RED GARDEN is a deck-based real-time strategy game — Clash Royale's card-hand economy layered over a living board that moves on its own whether you're paying attention to it or not. Here's where it actually stands, not where the roadmap says it should be.
**The core loop works, end to end.** Bot-vs-bot matches run clean. Ten independent headless bots can queue simultaneously, get paired into five concurrent matches by a real matchmaker, and hold up under ten seconds of sustained load without a crash. Accounts are real — HMAC connect-tickets, the same scheme the esports side of the house already proved out, fail closed if the signing secret isn't configured. None of this is a demo standing in for the real thing. It's the real thing, just not dressed yet.
**A second mode is growing alongside it.** `apps/arena` is a separate, additive single-hero click-to-move demo — proving ground for the MOBA-adjacent hero-kit side of the game without touching the card-RTS core. Four heroes are playable there now, on either side of the match:
- **The Unicorn** — a tank that dashes, dumps a self-heal, and doubles its own armor to eat a fight it started. - **The Duck** — pulls you toward it and hits you on the way in, twice, at two different scales. - **The Ghost** — a skillshot that silences, a blink out of targetability, and a patch of ground that punishes standing still. - **The Frog** — doesn't hit you at all. Rewinds its own position and HP to a few seconds ago, or vanishes outright when things go wrong. A defensive kit with zero offense, on purpose.
Every one of those four has passed a real audit against what the other eight heroes in the roster would actually need — grid-territory mechanics, ally targets, multiple units per player, a cooking system — none of which this smaller mode carries yet. The four that work here are the four that fit. The other eight are a decision about what arena grows into next, not a to-do list sitting on a shelf.
**Every match leaves a trail now.** Both modes write a match event log — connects, actions, outcomes, tied to a real player identity where one exists. That log already plays back: point the arena client at a finished match's log file and it renders through the exact same renderer live play uses. No second code path pretending to be a spectator mode. It's the same one, fed different input.
What's next is what's always been next: keep proving the roster fits before adding to it, and start pointing that replay data at something that learns from it.
---
**A NOTE FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STUDIO**
If card economies and cellular automata aren't your speed, ROCKBOSS STUDIOS would like a word. SHANKPIT is a server-authoritative shooter built for people who want their hit registration to be real and their movement tech to be earned — no rollback excuses, no client-trusted anything. The Highlands map is live in testing, the killcam records every angle worth watching, and if you've ever wanted a firefight where the server's word is final, this is the one. Wishlist it, tell a friend who still remembers what a real dedicated server feels like, and we'll see you in the hills.
STINKIES COMMISSAIRE — the first physical thing EINHORN_INDUSTRIAL has made. Join the waiting list for the hoodie →
← All posts