Launchway
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Six at the Gate

Three gates stand between you and the keep. Nobody new comes to fill the gaps.

Six at the Gate
Works on phone, tablet and desktop · No download · No account

What it is

You lead a warband of six against three defended gates: the outer gate, the inner gate and the keep, and night falls as you push in. You control the hero directly. There is no selecting units and nothing to build: where you stand is how you give orders, and the warband attacks whatever you’re nearest.

Each gate is held in beats. A picket is sent out to meet you, a line stands in front of the gate, and a reserve commits once more than half of that line has fallen. The gate itself can’t be touched while any of its line still stands. Where a gate has a captain, the defenders near him swing faster, and cutting him down sags the line.

Nobody new joins

Whoever is still standing walks to the next gate with you, healed. You recover 8.5% of your strength for each one of them, so the warband is your health as much as your army. Your own fallen stay where they fell, with a soft gold ring pulsing over each. Walk over one and you take what they carried, 7.5% of your strength, once. A defender leaves nothing.

The dead stay dead unless you choose otherwise. Rouse, a boon at a gate, stands one of the fallen up at half strength; the Horn, a relic, brings one back at the first gate; the Returning, a warband, brings one back at every gate. Anyone brought back stays wounded through the next gate, while the living are healed whole.

Hold or send

Held, your soldiers keep together, and each can be set upon by only one defender at a time. Sent, they push out to engage, hit 60% harder and move faster, and two can set upon each of them. A shieldbearer is only ever set upon by one. Its raised guard turns most of a frontal blow until enough blows wear it through and it breaks, and a guard left alone recovers.

Between gates, and between assaults

At every gate you take, three boons are offered, such as recovering your strength, hitting harder, taking less, or a rank in a skill you already have. The three lean toward what you need. A boon lasts the assault, and you can always press on without taking one.

Your hero carries what they learned from one assault to the next, and the warband doesn’t. Heroes level up, and each has three skills to put points into, three ranks each, with something new at the third rank. Taking the points back is free.

Who you bring

The warband screen is where you choose. A hero: the Breaker charges through the line, the Warden plants a great shield that arrows die on, and the Pyre burns ground rather than bodies. The ground: from the open Field to a raised causeway with nothing either side, or a shore with the sea on one flank. The warband itself: the Six, or later the Many, the Few, the Kindled or the Returning. Who walks in it: spearmen at first, reliable in the line, and then, as you reach further, berserkers (who kill fastest and die fastest), shieldbearers and skirmishers (who fight from behind the line and cannot hold one). And one relic to carry.

Every ground is held by a people who change a rule, not a number. The Hollow have no captain to cut down, and every body is harder. The Tide send their whole reserve at once, and early. The Rooks are almost all bows, and they slide along the wall. Cutting down the Vow’s captain makes the rest hit harder. The checkpoint tells you who holds the next gate, and their rule, before you get there, and your standing on the title screen grows with every ground you hold.

How to play

  • MoveDrag in the lower left
  • Your hero’s own moveThe big button, bottom right
  • Hold the line, or send themHold / Send
  • PauseThe button, top right

A stick appears under your thumb. The big button is named for your hero’s move, such as Charge or Plant: hold and release it for the Breaker’s Charge, and tap it for the others. The two buttons beside it are your hero’s other skills, once learned. At a gate you’ve taken, tap a boon if you want one, then Press on. To choose a hero, a ground, a warband, a relic and who walks with you, tap Choose your warband on the title screen, or Change warband after a run; they appear once there’s something to choose. The pause menu has Back to it, Sound, Flashing, Music and Start over, and the game pauses itself when you switch away.

On a desktop, W A S D or the arrow keys move you. Space is your hero’s own move (hold it to wind up the Charge), E and R are the other two skills, Q or either Shift holds or sends, 1, 2 and 3 take a boon at a gate, and P pauses and resumes. With the mouse, press and drag in the lower left to move, and click the buttons.

What isn’t settled yet

One ground per assault. A run is the three gates of the ground you chose, and nothing carries between runs except your hero’s levels and what you’ve opened.

You lead; you don’t steer. The warband follows you, held or sent, and no soldier can be picked out and given an order of its own.

No gamepad, and keys can’t be remapped.

It isn’t playable with a screen reader. The world is drawn, not written out.

Build Log

  1. Build 82

    The title screen told the Ronin and the Pyre to “loose through the file”, which is the Huntsman’s move. The hint had a line for each move it knew and gave the Huntsman’s to any it didn’t, and both heroes arrived after it was written. Each hero now carries its own line.

  2. Build 78

    The Few are four soldiers, and each holds two attackers. Four stronger bodies alone weren’t enough. Each held soldier is set upon by only one defender, so four took four of the line and the rest fell on the hero. Holding two each is what lets a smaller warband shield you the way six do. They hit hard enough that the four together deal what six do.

  3. Build 76

    Your own fallen now leave something behind. Walk over one and you recover 7.5% of your strength, once. A defender leaves nothing. It is deliberately less than the 8.5% each living soldier is worth at every gate, so losing people is never the efficient way to heal. The body stays, with a gold ring pulsing over it, until you take what it carried or press on.

  4. Build 65

    A run left in another tab kept the wind blowing. The frame loop stops on its own when a page is hidden, but the ambience is a looping buffer source and buffers do not care what is on screen. Audio suspends on visibilitychange and closes on pagehide, which unlike unload still fires on mobile.

Earlier builds (4)
  1. Build 53

    Damage numbers drew larger than the figures that threw them. They were sprites living in world space, so a hit near the camera scaled up with everything else. They are pinned to a fixed fraction of the screen now: a damage number is text that happens to be positioned in the world, not an object in it.

  2. Build 14

    Sound, synthesised rather than sampled: oscillators and a single noise buffer, so it adds no weight to the file and nothing to download.

  3. Build 12

    Staggered the warband's durability across the roster. Six identical bodies engage together, take identical damage and die together: at one value nobody died all run, and a little lower the entire warband vanished inside four seconds. There is no number between those two outcomes, so the fix was to stop making them identical.

  4. Build 8

    The focus ring now draws over everything. It was logically correct and completely invisible: at this camera angle the body it marks stands on top of it. A marker that exists to prevent confusion, causing exactly the confusion it existed to prevent.

Credits and licences

Built on three.js, used under the MIT licence with the copyright notice retained in the shipped file. Typefaces are the ones already on your device; nothing is downloaded. Cover drawn from the game’s own 3D castle, warband and battle code.

Six at the Gate is original work by Launchway Games.