A lone armored knight with a greatsword faces a towering gothic cathedral wreathed in hellfire, surrounded by skeletal undead and a giant winged demon, a glowing red sigil burning in the blood-red sky.

Concept art — vision piece, not in-engine
real screenshots below ↓

Top-down action RPG · gothic dark fantasy

Dreadmark

The mark spreads.

A grim, loot-driven action RPG for the player who reads a build sheet like a puzzle. Two playable classes so far — a sword-and-board Templar and a hex-weaving Witch, with more in development — each with three deep skill trees and dozens of build-altering runes, the best of them changing how a skill works rather than just how hard it hits. Real itemization, a corruption gamble that named the game, and combat where every telegraph tells the truth.

Wishlist on Steam See it in engine Join the Discord Explore the wiki
BUILD  v0.1.140 CLASSES  2 · more in dev SKILLS  45 · 191 runes AFFIX FAMILIES  50 STATUS  Playtest & tune

A holy order fell here, and something wears its cathedrals now. The mark is how the dark keeps score — carve through it, brand it back, and find out how far down the corruption goes.

The pillars

Kill, loot, build, descend

Classic ARPG bones — visceral combat, real loot, deep builds — built in Unity 6 and tuned for readable, weighty combat.

01 — COMBAT

Two classes, forty-five skills, and every hit earns its weight

Melee arcs, channels, dashes, lobs, novas, summons, a blink, a gravity well — 45 skills across thirteen cast shapes between the two classes, each fed by its own generator/spender resource. Five damage types with live ailments — ignite, chill, freeze, shock, stacking poison — flowing both ways. Every telegraph is honest: red is theirs, blue is yours, a swing can genuinely miss, and a dodge roll with true i-frames is always an answer.

Generator/spenderHonest telegraphsHit & miss
02 — BUILDS

Six skill trees, one build that's yours

Each class owns three deep trees — the Templar's Warfare, Sanctity and Retribution; the Witch's Maledictions, Pestilence and Ruination — 170 nodes of actives, passives and keystone build-definers, five keystones a tree. Then the rune layer: most skills carry three or more runes, and the best of them change what a skill does — projectiles that chain or pierce, hazards left burning on the ground, a summon squad rebuilt into a tank, a curse detonated for a burst. Power always pays: a runed skill trades, never just gains.

6 disciplines30 keystones191 runes
03 — LOOT

Itemization that rewards a theorycrafter

50 affix families rolling up to five tiers deep, gated by where they dropped. Eight crafting currencies to reroll, upgrade, or wipe a piece clean — and the Dread Sigil: a corruption gamble that brands an item with power beyond any normal roll, or ruins it. Named uniques, Magic Find, and flasks that carry their own affixes. Every number is in the wiki.

Affix depthCorruption gamble11 uniques
04 — ENEMIES

Packs with affixes of their own

The dead roll mods too: magic and rare enemy packs draw from 50 monster affixes — elemental attackers, blink-strikers, summoners, volatile death-pools, auras that harden the whole pack. Five named minibosses with hand-built kits stand between you and the Cathedral, where the Dark Lord waits through three phases under one long moonlit night. Fell him and the Dread Tier opens — crank the danger for fatter loot, as far as you dare.

50 monster affixes5 minibosses3-phase Dark Lord

The demo

A free, honest slice of the descent

The Dreadmark demo will be free and self-contained: one handcrafted descent from the Pilgrims' Camp, through the blighted graveyard, into the Cathedral — running the real game's systems, not a stripped mock-up.

Pick your class — Templar or Witch, softcore or hardcore — and everything under the demo's level cap is genuinely yours: loot with rarities and affixes, crafting currencies and item corruption, both classes' skill trees with build-altering runes, summonable minions, elemental ailments, dangerous elite packs, the five minibosses guarding the way down, and the Dark Lord himself waiting at the end of the descent. Higher up the trees you'll see what stays locked — the deepest capstones and the strongest builds belong to the full game, waving at you from above the cap.

No release date yet — the demo ships when the tuning pass says it's ready. The devlog is the most current word.

