Dreamtide: Reverie of the Last Magus

A bullet-heaven survivors-like set inside a dying dream. You are the last magus; your spells cast themselves. Weave through the horde, harvest the essence of the fallen, and grow from a single ember into a storm of light before the tide swallows the dream.

Built from scratch in TypeScript and rendered entirely on WebGPU — every star, spell and nightmare is drawn procedurally, with no art assets on disk.

npm install
npm run dev        # dev server → http://localhost:5173
npm run build      # typecheck + production build

Requires a browser with WebGPU (current Chrome, Edge, or the desktop build).

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The dream

• You move; the magic answers. Steer with WASD or the arrow keys and keep breathing room — you never aim a spell. Each one you carry fires on its own rhythm, so survival is all positioning, timing and the loadout you build.
• 22 spells, each its own language. Emberfall, Rimeheart, Stormcall, Void Rift, Moonlance, Dream Serpent, Sleepless Eye, Nightmare Brand and more — every school has a distinct colour, motion, sound and particle voice. Raise one to mastery and choose its evolution for a transcendent form.
• Build a run on the fly. Level up to pick new spells, boons and generic amplifiers. Fell a boss and claim a run-defining relic. Kneel at a Whispering Altar and take a pact — a boon braided to a curse.
• Elemental resonance. Every hit marks its target; marks react with one another for chained bursts once you learn to layer your elements.
• A horde that pushes back. Wisps, bats, gazing eyes, blinking shades, colossal golems, singing sirens and warlocks — culminating in bosses with their own choreographed attack patterns that enrage the longer they live.
• A constellation between runs. Spend the stardust you earn on a sprawling skill web of eight schools plus a hidden dark path — persistent power that carries into every new dream.

Controls

Key	Action
WASD / Arrows	Move
1–4	Choose a card on level-up
Esc	Pause / settings
F	Toggle the performance overlay

Settings

Tune audio, four performance presets (particles, damage numbers, health bars, render resolution) and HDR. When your display and OS report HDR support, the HDR toggle lets bright spells bloom past white into your monitor's headroom; it's detected automatically and greyed out otherwise. Everything persists locally and applies live.

Desktop build

A native desktop app ships via Tauri (borderless fullscreen, F11 for true exclusive fullscreen):

npm run tauri:dev     # run the desktop app in dev
npm run tauri:build   # build a native installer

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Under the hood

Dreamtide is engineered to stay smooth when the screen is a wall of bodies, bullets and light. The interesting bits:

• Fixed-timestep simulation (60 Hz) with interpolated rendering. The sim is deterministic and stable under frame spikes; rendering runs at display refresh and draws every moving entity at a position interpolated between the last two sim steps.
• Zero steady-state allocation. Enemies, projectiles, boss bullets, zones, beams, bolts, gems and damage texts live in free-list pools with swap-remove compaction — no per-frame .filter(), no object churn in the hot path.
• Stamp-mask hit tracking. Per-cast hit sets are replaced by rented Uint32Array masks keyed by enemy slot; a globally unique stamp per effect means the arrays never need clearing.
• One spatial grid for everything. A single uniform grid rebuild per sim step routes every proximity query — zone ticks, beams, orbitals and projectile hit tests alike.
• WebGPU-only scene renderer. The whole world draws on one canvas in a handful of entity-count-independent draw calls:
  1. background — a fully procedural dreamscape shader (domain-warped nebula, aurora veils, three parallax star fields, drifting colour motes);
  2. shapes — spell zones, beams and lightning as instanced analytic SDF primitives (rings, discs, spirals, capsules), crisp at any radius;
  3. sprites — every entity and particle as one instanced quad from a baked procedural atlas, drawn in a single painter's-order pass where additive and source-over blending coexist in one pipeline;
  4. post — HDR (rgba16float) scene → threshold bloom mip-chain → filmic composite with vignette and dither, presented in SDR or true HDR. A thin full-resolution 2D overlay carries damage text, health bars, banners and the perf HUD.
• Procedural everything. Sprites are painted once with vector code at supersampled resolution and packed into a texture atlas; music and every sound effect are synthesised live via the Web Audio API, with adaptive scoring that swells and darkens with the danger on screen.
• Built-in profiler. Press F to show render FPS, 1% low FPS, simulation FPS, per-subsystem frame timings and live entity counts. Hide it again and a diagnostic JSON naming the observed bottleneck is downloaded and logged.

Stack: TypeScript · WebGPU · Web Audio · React (menus/HUD only) · Vite · Tauri (desktop). No game engine, no rendering library, no art or audio assets.

Save compatibility

Constellation progress is stored under dreamtide_meta_v4. Older dreamtide_meta_v3 saves (the fixed-price tree) migrate automatically on first load: every coin ever spent is refunded in full, both webs stay revealed, and points become the new currency for stars.