DRILLHEART

You are a kid in a scrap drill-pod, and the only way out of your buried village is up: through the caves, across the ash wasteland, into the moon and out to the edge of the galaxy. Every boss you beat is bigger than you, and its wreck closes around your pod as your next shell, so by the end you are wearing every fight you won.

How it plays

You have one weapon, the drill. Hold to charge it, let go to dash along your aim. A quick tap is a short dash that breaks small things. A full charge (half a second) is a long dash that can break the glowing orange weak points on anything bigger than you. Hit armour instead and you bounce off, stunned for a moment but unhurt, so a miss tells you to try another angle.

Anything you can break in one hit wears an orange outline, and anything that will bounce you wears a blue one. When you grow, last tier's blue bruisers turn orange in front of you. Orange is always spiky and blue is always flat hex plate, so the colours read with red-green colourblindness too.

Every attack is drawn on the ground before it lands. Jump the rings. Sidestep the lines and arcs with a dodge, which never cancels a charge you are holding.

Each tier teaches the drill one new trick, and its boss asks for it:

• The Burrow: Drill Dive. Jump, then drill in the air to spike straight down. The landing is your own shockwave, it clears a crowd of grubs at once, and it is the only way onto a core that sits on top of a boss.
• The Surface: Reflect. Dash at full charge into an incoming shell and it flies back where you were heading, breaking whatever it hits, weak points included.
• The Moon: Spiral Overdrive. Chains and broken cores fill a meter. Spend it for six seconds of a huge drill that breaks everything at your size and one size up.
• The Deep: no new move. The last boss needs all of them.

Dashing through a crowd chains your kills, and every link raises the pitch of the hit, so a long chain sounds like a scale going up. Scrap from the wreckage levels you up, and every level offers two bolt-ons, one for offence and one for defence: a longer drill bit, a wider one, a spring that refills your charge when you bounce, extra plating, boosters, shoulder spikes. They weld onto the outside of your shell where you can see them, and they stay on that shell for good, still visible through the canopy after you grow out of it.

Controls

Action	Keyboard + mouse	Gamepad
Move	WASD	Left stick
Aim / camera	Mouse	Right stick
Charge the drill, release to dash	Hold and release left mouse	Hold and release RT
Jump	Space	A
Drill Dive	Space, then left mouse in the air	A, then RT in the air
Dodge	Shift or right mouse	B
Spiral Overdrive (from the Moon)	Q	LB
Pick a bolt-on	Mouse, or 1 / 2	D-pad left / right
Pause	Esc	Start
Fullscreen	F11

Mouse sensitivity and invert-Y are in Settings and the pause menu. A pad gets a little aim assist toward exposed weak points, never toward armour.

Length

About 20 minutes for a first run, deaths included. Four tiers, each about half arena and half boss, then the finale. The game saves at every checkpoint, Continue picks up where you left off, and Chapters starts any tier you have reached. Each tier ends with a results card and a rank from S to C, if you want a reason to go back.

Sturdy mode doubles your hull. Turn it on in Settings on the title screen or in the pause menu at any time. Dying only ever sends you back to the last checkpoint with your shells and bolt-ons kept, so Sturdy is there for anyone who would rather see the whole climb than retry a boss.

Playing in the browser

The version on this page runs in Chrome or Firefox on a desktop. The first seconds of each tier may hitch while the browser compiles the game's shaders; it settles after that. The browser build runs Godot's Compatibility renderer, so it looks a little flatter than the downloads below, which are the intended way to play.

Running it

• Windows (64-bit): unzip and run DRILLHEART.exe. The game is not signed, so SmartScreen will warn you the first time: click More info → Run anyway. It starts on Vulkan and falls back to Direct3D 12, then to OpenGL, on older graphics cards.
• macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon): unzip, then right-click the app → Open the first time and confirm. It is not notarized, so a plain double-click refuses to open it. On macOS 15 or later, if right-click does not offer Open, try once, then go to System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway.
• Linux (x86-64): unzip, then in the folder run chmod +x DRILLHEART.x86_64 once (in case your unzipper dropped the execute bit) and ./DRILLHEART.x86_64. It needs a Vulkan driver and falls back to OpenGL without one.
• A gamepad is recommended. Keyboard and mouse work everywhere, menus included.

Made with AI

Sam designed the game and played every build to decide what stayed and what got cut. Claude agents (Claude Code) wrote all of the code and the text, Gramps' radio lines included. There is no AI-generated art, sound or music. The mechs, bosses and shells are low-poly meshes built from boxes, cylinders and cones by code Claude wrote; the props, skies, particles and fonts come from the CC0 and OFL packs below. The sound effects are recordings cut from the Sonniss GDC Game Audio Bundles, and the music is CC0 tracks by the artists credited below.

Made in a week for a weekly AI jam with a friend, theme "growing things". Built with Godot 4.7.2. Inspired by Gurren Lagann's climb from a hole in the ground to the edge of the galaxy.

Credits

3D models: Space Kit, Modular Cave Kit, Survival Kit, Factory Kit and Nature Kit by Kenney, CC0.

Textures and effects: Particle Pack and Prototype Textures by Kenney, CC0.

Skies: Wasteland Clouds (Pure Sky) by Sergej Majboroda, sky edit by Jarod Guest, from Poly Haven; Planet Surface Skyboxes by Screaming Brain Studios; Space Skyboxes by StumpyStrust. All CC0.

Type: Dela Gothic One by artakana and Chakra Petch by Cadson Demak, SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Music (all CC0):

• Rock Music For Games by Ragnar Random: the title, the Burrow, the Gate Mole, the Surface, the Mountain Walker, the Moon and the Deep.
• Boss Battle #2 [Symphonic Metal] by nene: the Moon Engine.
• Eerie Space Music by Potriel, distributed by Foozle: inside the moon, and the Deep's ambience.
• Epic Boss Battle by Juhani Junkala (SubspaceAudio): the Spiral King.
• A Legend Will Rise (Orchestral) by CodeManu: the finale.

Sound effects: cut from the Sonniss GDC Game Audio Bundles (2023, 2024 and 2026), from packs by 344 Audio, BluezoneCorp, CB Sound Design, Cinematic Sound Design, David Dumais Audio, Epic Stock Media, InMotionAudio, Jake Fielding, Justsoundeffects, Mechanical Wave, Pole Position Production, Rescopic Sound, Rogue Waves, Sonic Bat, SoundBits, Spectravelers, Systematic Sound, TheWorkRoom Audio Post and Unreal SFX. The full list of packs is in the game's credits.