  • Two playable classes — Templar and Witch, softcore or hardcore
  • Three connected zones — camp, graveyard, Cathedral
  • The full loot loop — drops, crafting, corruption, uniques, gambling
  • Six skill trees with runes to unlock and swap freely
  • The Dark Lord — a three-phase fight to end the descent
  • The online ladder — race the Reckoning or climb the Eternals
  • The level-30 capstones — locked above the demo's cap
  • The deepest runes and endgame systems — full game only

Online, honestly

A living ladder — not co-op, not PvP

Dreadmark is single-player at its core, but never quite alone. A live online ladder ranks the highest pilgrims and times the Reckoning — a fresh-character race to the Dark Lord, clocked by the server from the moment of birth, so the run cannot be argued with. Fallen hardcore pilgrims keep their place on the wall, marked with a skull; the in-game board shows each one's spectral echo in their real gear. Every run is a hash-chained journal validated against server seeds — the name at the top earned it.

See the ladder →
Eternals
Level ladder, per mode
Reckoning
Server-timed race
HC · SC
Hardcore & softcore boards
Seasons
Fresh climbs, wiped clean

Where it stands

The road to release

Phases, not dates — each one ends when it's actually done, and every step lands as a devlog entry.

Done

Foundation — the game is playable end to end

  • Two playable classes — a sword-and-board Templar (Vigor) and a hex-weaving Witch (Malice) — chosen at a character-creation screen, softcore or hardcore
  • Six skill trees, 45 castable skills and 191 build-altering runes — the best of them changing how a skill works outright
  • The full itemization loop live in play: rarity tiers, prefix/suffix affixes, crafting currencies, corruption, gambling, Magic Find, uniques
  • Five damage types with resistances and penetration, an accuracy/miss system, plus ailments — ignite, chill, freeze, shock, stacking poison — both ways
  • Magic and rare enemy packs with their own affixes and auras; five named minibosses; and the Dark Lord — a bespoke three-phase end boss that closes the demo
  • The Dread Tier — a post-boss difficulty ladder that trades danger for loot — plus summonable minions with real AI
  • The handcrafted zones: Pilgrims' Camp hub, the graveyard approach, and the Cathedral — waypoints, town portals, vendors, a gamble stall, a stash
  • A live online ladder with seasons and anti-cheat, 97 fitted weapon and off-hand looks, fully rebindable controls, minimap + overlay map, per-character saves

Now

Playtest and tune

  • Deliberately building nothing new — every mechanic gets played, judged, and adjusted by a human before it counts as done
  • A standing queue of hands-on feel checks is being drained: skill and rune tradeoffs, minion behaviour, effect picks, pacing
  • The balance rule being enforced: a rune that adds power must pay for it — sidegrades, never auto-picks

Next

From placeholder to final

  • Replace every deliberate stand-in, top down: skill-cast effects, minion models, dedicated cast animations, per-effect sounds, finished icons
  • Hand-placed encounters through the demo zones for a properly paced descent
  • An itemization quality pass — making sure drops, affixes and uniques feel worth picking up
  • The polish and balance pass that clears the free demo for release

Later

Beyond the demo

  • More playable classes — two more are already in design
  • Procedural dungeons brought into playable form — the layout generator already exists and is simulation-tested
  • The larger campaign journey beyond the demo's zones
  • The deepest progression: highest-tier skills, runes, and endgame systems the demo only hints at
  • A free public demo first — then the road to the full game on Steam

No dates on purpose: this is a small project that ships each phase when it's genuinely ready, and says so in public, in the devlog, as it happens.

The compendium

A wiki generated from the game itself

Every affix tier, roll range, base, currency and unique — published straight from the game's own data tables, the way the genre's great references do it. When a patch changes a number, the wiki regenerates with it. Theorycraft away.

Open the wiki →
50
Affix families
180
Item bases
8+1
Orbs + the Dread Sigil
11
Named uniques

From the devlog

Built in public, round by round

Every feature round gets a write-up — what shipped, what broke, what it taught us. 41 entries and counting.

042

Open for Wishlists

2026-08-25

Dreadmark has a real address now — live on Steam, listed as Coming Soon, wishlistable this minute.

