VibeWars

Team arena PvP in the browser, after Guild Wars 1: two professions, eight skills on the bar, and real-time fights at 20 Hz, hosted by one player's browser.

▶ Play it now — build a character, test it on dummies in the Training Ground, then open your lobby (the lock in the title bar) and send its invite link to your friends. Nothing to install; see Play it.

A browser-based, minimalist, multiplayer PvP arena game mechanically inspired by Guild Wars 1 PvP — original implementation, original geometric visuals, no proprietary GW1 assets or code. Peer to peer: one player's browser tab hosts the lobby and runs the match, and friends open its invite link. No accounts, no database, no game server. Peers find each other through public Nostr relays (Trystero) and then talk over WebRTC, so the players in a lobby can see each other's IP address.

See docs/product/master-brief.md for the full product brief and sprint roadmap, and docs/adr/ for the decisions behind this repository (start with ADR-0001).

Play it

Requirements: a desktop browser, a keyboard and a mouse. VibeWars does not work on a phone or a touch-only tablet.

Open the GitHub Pages build: the latest release or the latest main. Every player is always in a lobby of your own. Open it (the lock in the title bar), press Copy invite link and send it; a friend opens the link, and the host's mode is the party's. The host's tab runs the match, so it has to stay open: if it closes, the lobby ends for everyone. The two builds keep separate saved characters.

In a match, the default keys are:

• Q W E R and A S D F: the eight skills on your bar.
• Arrow keys or a left click on the ground: move.
• Right click a foe, or Tab: target it. Space: attack.
• Esc: cancel what you are doing. F10: leave the match.

The Classic preset puts skills on 1 to 8 and moves with W A S D. Every key but Esc, Enter, F10 and the mouse can be changed in Options. Controls lists them all. Getting started walks through a first match, and the [?] button in the game opens the same Help.

To play your own build, run pnpm run dev (see Development), or pnpm run build and serve apps/web/dist from any static web server.

If devenv is unavailable, any Node 24 with pnpm@10 works — every command is a plain pnpm script (see package.json). This repository's own development was verified that way; see ADR-0007 for why.

What works today

• Real-time authoritative combat on a fixed 20 Hz tick, run by the host: movement, body blocking, line of sight, casting with activation and recharge, energy and adrenaline.
• Over 200 skills across all ten professions: Warrior, Ranger, Monk, Necromancer, Mesmer, Elementalist, Assassin, Ritualist, Paragon and Dervish (Skills and builds).
• Mechanics: conditions, hexes and enchantments, maintained enchantments, interrupts, area effects, projectiles, weapon auto-attacks and critical hits, knockdowns, spirits, wells, wards and traps, minions and pets, weapon sets, morale and resurrection (Combat basics, Equipment).
• Twelve original maps, picked by the lobby host, in seven modes: Annihilation, Kill Count, Priest Annihilation, Guild Battle, Relic Run, King of the Hill and Capture Points.
• Random Arena: queue for a team size and get matched with other players on a random map (Getting started).
• Bots fill empty places in a lobby you host (Bots).
• Character builder with profession, attribute and equipment rules, saved in the browser, and the Training Ground beside it to try a bar on dummies. The host validates every build and hands an illegal one a starter build instead.
• Team Builds: teams of their own characters, for planning a roster (see the limits below).
• Music and sound, and a narrow-window layout.
• Robustness: a dropped player's character stays in the match for 30 seconds and the player can rejoin it; hostile input cannot crash the host (fuzz-tested).

Honest limits:

• A saved team is not taken into a match. Each player picks their own character; the lobby does not assign a team's slots to anyone. A team is a planning tool.
• A player in a lobby without a team stays in the lobby while the match runs; watching a match is not built yet.
• The host's tab runs the match: if it closes, the match ends for everyone.

Screenshots

Repository layout

apps/
  web/      Browser client (HTML/CSS shell + Phaser 4 viewport)
packages/
  game-core/      Pure domain logic: combat, skills, geometry, rules
  game-protocol/  The peer-to-peer wire contract
  game-maps/      Declarative arenas + loader/validator
  game-data/      GW1 reference-skill import pipeline + dev CLI
  game-session/   Peer-to-peer match sessions over a Transport (#15)
docs/
  product/master-brief.md   Product brief and sprint roadmap
  adr/                      Architectural Decision Records
  player/                   The player's guide, also the in-game Help
  art/                      Art direction and asset studies

game-core depends on nothing else in the workspace and never touches a socket, a renderer or a clock — which is what makes combat testable headlessly. See ARCHITECTURE.md.

Development

pnpm run dev      # the whole game, reloading as you edit

Opens the client on http://127.0.0.1:5173. Editing the client reloads the page; editing any package rebuilds it. Ctrl-C stops all the watchers. Two tabs of it can play each other: one hosts, the other joins.

The browser tests build the client with VITE_VIBEWARS_TRANSPORT=broadcast, so their peers are tabs of one browser and need no relay (see environment variables).

pnpm run ci       # format check, typecheck, lint, test, build
pnpm run test     # unit, integration, fuzz and headless simulation tests
pnpm run test:e2e # the browser tests, in a real Chromium (needs one installed)
pnpm run ci:full  # ci, then the browser tests

devenv test runs the same sequence. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Dev tools

pnpm --filter @vibewars/game-data run build
node packages/game-data/dist/run-cli.js skills      # inspect skills
node packages/game-data/dist/run-cli.js statuses    # conditions/hexes/enchantments
node packages/game-data/dist/run-cli.js coverage    # imported vs implemented
node packages/game-data/dist/run-cli.js duel elementalist.fireball ranger.troll-unguent

The duel runner simulates real combat headlessly and deterministically from a seed — useful for balance questions and for reproducing bugs.

Agent swarm

claude-llc auth     # sign in the company's own credentials, once
claude-llc-init     # check them, set up the board
claude-llc doctor   # what is signed in, and as whom
claude-llc          # start the company, and attach to it

VibeWars is built by a company of sandboxed Claude agents, one per role. Each runs in its own bubblewrap jail on its own git worktree, takes its work from a GitHub board, and coordinates with the others through a Telegram supergroup, one topic per role. The group doubles as a log and a remote control you can read on a phone. Why it is built this way: ADR-0014 and ADR-0015. What the host needs (cgroup delegation, user namespaces, credentials, tmux): Host prerequisites.

License

AGPL-3.0-or-later; the full text is in LICENSE. No proprietary Guild Wars assets, code or map geometry are included or depended on; the GW1 skill corpus used for reference is treated as reference data with recorded provenance, never a runtime dependency — see ADR-0004.