GORGE

About

A digging game, built from the physics up

GORGE is a multiplayer arcade game about tunnelling through rock, growing on what you eat, and using the holes you leave behind to cut everyone else off.

The idea

Most competitive arcade games hand you a map. GORGE hands you solid ground and makes the map the thing the players produce. Every tunnel in an arena was dug by somebody, which means the terrain is a record of where everyone has been and a weapon anyone can use.

That produces the one mechanic the whole design hangs off: there is no attack. You kill by forcing a rival into something solid. So the interesting question is never "can I hit them" — it is "what is behind them, and can I make them go there".

How it is built

The game's rules live in a single Rust simulation crate with no external dependencies, which runs identically on your phone, in your browser, and on the server. Not approximately identically — bit-for-bit identically. There is no floating-point arithmetic anywhere in the simulation; positions are fixed-point integers, angles are integers, and even the trigonometry comes out of a committed lookup table rather than the platform's maths library.

Every version of the world state can be hashed, and recorded games are replayed across every target architecture on every build. If an ARM phone and an x86 server ever disagree about a single tick, the build fails.

This is expensive and it is worth it. A game where the terrain is player-generated and collisions decide everything cannot afford the client and the server to have slightly different opinions about where a wall is. Determinism is what lets the game feel instant on your screen while remaining authoritative on the server, and it is the difference between a rewind that looks like lag and a rewind that looks like a lie.

The rule the codebase is organised around: the game engine layer never computes anything that affects an outcome. It draws what the simulation returns and plays sounds for the events the simulation emits. If a line of presentation code ever needs to decide something, it belongs in the simulation instead.

Where it actually is

GORGE is in development and this site is deliberately explicit about that. Nothing on it is a store listing for a product you can buy.

Done The simulation core: fixed-point maths, seeded deterministic randomness, the occupancy grid, tunnel carving and collision, growth, boost, the five death causes, and the endgame collapse with its connectivity guarantee. Verified across x86, ARM and WebAssembly.
Now The playable shell, on real hardware and in mobile browsers — resolving how much world a phone screen can legibly show, which sets the minimum device the game can honestly support.
Next The networked arena: server, wire protocol, ten players, client prediction through the same shared simulation.
Later The full digger roster, country selection and persistent exploration, arena matchmaking and lifecycle, accounts, and a mobile store release.

The dev build on this site is not the game. It is a measurement harness that replays a recorded simulation so its readability can be checked on real screens. It is linked because hiding it would be sillier than explaining it.

Who makes it

GORGE is developed and published by Beacon Light Investments. It is a small operation, which is most of why the site says what the game is instead of what it will be.

Questions, bugs, and anything about your data go to the contact page.

The name

A gorge is a deep cut in the earth. To gorge is to eat past the point of sense. The game is both of those at once, which is the entire reason it is called that.