HEXWIRE

Turn-based cyberpunk strategy tactics for iPhone and iPad

Take the contract. Build the crew. Burn the signal. Get out before the city learns your name.

The World · The Crew · Combat · Modes · Build · Atlas

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The city is listening

The city sold its nervous system to the highest bidder.

Every camera is awake. Every transit gate keeps a memory. Every corporate district is a sealed machine built to recognize the wrong face at the wrong time. Data brokers trade reputations like ammunition. Private security responds before the law knows a crime happened. Somewhere above the rain, an executive dashboard is turning human movement into risk scores.

You are not here to fix that system.

You are here to rob it.

HexWire is a turn-based cyberpunk strategy tactics game built around small-team infiltration, authored multi-room operations, persistent consequences, and a combat economy where speed creates exposure. You command a crew of specialists across a hex-grid battlefield, spend scarce actions to break hostile positions, extract before the network closes around you, and carry the consequences into the next job.

The fantasy is not invincibility. It is competence under pressure.

A clean mission pays. A loud mission pays faster. A reckless mission changes what the city sends after you next.

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Four runners. One bad plan.

A HexWire crew is built from four complementary archetypes. None of them owns the battlefield alone; the game lives in the space between their abilities.

Runner	Function	Battlefield identity
Street Samurai	Frontline pressure	Closes distance, absorbs risk, and turns positional advantage into decisive force.
Mage	Arcane control	Shapes contested space, punishes clustered threats, and bends the encounter outside ordinary rules.
Decker	Signal warfare	Exploits the network, accelerates tactical plays, and makes the fastest path the most dangerous one.
Face	Social and support leverage	Keeps the operation coherent, creates openings, and converts preparation into survival.

The crew moves as a single operational system. Positioning, initiative, room sequencing, damage, extraction, economy, and persistence all feed forward. A mistake in one room becomes the shape of the next.

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Every turn leaves a trace

At the center of HexWire is a pressure loop built around two ways of acting:

STREET

Reliable. Controlled. Slow enough to disappear inside the noise.

Street actions resolve without increasing trace. They preserve operational safety but surrender tempo to the opposition.

SIGNAL

Fast. Powerful. Visible.

Signal actions create immediate tactical leverage while raising your trace level. Push it too far and the hostile network escalates: enemy awareness hardens, incoming damage increases, and the mission begins charging interest on every shortcut you took.

LAY LOW

You can reduce trace, but there is no free reset. Laying low consumes a full turn. The crew survives by deciding when tempo matters more than safety—and when one more aggressive action will turn a winning position into a collapse.

Signal → Power → Trace → Escalation → Lay Low → Tempo Tradeoff

Trace is not a cosmetic alert meter. It is the combat clock the player chooses to wind.

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The shape of a run

Every operation follows a tactical rhythm:

1. Take the contract — enter an authored story mission, side contract, arena, or gauntlet run.
2. Read the room — study walls, lanes, enemy positions, initiative, objectives, and extraction conditions.
3. Commit the crew — move across the hex grid, attack, cast, hack, support, or sacrifice tempo to reduce exposure.
4. Clear forward — move through connected rooms while carrying damage, pressure, and mission state with you.
5. Hit the objective — acquire data, eliminate resistance, survive the encounter logic, or satisfy the mission gate.
6. Reach extraction — physically move a runner onto the armed extraction tile and resolve the operation.
7. Live with it — collect nuyen, preserve progression, alter faction attention, upgrade the crew, and decide what risk comes next.

Victory is not simply killing the final enemy. The job ends when the crew gets out.

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Authored campaigns, unstable replays

HexWire currently contains six machine-certified multi-room story missions, supported by scene-driven interstitial operations and repeatable combat modes.

Story operations

Each mission is built as a connected room graph with authored enemies, boss or unique slots, objective logic, extraction conditions, payout, defeat handling, replay behavior, and save/resume persistence.

The story campaign is designed to feel deliberate rather than procedurally anonymous: rooms have authored tactical intent, while seeded replay rerolls vary ordinary opposition without replacing bosses, unique encounters, or mission structure.

Interstitial operations

Between major missions, the campaign shifts format through scene-driven encounters including:

• Mirrorline
• The Drop
• Basement Brawl
• Cold Trace

These sequences widen the fiction beyond the standard combat board while still routing rewards and objectives through the same authoritative progression system.

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The work never ends

The campaign is only one layer of the city.

Mode	What it does
Side Contracts	Tiered operations generated from the contract board, built for repeatable risk and progression.
Arenas	Twenty validated combat spaces selected through seeded contract generation.
Endless Gauntlet	Escalating floors, shifting enemy composition, persistent best-floor tracking, and failure that sends the crew back to floor one.
Seeded Replay	Rerolls standard opposition while preserving authored structure, boss identity, positions, and mission logic.
New Game+	Carries the campaign forward into a higher-pressure progression cycle.

The persistent layer includes nuyen, black-market access, cyberware, faction heat, mission completion, replay state, and campaign scaling. The city remembers both success and attention.

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Tactical identity

HexWire is built around a specific kind of strategy:

• Turn-based, not twitch-based — the player has time to read the board, but every action changes the pressure state.
• Position-first combat — walls, lanes, movement budgets, room topology, and extraction placement determine what is possible.
• Small-team synergy — runners are designed as interlocking roles rather than isolated damage engines.
• Objective-driven missions — combat is part of the operation, not always the complete operation.
• Persistent consequence — rewards, faction attention, upgrades, campaign progress, and replay state survive beyond the room.
• Deterministic authority — identical inputs and seeded conditions resolve consistently, making tactics testable rather than theatrical.

