Discipline

v1.2 — "The Look" is out now. Every body of water moves, the distance fogs out in the colour of the hour, the light knows where you are, and you can draw figures on the ground. There is a Linux build for the first time. Full patch notes are in the devlog.

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DISCIPLINE is an isometric action-RPG set in a grey harbour world — three towns, the roads between them, and the dark underneath all of it.

You get one life. Death is permanent and it is the point. Your coin, your rank and everything you were carrying die with you. What survives is what you learned: knowledge carries across lives, so the next one begins wiser rather than richer.

The world is on a curve, and you are the one moving it

This is the thing the game is built around. It opens grey, and raining, and close. As you climb, it opens with you — more light, more distance, more colour. But the dark is the floor, not the weather. It never fully lifts, however far you get.

So the light is not decoration. It is a direction. Towns are clear and comfortable, somewhere to stand around in. The open road is deliberately the brightest thing in the game, because once you have found your feet, outside should look better than the room you left. Then the pockets close in, and the deeps are dark and stay dark. If somewhere looks sharp and cold, that is the world telling you something true.

A rank is something you survive, not something you reach

You pick a discipline and climb it. There are thirteen — some you can walk into a guild and sign for, and some that are not advertised anywhere. Ranking up is a rite, and the thing that comes for you during it gets worse as you climb, not merely more numerous.

The world also runs on a clock, and night is not a filter over the day. It is a different set of rules. Things glow after dark that are invisible at noon — some worth having, some looking for you.

Magic you leave behind

You can draw figures on the ground. A figure keeps working after you have walked away from it, which makes it the one kind of power here that is about where you put it rather than what you press. Like everything else, it dies with the life that drew it.

Where this is going

The ceiling of this world does not rise on a patch schedule. It rises as the people playing it get further. New ranks are written into the game ahead of time and opened when the community reaches them — so how deep the world goes is a thing that gets earned collectively, not handed out on a release date.

This game has an ending, and it is already planned. It is not an early-access project that will quietly trail off — there is a finished version at the end of the road, the road to it is mapped, and everything that ships between now and then is a step along it. More shore, more water, more of what is under the map, and then a last version that closes it.

No date on that. But the destination is not a maybe.

Sparring

Separate from all of it. Fight the Shade who keeps the ring, or duel another person over the internet with a ring code. Nothing there touches your life — no gain, no loss, no record. Just the fight.

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Before you download

Windows will warn on first run because this build is unsigned — click More info, then Run anyway.

If you have the itch.io desktop app, install it through that. It handles updates for you, and there will be updates.

Free, and in development. It plays end to end and it is meant to be finished, but it is still being built, and it still has edges. Bug reports are the whole point of this being here.