Flatline

The city never sleeps. Neither does the trace.

FLATLINE is a neon-soaked netrunner roguelite. Walk a rain-slicked city of rival corporations, street gangs and cults. Break into their towers, find a terminal, and jack in. Then dive layer after layer through their network, grabbing data shards before their ICE, and the trace, catch up with you.

Three ways to play in one run

• The city. A big scrolling cyberpunk district with traffic, locals who trade rumours, and 12 locations: corporate towers, gang dens, underground collectives, housing blocks and your safehouse.
• The towers. Side-scrolling break-ins across multi-floor buildings. Dodge guard vision cones, sentry dogs, turrets and tripwires. Shoot open reinforced doors, lift the keycard from security, and reach the high-access terminals tucked away in locked rooms.
• The dive. A top-down descent through the target's net. Pulse ICE with your buddy daemon's EMP, chain shards into combos, push and shatter data blocks, dodge wall sections that slide in and out, and pick a run upgrade at every portal. Extract at an uplink, or lose everything you're carrying when you get traced.

Features

• 8 factions: 4 corporations, 2 street gangs and 2 underground collectives, each with its own tower, security and ICE. Plus 2 housing blocks full of residents to hack.
• Home hacks. Break into residents' home networks to steal intel on their employers: ID badges, service keys, backdoors, ghost protocols and cache maps.
• Infiltration. Keep working a faction and its doors start opening for you.
• Run upgrades. Every portal offers 3 of 10 upgrades: overclock, shard magnet, hard shell, ghost step and more.
• Permanent progression. Spend banked shards on a five-branch skill tree at the fixer.
• A goal. Crack the Obsidian core ten layers down, then keep diving in endless mode.
• Original music, sound and a chatty buddy daemon.

Controls

WASD / arrows	move
Mouse / click	aim / fire
E	interact · EMP pulse (in dives)
Right-click	EMP pulse
Space	jump (towers) · extract on an uplink (dives)
P / Esc	pause & settings (use P in fullscreen)
F / M	fullscreen / mute

Best played in a desktop browser with keyboard and mouse. Your progress saves automatically.

Credits

Design, direction & testing: Allan Rowntree (arowx.com) Code & procedural generation: built with Claude (Anthropic) Art, animation, music, sound & voice: generated with Ludo.ai Type: Tektur, Orbitron & Share Tech Mono (SIL Open Font License)

FLATLINE grew out of an entry to the Ultimate AI-Powered Game Jam #2. This is an in-development build, so bug reports and feedback in the comments are very welcome.