Amberwall

A Breaker rears at your bay, then veers away as if the wall were not there. Twenty seconds ago your crew bonded amber shell to that stone, and the monster cannot see its own shell.

Ashenvault is a city of blue stone walls on a plain of white ash. You are an engineer on Section Twelve of its eastern wall, in a Guild apron and tool belt over your own avatar. The Hollowborn come in circuits: scuttling Drones, huge Breakers that rear to ram, and Weavers that build arches. Sable Cray teaches the stress map and the bond, Fennick posts the day's work order in the Engineers' Guild Workshop, Tova scouts the ash, and Castellan Dorne rings the bell when the Signal peaks.

Each circuit has a Charge and a Lull. In the Charge you turn creatures aside with ballistas, steam vents and slick resin, firing a vent the instant a Breaker rears for a Turn-back, patching red bays and sounding the horn. Turned creatures shed plates on the apron below. In the Lull the scout slips out through the sally port to gather them, the bonder cures each plate at the Bench inside a two-degree window, the builder mounts panels where the next charge will strike, and the valve player cranks the Pressure back up. A Watch is eight circuits.

Cladding steers the tide. A bay covered in shell drops out of the Hollowborn's sight, so each charge goes to the most visible bay, and your crew decides which bay that is. Nothing is killed: your defenses wear down each creature's pull until its glow cools from gold to green, and it turns and walks home.

The design's first map is Section Twelve, with six bays, the Scar, the Cistern and Valve Seven, for one to four engineers per Watch, around a Workshop hub for 24. It also lays out the collapsed watchtower works, a stealth expedition to the Nest of a sleeping Matriarch, and Maximum Signal, a boss night on the Ashlands where the crew holds giant tuning forks around a spire of roots and shell.

Every plate you earn goes into the Plate Ledger, in five grades from Pale to Laminate. Rarity records what you did, not a roll: a Skull flake means you timed a Turn-back, a Laminate ring means the crew held the dampener at Maximum Signal, and your rarest plates show on the wall in every Watch. Mentors unlock by rank and lend one small perk each, Fennick's work order and the root braids growing in the Workshop beds bring you back, and a monthly Signal Night runs every Watch at its loudest.

Based on The Siege of Ashenvault by Elliot Cranmer: the shell the Hollowborn cannot see, the two-degree bond, the cure that cannot be rushed and an ending where the monsters stop and rest are all from the novel.

Amberwall is a finished game design for Roblox, and Greenlight Games is looking for a studio partner to build it.