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Neon Rebirth

A procedural arcade shooter for Mac. Every run is generated from a seed, every sprite is drawn at runtime, and nothing in it is built to pull you back.

Year
2026
Track
built
Category
game

Tools

  • Swift
  • SpriteKit

Fifteen minutes of undivided attention, and the game notices. No daily streaks, no energy timers, no loot boxes. Nothing buzzes to pull you back. The reward for playing well is that the game gets more interesting.

Hold your nerve across a sector and the fleet answers with more intricate formations, never with a bigger multiplier. There is no meter for this and nothing congratulates you for it. You notice it in the enemy.

Every run is built when you press engage. Formations, enemy rosters, wave modifiers, boss silhouettes, cover and the sector's own name are generated from a seed. Same seed, same fleet: share the code and someone else flies exactly what you flew. There are no image files in the game at all. Every sprite is drawn at runtime and every sound effect is synthesised.

The modes run from a training drill with no score and no record, through a five sector quick strike, to an endless protocol with no end state where the fleet scales until it wins. A daily signal gives everyone one seed and one score a day. Clear a sector and you take a card: sixteen upgrades with real levels behind them, and six hidden pairings that change what the ship fundamentally is. Six anomalies each have a rule you either learn or do not get past. The sentinel hides behind a rotating shield ring you have to time a shot through, the colossus is an immobile fortress you strip plate by plate, and the swarmlord is fragile and never stops spawning. Four tiers sit under all of it, from recruit, where cover is scenery and the parry window forgives, to blackout, where bunkers are solid walls you pay core to dash through.

Native Swift and SpriteKit. Full controller support, including adaptive trigger resistance and haptics on DualSense, plus keyboard and mouse. Three palettes and an original adaptive score that follows the fight bar by bar. No ads, no in-app purchases, no accounts, no analytics. The app ships without network entitlements, so it cannot phone home and it plays on a plane.

Out now on the Mac App Store.

Screens

  1. The seed is printed on the briefing panel before the run exists. Everything past engage comes out of it.
  2. The game in the Neon Tokyo palette. Cyan and magenta, a city skyline behind a grid floor running to the horizon, a formation of twenty enemies above four bunkers and the ship at the bottom.
    The palette the menu opens on. It sets the whole screen, not just the ship.
  3. Sector eight cleared, and the run stops to offer three upgrade cards: siphon, escort drone and lodestone. Each card carries its rarity, its level and what it changes. Two rerolls left.
  4. A boss called Analogue God fills the top of the screen, tagged fortified and armoured, with a line of recovered log text burning across the grid below it.
  5. The same boss in a later run with its armour gone. The words core exposed sit across its middle and the shell around the core has gone white.
    Fortified, then armour stripped, then core exposed. The screen tells you the rule while you are fighting it.
  6. A second boss, Null Chorus, tagged drift and armoured. A magenta fortress sitting inside a wireframe cage with an orbit ring drawn around it, small escorts spread either side.
  7. The third palette. Amber and black, rain falling across a city skyline, a formation of orange enemies above three bunkers and the ship alone at the bottom.
    Night City, the third of them. Rain and amber over a skyline, where the others put a grid.
  8. A finished run. Sector network cleared, a score called a new record, and a row of figures under it for sectors, kills, accuracy, best chain, grazes, parries and time.
  9. A run that ended early. Signal lost in red over the amber palette, a line saying the fleet holds sector five, and the same row of figures under a smaller score.
Open

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