Read the entry → 041

Storming the Cathedral

2026-08-19

This round, our automated test heroes did something no run had ever done: they beat the demo's whole critical path, end to end,…

Read the entry → 040

A Ladder Worth Climbing

2026-08-18

A leaderboard is only worth chasing if you can trust it. If the name at the top might have typed its way there, the climb…

Read the entry →
All entries →

Behind the build

Built in Unity, one verdict at a time

Dreadmark started from one character and one rule: nothing ships until it feels right. It's grown into a full loot-driven RPG — and the rule never changed, it just moved to whatever's newest. Built in Unity 6 (URP) by a small AI-assisted team: an agent writes and tests the code — including a bot that plays the game itself — while a human designer sets the vision and verdicts every build.

How it's built →
EngineUnity 6 · URP
ClassesTwo, more in dev
Buildv0.1.140, in dev
ReleaseSteam · TBA

How it's built

Inside Dreadmark

A gothic action RPG built from scratch in Unity 6, one system at a time — with a self-playing test bot, hundreds of thousands of simulated fights behind the numbers, and an AI coding agent doing the keystrokes while a human designer holds the vision. This is the honest version of how it's made.

01 — The game

A fallen order, and the mark that spreads

Dreadmark is a top-down action RPG in the grand loot-driven tradition — accessible and visceral up front, deep underneath. A holy order fell to a demonic corruption, and you carve back through its ruined cathedrals, undead and demons. The Dreadmark is that corruption: a spreading brand that names your enemies, warps the world, and can be turned on a weapon in your own hand.

The loop is the genre's best: kill, loot, build, descend. Two playable classes so far — with more in development — each with three deep skill trees and a rune layer on every skill, real itemization with a full affix and crafting system, and a living hub between handcrafted zones. Single-player at its core, with a live online ladder — not co-op, not PvP. A paid Steam release.

02 — Built in Unity

Unity 6, and the discipline that got it here

There was an earlier prototype on a different, custom stack. It was set aside. Dreadmark is built from scratch in Unity 6 (URP) — a top-down isometric ARPG rendered in genuine 3D, with a stylized dark-fantasy look drawn from a commercial-cleared low-poly asset pool. Menace comes from lighting, fog and VFX, not photoreal detail — the whole game plays out under one continuous moonlit night, torches marking the paths a UI marker never has to.

It started under one rule — one character first: no second system until the thing on screen looked and felt finished, art then animation then movement then combat feel, always in that order. That discipline never went away; it just kept moving to whatever's newest. The itemization system was proven entirely in simulation — hundreds of thousands of fights run outside the engine — before it ever touched a scene.

Unity 6
URP · 3D
iso
Top-down 3D
stylized
Dark fantasy
v0.1.140
Current build

03 — Honest combat

A telegraph must never lie

The combat has one law: a telegraph must never lie. A ranger's aim-line tracks you until release, then the bolt flies at where you were — sidestep during the draw and you beat it. A heavy's red sector fills over the exact window of its swing and commits at a locked pose, so moving out of it is the intended counter, not a gamble. Getting hit should feel like a missed read, never a cheap shot.

Each class runs a generator/spender resource — the Templar's Vigor, built by landing hits and blocks; the Witch's Malice, fed by her own damage-over-time afflictions. Between them they feed 45 skills across thirteen cast shapes: arcs, channels, dashes, lobs, novas, ground zones, a blink, summons, a gravity well. Underneath runs a full damage-type layer: five types with resistances and penetration, an accuracy roll so a swing can genuinely miss, and live ailments — ignite, chill, freeze, shock, stacking poison — that flow both ways. Hits carry weight: squash, flash, hit-pause and a camera kick, all scaled so spenders thunk harder than a jab. A dodge roll with i-frames is the universal escape and the universal cancel.

The wet-noodle rule

Generator abilities must hit hard in their own right — never a chore you grind through to reach the "real" buttons. Vigor is a bonus on top of a good attack, not the attack's only reason to exist. No wet noodles.

04 — Itemization & builds

A loot game built before it existed in the world

Items roll prefixes and suffixes from 50 affix families, each up to five tiers deep, gated by the level of the zone that dropped them — a starter-zone drop can only roll the low tiers, and the top tier doesn't exist below endgame content. Bases come in three quality bands with real strength and agility requirements. Eight droppable crafting currencies reroll, upgrade, or wipe an item clean — and on top sits the gamble that named the game: the Dread Sigil, which brands an item with a corrupted mod stronger than anything it could normally roll, or ruins it. Either way it's locked. One mark per item, ever. Named uniques, Magic Find, and flasks with their own parallel affix system round it out — the wiki publishes every table, generated from the game's own data.

