GridLocust

1. Download the zip and unpack it anywhere. Keep the folder together: the exe needs the files next to it.
2. Run GridLocust.exe.
3. Windows may warn you about an unrecognized publisher. This build is not signed yet. Choose More info, then Run anyway.
4. It opens borderless at your desktop resolution. Change that under Visuals in the main menu.

Windows 64-bit, keyboard and mouse. No installer, no account, no launcher, and nothing else to install.

Controls, rules, and how to play a maze you designed yourself are below. More at gridlocust.com.

Controls

Your hero.

• WASD to move. The camera keeps the center of the maze toward the top of the screen and your movement follows the camera, so up is always inward.
• Left Shift to run, F to dash.
• Left mouse casts whatever you have equipped.
• Stand next to a neutral vent to raise a gateway on it. There is no key for this one: a ring on the ground marks how close you have to be, and it fills while you are inside it.
• Space to interact: pull a lever, open a door you hold the keycard for.
• Escape pauses, and also puts your weapon back in hand.
• R restarts a map once it has ended.

Your kit. Keys 4 and 5 equip, they do not fire. Press the key, then click.

• 4 equips your bolt: free, unlimited, and what you hold by default.
• 5 equips the barricade. Click to raise a ridge of earth that blocks turret fire, for 10 tickets. It blocks your own team's shots too, and your bolt is holstered while it is equipped, so press 4 to take it back.
• 6 releases the scouts and fires the moment you press it. Widens what you can see for a few seconds, for 5 tickets.
• 7 drinks a health potion, 8 a ticket potion. Both go off on the keypress.

Your teams. One team is on the field at a time.

• 1 and 2 pick which one it is. Pressing the other number is the switch: the team you had dissolves back into the gateway and returns what it cost, and the new one climbs out of the gateway nearest you. It needs a gateway standing, and pressing the team you already have does nothing.
• Nothing else calls a team in. Bodies you lose are bought back out of the pool on their own while a gateway stands, a few at a time. The bar under the team chip is that clock.
• Right click a turret, a relay, a hub or a wall and the team commits to it, however far away it is.
• Right click open ground and the team goes there.
• Q yanks everyone back to you and drops what they were doing, orders included. They stay slow to re-engage for about five seconds.
• Given no orders, a team follows you. An order whose target sits off screen for four seconds is cancelled and that team comes home, so keep what you ordered in frame.

Rules and numbers

The map ends when the hub in the middle falls.

Gateways. Stand inside the ring around a neutral vent and the gateway raises itself over about eight seconds, free. Walk out and it sinks again at the same rate; a live Grid unit inside the ring holds it where it is; your beasts count for neither. A standing gateway pays you twelve tickets a minute, is where your team comes out, and heals you and your beasts next to it. That is the whole economy, so take vents early and hold them. A vent you have opened stays open: the Grid never comes back for it.

Tickets. The pool holds a hundred and the gateways fill it. Fielding a team buys every body in it, and a body you lose is bought back on its own while a gateway stands, in the order they fell, the first one the pool cannot cover holding up the rest. Switching teams refunds the bodies still standing and buys the new team whole, so a switch costs you whatever the two teams differ by. You lose the map when you have no tickets, nothing alive, and nothing left to earn from: no gateway, no vent you could still take, no cache on the ground and no potion on your belt. Any one of those keeps you in it.

Turrets. Peashooters shoot over walls. Flamethrowers saturate a short cone, so stay out of the front of one. Tesla coils chain through walls and stun. Repulsors knock your team back and stagger them. Mine layers keep the corridors beside them seeded. Trip an alarm and the Grid sends droids.

Caches. Walk your hero over one and it goes on your belt as a potion on key 7 or 8. A drink that would be wasted is refused and the potion kept, so you cannot lose one by pressing the key too early.

Your own mazes

The mazes you build in the editor play here. Download the JSON from the editor, then on the main menu press LOAD MAZE. That page lists every maze you have added, each under its own title and description, and launches the one you pick.

To add one, press OPEN FOLDER on that same page. The game creates the folder if it is missing and opens it for you, so there is no path to type. Drop the .json in, switch back to the game, and it is in the list: the page rereads the folder every time the window comes back into focus.

If you would rather go there yourself, the folder is C:\Users\you\AppData\LocalLow\Tendrils Foundry\GridLocust\CustomLevels.

A maze this build cannot play is still listed, marked UNLOADABLE, with the reason where its description would be, so a file that is too new or malformed tells you what is wrong instead of quietly missing. Your own mazes are tracked separately from the campaign, so one named after a chapter can never mark that chapter finished.

This build is early and it is being worked on. If something breaks or plays wrong, tell us on the Discord, or in the comments below.