Written by GuillaumeTechProject Skyfall

Skyfall, part 4: the War Room and the armory

June 2026: a real lobby, a stage select, rematches, and a buy phase where every player shops the same screen at the same time for drill, bramble, bomb and homing arrows.

Skyfall's buy phase in June 2026, titled “Arm yourself”: a grid of arrows and a shield with their prices in shards, a blue cursor for player 1 and an orange one for player 2.

Part 4 of the Skyfall story. By the end of part 3, matches had rounds, weather and a replay. June was about everything around a match: getting into one, getting through the rounds, and arming up between them.

Table of contents

The War Room

On June 1, the lobby became the War Room, step 1 of 2: champions and rules. Players ready up there and set the match rules. Step 2 is the stage select, a grid of arenas with previews where every player votes, each vote shown as a coloured border stacked around the map. The party code can be copied to the clipboard, and on June 12 it got a bigger chip of its own.

June 1 also brought an in-match pause menu, and on June 8, the options screen opened from inside a match.

The War Room, step 1 of 2: two player slots with Ready Up buttons, two open slots, and the match rules underneath.
The War Room: champions and rules.

Stage select, step 2 of 2: Towerfall, Towerfall 2 and several “coming soon” slots, with a preview of the chosen arena and a Launch button.
Stage select, with room for the arenas to come.

Two kinds of online matches

On June 2, online play got sturdier. A match can now be relayed, with one player’s game hosting the round while the server passes messages along, or authoritative, with the server running the simulation itself. Joining tries a relayed match first and falls back to an authoritative one. The server match loop also got lighter, and the bot script learned to spread its bots over several processes, to test a crowded server.

Between rounds

The first week of June rebuilt everything that happens between two rounds:

  • June 7: a new replay screen, with a timeline, more details and controls to skip it.
  • June 8: a redesigned round and match end screen.
  • June 9: a Ready Up button, a countdown flash, and rematch votes at the end of a match.
  • June 12: “First to” rules, so a match goes to 5, 7 or 10 points, and a shorter countdown when everyone is ready.

The round break: a “Match” panel with each player's score pips and shards earned, and a Ready Up button.
Between rounds: the score, the shards earned and Ready Up.

The buy phase

On June 10, I added a buy phase between rounds, with new arrows and a shield. The next day, I redesigned it from scratch: everyone shops the same screen at the same time, each with their own cursor. Online, the other players’ carts and lock-ins show up live.

Shards are the currency. Every round pays 150 to everyone, and each kill pays 100 more. You get 30 seconds to spend them before your loadout locks itself. Here’s the armory, with each item’s own description:

  • Normal arrow (20): honest weight, honest arc.
  • Drill arrow (40): burrows through one wall, then flies on.
  • Bramble arrow (110): sprouts lethal thorns on impact.
  • Bomb arrow (130): blinks, then detonates, unless caught.
  • Feather arrow (100): flat, gravity-defying, blink-fast.
  • Bolt arrow (150): smart homing, snaps 90 degrees to hunt.
  • Toy arrow (40): non-lethal, bonks foes backward.
  • Shield (200): an extra life, but you can’t dodge.

June 13 made the special arrows respect the level. Bramble thorns follow the shape of the walls they hit. Bomb blasts stop at walls and can wrap around a corner. A drill arrow earns one more wall to burrow through every time it wraps around the edge of the map, and thorns and blasts wrap around those edges like everything else.

A bomb arrow goes off against a wall: a bright orange blast follows the shape of the bricks and lights up the two archers standing on a ledge under the rain.
A bomb against a wall: the blast follows the shape of the level.

Then came the art: a sprite for each arrow type, with animations in flight and when stuck, a quiver display that shows which arrows you’re carrying, an animated shield icon, a spinning shard and catalog items that move under the cursor. I also cut things: the trap item left the shop on June 15.

End of June

On June 28, the score pips in the round break started filling up one by one, replaying the round’s events. On June 29, the interface colours were merged into one palette, and the menus traded their moss green for a night blue.

By the numbers

  • 74 commits in June.
  • About 18,800 lines of Lua on June 29.

The Skyfall story

  1. From a Defold cube to a fresh start in LÖVE
  2. Wall jumps, a real bow and a quiet network
  3. Rounds, rain, torches and a VHS replay
  4. The War Room and the armory (this article)
  5. A map editor, a ghost and the Champion Forge

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