Overview
What Greedwave is
Greedwave is a top-down 2D extraction shooter built in Unity. You pick one of three locations — a house in an overgrown yard, a roadside motel, or a fallen quarantine post — and hold it while the horde comes in through the exterior doors.
A run moves through six phases. Each phase raises the spawn rate and changes the mix of what walks in, so the pressure is not just heavier, it is different. A helicopter comes back five times along the way, and every landing asks whether you are done.
Everything you see is generated in code. The project ships no art or audio files: sprites, maps and sound effects are produced at runtime.
Core mechanic
The limiting resource is seconds, not boards
Boards are unlimited and one board already closes a door — the other three are only health. Closing every door in the house costs 4 seconds and boarding them all to full costs 16. The motel has ten doors: 8 seconds and 32. Both numbers are deliberately just short of enough while the horde is already walking in.
So the real question a barricade asks is not whether you can close the doors. It is which one you close.
Pathfinding
The horde decides whether the door is worth it
A barricade is not a wall, it is a price. The flow field converts both options into the same unit — time — and compares them: the plank health left on a door divided by the damage actually being piled onto it gives the seconds to break through, and those seconds times walking speed give the cells the horde could walk around instead.
Measured on the house: at the west door, where the detour is 20 cells, the horde comes through the boards. At the east door, where the detour is 6, it walks around — and the barricade did its job by redirecting rather than holding. A door already being chewed on gets cheaper as its planks go, so the horde commits to the weak point instead of milling about. A Brute counts as five Shamblers here, because what is weighed is damage, not bodies.
Enemies
Six silhouettes, read at a glance
Phase 1 is Shamblers alone — where you learn the weapon and the building. Runners join in phase 2, so spraying the crowd stops being enough and you have to pick targets. Brutes arrive in phase 3, and the barricade stops being a solution and becomes only time. The Colossus closes the run.
Shamblerthe baseline, phase 1 on
Runnercloses distance fast
Armoredplated from the front
Bloaterbursts at close range
Bruteworth five at a barricade
Colossusend-of-run boss
Loot
The pocket the HUD calls unsecured
Ammunition drops from 9% of kills, always from the family of the weapon in your hands, so the loot table teaches itself without a screen. Weapons drop from 4% and land visibly: a coloured piece on the floor you have to walk to and stand on.
The colour is the tier: Enhanced 85%, Rare 10%, Legendary 4%, Black Market 1%. Every roll shifts upward by four percentage points a phase, because the best loot has to arrive at the worst moment for the decision to mean anything.
All of it lands in the pocket, and the HUD labels it exactly that — POCKET (UNSECURED). Nothing you bought in the shop is ever at risk; the risk sits entirely on top of what this raid gave you. The longer you stay the more the pocket is worth, which is the same sentence as: the more leaving costs you.
Risk
Coin is only yours once you extract
Coin picked up during a raid sits in your pocket, not in the bank. Die and the run coin is gone; extract and it is banked. XP is kept either way, so a lost run still moves your account forward.
The helicopter lands five times across a run — once in every phase but the first. The early windows stay open for 25 seconds, the last one for 75. Each map has three landing pads and you do not know which it will use.
You do not know which bird is coming either: the intermediate windows roll between the unarmed transport and the gunship. The final window is always the gunship — and if you miss it, the run has no exit left.
Loadout
Four answers to four different problems
A barricade buys time, a turret buys firepower, a grenade reverses a position you have already lost. The three grenades say three different things: frag is 130 damage in a 3.6 m circle and it burns you too, gas lays a cloud that sits for 6 seconds and bites twice a second, and lure deals no damage at all — it steals the target of every zombie within 12 m for 8 seconds. Lure is the most expensive of the three precisely because it sells the thing the other two cannot.
The fourth is the signal flare, one per raid: it calls a gunship to where it lands for thirty seconds of rockets and strafing. It is the most expensive consumable in the shop and the only one that answers with an aircraft instead of a blast radius.
Six weapons carry all of it — pistol, SMG, shotgun, rifle, AK-47 and minigun — bought and upgraded with coin you actually got out with.
Pistol
SMG
Shotgun
Rifle
AK-47
Minigun
Multiplayer
Co-op for up to four players
Rooms are hosted through a Go lobby and relay server. Each player boards the helicopter independently: one player leaving does not split or delete another player’s coin, and teammates can extract at different times.
Platforms
Free, in your browser
The browser build is the full game and needs no install — no download, no account to start. An iOS build is being prepared for review, and Android is planned after it.
The Windows desktop build is paused for now. It exists and it works, but it is not being published while the browser version is the one getting the attention.
There are no ads, no tracking, no analytics and no third-party SDKs. Progress is stored against your account on the server so it follows you between devices.
In development
What is not built yet
This is a playable demo and it is worth being precise about the edges. The signal system — where the noise you make would drive both the horde and the loot table — is not in yet: the HUD shows the meter and the weapons accumulate it, but nothing reads it. Until it lands, the phase number stands in when loot tiers are rolled.
The horde does not adapt to how you play yet either, and rarity says how rarely a weapon dropped rather than that it behaves differently. Also missing: a skill tree to spend levels on, banking a looted weapon at settlement, and an Android build.
Screenshots