The intended feeling is a cyberpunk heist collapsing one measured decision at a time.

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Under the neon

HexWire is an iOS-native game built with:

Layer	Technology
Application and campaign UI	SwiftUI
Tactical battlefield	SpriteKit
Core language	Swift 5.9
Project generation	XcodeGen 2.46.0
Minimum deployment target	iOS 17.0
Supported devices	iPhone and iPad
Build validation	GitHub Actions on macOS

The gameplay architecture follows one hard rule:

GameState is the single gameplay authority.

SwiftUI and SpriteKit do not independently decide outcomes. Presentation surfaces emit intents through the game-intent and combat-flow seams, then render the authoritative result. This prevents animation, touch handling, or scene timing from silently becoming a second rules engine.

flowchart LR
    P[Player input] --> I[Game intents]
    I --> G[GameState authority]
    G --> C[Combat and mission systems]
    C --> G
    G --> S[SpriteKit battlefield]
    G --> U[SwiftUI campaign UI]
    G --> V[Persistence and progression]

Loading

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Current state

HexWire is a stabilized vertical slice, not yet a finished App Store release.

The current repository includes:

• Six certified multi-room story missions
• Scene-driven interstitial missions
• Deterministic combat and seeded replay behavior
• Twenty validated arenas
• Side-contract tiers 1–3
• Gauntlet progression across the tested scaling band
• Persistent economy, campaign, and upgrade state
• iPhone and iPad layouts
• Debug and Release simulator builds
• Unsigned release archive generation
• Hosted CI on every pull request and push to main

Remaining release work is concentrated around the owner’s real-device pass, ship configuration, signing, and App Store metadata. See plans.md for the active release frontier.

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Jack in

Requirements

• macOS
• Xcode with an iOS 17+ SDK
• XcodeGen 2.46.0

Generate the project

xcodegen generate

HexWire.xcodeproj is generated from project.yml. After adding or removing files, regenerate and commit the project. CI rejects project drift.

Build

xcodebuild \
  -project HexWire.xcodeproj \
  -scheme HexWire \
  -destination 'platform=iOS Simulator,name=iPhone 17' \
  build

Test

xcodebuild \
  -project HexWire.xcodeproj \
  -scheme HexWire \
  -destination 'platform=iOS Simulator,name=iPhone 17' \
  test

For repeated test runs, pre-boot the simulator to avoid cold-launch instability:

xcrun simctl boot <udid> || true
xcrun simctl bootstatus <udid> -b

Launch directly into a mission

Debug builds honor SR_AUTOSTART_MISSION_ID:

SR_AUTOSTART_MISSION_ID=Mission003

Use Mission001 through Mission006 to bypass campaign navigation and enter a mission directly.

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Validation is part of the design

HexWire treats gameplay claims as executable obligations.

The hosted hexwire-ci workflow checks:

Gate	Coverage
Repository hygiene	Nested repositories, tracked build output, user state, backup projects, and stray workspaces
Mission data	JSON validity and unique mission identifiers
Asset safety	Duplicate runtime asset-name detection
Project reproducibility	XcodeGen regeneration and drift rejection
Deterministic tests	Combat, authority, economy, persistence, missions, replay modes, and player movement semantics
Device matrix	Debug and Release builds for iPhone and iPad simulators
Archive path	Unsigned generic-iOS Release archive
Resource integrity	Missing-resource warning gate

The authoritative status signal is the live CI badge at the top of this README. Historical documents may contain older test-count snapshots; green CI on main is the current truth surface.

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Repository atlas

Hexwire/
├── Game/                         # Intents, combat flow, authority-facing systems
├── Missions/                     # Authored mission JSON
├── Sprites/                      # SpriteKit runtime art
├── Assets.xcassets/              # Asset catalog
├── tests/                        # Deterministic and certification suites
├── docs/
│   ├── TraceSystem.md            # Signal, trace, escalation, and Lay Low loop
│   ├── architecture/             # Extraction and authority architecture
│   ├── audit/                    # Build, test, mission, persistence, and repo evidence
│   └── archive/                  # Superseded historical material
├── .github/workflows/            # Hosted CI
├── project.yml                   # Canonical XcodeGen specification
├── AGENTS.md                     # Contributor and coding-agent rules
└── plans.md                      # Current verified baseline and next actions

Start here

Document	Purpose
plans.md	Current mission, verified baseline, blockers, and next actions
AGENTS.md	Repository workflow and authority invariants
docs/TraceSystem.md	The Street / Signal / Trace pressure system
docs/audit/MissionCertificationMatrix.md	Evidence for missions, arenas, contracts, gauntlet, and extraction semantics
docs/audit/GameStateAuthorityMutationLedger.md	Gameplay authority and mutation boundaries
docs/audit/PersistenceCertificationReport.md	Save, migration, corruption, and resume evidence
docs/architecture/StabilizationExtractionMap.md	Current system decomposition and deferred extraction candidates

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Operating rules

Contributions should preserve four invariants:

1. GameState remains the gameplay authority.
2. Presentation layers emit intents and render results; they do not invent outcomes.
3. Mission, replay, progression, and persistence behavior must remain deterministic under controlled seeds.
4. No completed claim is accepted without a test, build receipt, runtime evidence, or an explicit NOT_COMPUTABLE boundary.

Read AGENTS.md before changing combat flow, mission state, persistence, project structure, or generated Xcode files.

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The signal makes you powerful. The trace makes you mortal.

HexWire — turn-based cyberpunk strategy tactics for iOS.