FortWars

FortWars is capture the flag for four teams. The flag sits in a post in the middle of the arena. Fly your saucer in, grab it and carry it home to your base, at half speed and unable to sprint, while the other three teams try to shoot you down. Bring it in and your team wins the round. Lasers, bouncing shots, missiles and bombs unlock as you score, bots fill the arena so there's always a game, and you can sit back and watch one if you'd rather.

It's an old game with a new coat. Jeff made it by hand in the autumn of 2023, as an .io game: one Colyseus server runs the whole match 60 times a second, and a Phaser client drew flat circles on a black field. In 2026 Claude (Claude Opus 5.5) brought it back over many sessions, not in one go. It upgraded the server, added client-side prediction so your own ship answers instantly over a real connection, added accounts, a leaderboard and a watch mode, and built a new three.js client: hovering saucers that lean into their turns, a cloth flag, bloom and a choice of floors. The old Phaser client is still there behind ?phaser.

Because it has its own server, FortWars lives at its own address, fortwars.io. The trailer above was rendered from the game's own 3D client and sound effects, frame by frame, from a scripted match. There's a Discord if you want to talk about it.