Brainstorm Labs

Reactor Drone

Early prototype build

A top-down neon arena survival shooter built in C++17 and SDL3 on a hand-rolled ECS engine. You fly a maintenance drone inside a reactor, mouse-aiming against ring-spawned waves, banking credits from loot and spending them between waves on permanent upgrades. A 50-wave run spans nine arenas across four themes — Core, Foundry, Bio-lab, and Prism — ending in Singularity, a black-hole map the final boss transforms the arena into. Bosses appear every 10 waves, themed per arena; killing one grants a choice of three active abilities. Two difficulties are available.

Download

All three builds are early prototypes and are being prepared now. Windows is furthest along; Linux and macOS follow. Check back soon.

Screenshots

The drone firing into an early wave of enemy drones in the Core arena A close dogfight at 24% hull in the Core arena Enemy drones converging across the Core arena grid A different wave layout with tracer fire crossing the arena

How to play

Each run spawns waves of enemies in rings around the arena. Between waves an upgrade panel opens, with a full shop appearing every fifth wave, covering eight upgrade lines: hull, shields, thrusters, fire rate, damage, extra shots, projectile range, and ricochet. Score accumulates across runs and unlocks new ships. Runs can be saved from the pause menu.

Arrows / WASDMove
MouseAim (hold to fire)
SpaceThruster dash, damages what you pass through, 10s cooldown
ESCPause
1–8Buy / equip in shop
TAB / BChange shop page / launch

Installing

  1. Download the installer and run it.
  2. Because the installer is unsigned, Windows SmartScreen may warn you — click "More info", then "Run anyway".
  3. The game installs to Program Files with a Start-menu shortcut.
  4. Uninstall from Windows Settings → Apps.

System requirements