player who sits still still loses on three seeds out of three, in around a hundred turns.

v0.10

2026-08-10
  • The CODEX. A sixth screen — reachable from the nav bar or the G key, even between runs — holding everything you have discovered: 87 entries across technology, planets, races, hulls and ship components. Entries you have not met yet are just question marks.
  • What you learn is yours forever. Discovery banks across runs, and losing keeps it: concede, get exterminated, walk away mid-galaxy — the codex still remembers every world you visited, every rival you met and every hull you shot at.
  • The GUIDE tab teaches by playing the game. Each lesson is not a screenshot or a diagram — it is the actual screen, driven through the actual clicks, with a cursor and captions. Watch it, replay it, or skip to the end.
  • Seven lessons, and they arrive when they start to matter: your first turns and building a ship from the very beginning, colonising when you scout a free world, invasion once you have an enemy, diplomacy and espionage the moment you meet somebody.
  • Every number the codex shows is read live from the game, and the writing never quotes one — so a stat on a codex page always agrees with the research and ship-design screens it came from.

v0.9

2026-08-09
  • Diplomacy. Rivals now have an attitude toward you and a formal relation — war, neutral or peace — and the RIVALS screen grows a DIPLOMACY tab where you can read exactly how they feel and what the odds are of changing it.
  • Runs no longer open at permanent war. Everyone starts as hostile neutrals, wars are formally declared, and attacking without declaring is a sneak attack — it starts the war for you and the whole galaxy thinks less of you for it.
  • Rivals war among themselves. They declare on each other, raid each other's colonies, sign ceasefires and trade pacts — the map now has a shifting political story instead of everyone permanently gunning for everyone.
  • Audiences resolve on the spot: buy goodwill with tribute, sign a ceasefire, a non-aggression pact or a trade deal that pays both sides, threaten a weaker rival into paying you off — or have the threat blow up into a war on the spot.
  • Don't mistake it for a peaceful galaxy: goodwill decays on its own, rejected proposals sting, and an unattended neighbour still slides toward declaring on you in about ten turns. Peace is something you maintain, not something you get.
  • Humans finally play their hook — a 25% diplomacy bonus — and the Loop's Statecraft branch grows an ENVOY CORPS node that sharpens every audience.

v0.8

2026-08-07
  • The game has sound. Buttons click, research breakthroughs chime, beams and missiles land with their impacts, colonies you lose sound like a loss, and there is music underneath all of it.
  • Battles are the big one. Every shot, hit, miss and exploding ship has its own sound, and watching a fleet action now plays as a fight rather than a slideshow of coloured lines.
  • Three pieces of music that follow where you are: one for running your empire, one for combat, and one for THE LOOP and the run-end tally. They cross-fade as you move between screens.
  • A gear button on the bottom bar opens volume controls — master, music and sound effects on separate sliders, plus a mute switch. M mutes from anywhere. Your settings are remembered, and they survive wiping your progress.
  • It stays out of your way. Fast-forwarding a run is completely silent, a busy turn plays at most three sounds, and skipping a battle resolves it without a peep.

v0.7

2026-08-06
  • Pick your race. Every run used to be Humans; now the new-run screen is a real choice, and each card tells you exactly what that race does before you commit to it.
  • Four new races unlock by playing their style, not by paying for them. Finish a tech ladder and the Psilons are yours. Hold six colonies at once for the Silicoids, land five spy missions for the Darloks, build one world up to 120 factories for the Klackons. Progress counts on runs you lose, and your best attempt is always shown on the locked card.
  • Every rival now plays like its species too. A Psilon neighbour out-researches you, Bulrathi hit far harder on the ground, Silicoids settle worlds nobody else can reach, and Mrrshan ships shoot straight. Scouting who you are next to finally matters.
  • The races play genuinely differently. Silicoids never generate pollution at all and can colonise any planet in the galaxy, but they breed at half speed. Psilons research 30% faster and spy badly. Klackons out-produce everyone. Darloks are simply better at espionage than anybody.
  • Race talents in the Loop: each playable race has its own short ladder of Guardian Data upgrades that deepen what it is good at. They only apply while you are actually playing that race, so a bought-out Psilon ladder does nothing on a Klackon run.
  • The run-end tally now tells you the moment you have earned a race — including on a defeat, which is exactly when you want the good news.

v0.6

2026-08-06
  • Spies and sabotage. There is a new RIVALS screen where you fund a covert network against each empire you have met, then point it at what you want: sit quiet and build it up, steal a technology you never researched, blow up missile bases and factories, or incite unrest on one of their worlds.
  • Your rivals do all of it back. They will steal your tech, wreck your industry and freeze your colonies — and you often will not know who did it. The name of the empire behind an attack only shows up when you catch their agents in the act.
  • A world under unrest produces half of everything and cannot be given new orders at all — its sliders and its build queue are locked until the agitators are cleared out.
  • Patience pays. A network only ever runs one mission per rival per turn, but points banked beyond the next mission make it far more likely to succeed and far less likely to get caught, so sitting on HIDE and waiting is a real strategy. The screen shows you the exact odds.
  • Counter-intelligence comes from two places: your Computers research, which now finally does something outside the shipyard, and a security budget you can raise at any time.
  • The Statecraft branch of the Loop has been rebuilt around all this — five steps ending in a node that halves what every mission costs, instead of just nudging your payout.

v0.5

2026-08-05
  • A behind-the-scenes release: no gameplay changes, just tooling that makes the next few a lot faster to build.
  • Testing the game used to mean playing twenty minutes to reach the interesting part. There is now a set of named starting points — a battle about to happen, an invasion about to land, a developed empire, a run one strike from victory, a run one strike from defeat — that can be jumped to instantly.
  • Each of those is rebuilt from the live rules every time it is used and checked automatically on every change, so a balance tweak that quietly breaks one gets caught the same day instead of weeks later.
  • Your existing save is unaffected.

v0.4

2026-08-05
  • Ships are real ships now. Every hull, on every screen, is hand-drawn pixel art instead of a coloured rectangle — on the battle grid, on the blueprint, in your design roster, and as the fleet markers moving across the starmap.
  • Big ships take up real space in a battle. The tactical grid is far finer than it was, and a hull now occupies a footprint rather than a square: a fighter takes a couple of cells, a dreadnought sprawls across a wide block. Ships block each other, weapons range from hull edge to hull edge, and missiles hit where the ship actually is. Manoeuvring a big ship out of a corner is now a genuine problem.
  • Pick the artwork for each of your designs. The ship design screen has an ART cycler — flip through your species' hulls of that size and choose the one you want. It is the ship you will see fighting your battles and crossing the map, and it locks in once you have ships in service.
  • Every empire looks different. Your rivals are drawn from ten distinct fleets — insectoid, crystalline, stealth-black, gold swept-wing — dealt fresh each run, so you can tell whose ships are in orbit at a glance. It is pure identity: nobody gets a hidden bonus for it.
  • Fleet markers show what is actually in the fleet. The marker is the most valuable ship you have got there, in its own artwork, so a scout on a survey run and a battleship stack heading for your border no longer look identical.
  • Existing saves are cleared by this release.