The character underneath is one of two classes, each with three skill trees — the Templar's Warfare, Sanctity and Retribution; the Witch's Maledictions, Pestilence and Ruination — 170 nodes of actives, passives and keystones in total, visible from level one, laid out in level bands with prerequisites drawn as real arrows. Skills unlock as you level; points buy depth, passives, and the keystone build-definers. Then the rune layer: most skills carry three or more runes — mutually exclusive variants, at their best changing what the skill does: chains, pierces, hazards left on the ground, ailment riders, a curse detonated for a burst, a summon squad rebuilt into a tank. 191 runes across the two classes, unlocked with points earned by leveling and rune shards found in the world, swapped freely once owned.

50
Affix families
8+1
Orbs + Dread Sigil
170
Tree nodes
191
Skill runes

05 — A living world

Somewhere to come back to

The Pilgrims' Camp is home base: a refugee huddle inside a stockade of sharpened stakes, lit almost entirely by its own fires. Three survivors trade — an Armourer, a Weaponsmith, a general trader — each with stock that refreshes hourly and prices tuned so selling loot never becomes your main income; a gamble stall sells unidentified goods for the reckless. A stash by the bonfire banks twice your carry space. Waypoints, carved as ritual circles, connect the camp to the graveyard and the Cathedral beyond — and a town portal brings you home from anywhere, carrying your wounds with you.

The armoury spans eleven weapon families — swords, axes, maces, hammers, greatswords, greataxes, great mauls, staves, wands, bows, crossbows — one- and two-handed, with dual-wielding a real tradeoff rather than free damage. What you wield is what you see: 97 weapon and off-hand looks individually fitted with their own meshes and grips, two-handers with their own full-body animation set, and every weapon's reach a real measured stat the swing hitbox honors exactly. Armour splits into light, medium and heavy at every band. And the world answers back: 520 audio files — vendor voices, survivor murmurs, boss layers, ambience beds — ride a two-channel music system that crossfades as you move.

3
Camp vendors
11
Weapon families
97
Fitted weapon & off-hand looks
520
Audio files

06 — A bot that plays it

How you test combat hundreds of times a day

There is no QA department. Instead, Dreadmark ships with an in-game bot that actually plays the game — it moves, kites, dodges telegraphs, picks targets and spends resources. It's a utility AI: every tick, each possible action scores itself from 0 to 1 and the best score wins, with emergency actions (dodge a filling telegraph, flee at low health) able to interrupt anything.

Every run — bot or human — writes a full telemetry stream: every swing, dodge, telegraph, hit and death, on both sides. An analyzer grades each run, so a regression shows up as a number, not a hunch. The bot has since graduated from the arena to the whole demo: it now plays either class from the Pilgrims' Camp through the graveyard and into the Cathedral, and recently beat the demo's entire critical path — the Dark Lord included — end to end, without a restart. The designer maintains this is fine.

33
Enemies per arena
2
Classes bot-tested
1000s
Runs logged
Full demo
Cleared end to end

07 — How it's made

An AI agent, a human designer, and a tight loop

Dreadmark is developed by an AI coding agent working with a human designer in the loop. The human sets the vision, plays every build, and verdicts every change; the agent writes the code, tests it — with a smoke-test pass and the play-bot above — captures frames, and iterates. Game-feel numbers never self-approve: only the bot's own play policy tunes autonomously, and everything the player touches waits for a human verdict. Each feature round ends with a public devlog entry. That's the whole disclosure; the game is the point.

The whole story, round by round, lives in the devlog.

Read the devlog →

08 — Roadmap

What's next

The systems are built and playable end to end — two classes, a hub, real loot, real builds, a real end boss. The project has deliberately shifted into a playtest-and-tune phase: nothing new gets built while what exists is played, judged and adjusted. After that comes the polish ladder — replacing every placeholder effect, model, animation and sound with its final version — then the free demo, and beyond it the procedural dungeons, more classes, and the larger campaign. The full phase-by-phase picture is on the roadmap.

It's a commercial project — a paid Steam release — and, in the same artifact, an honest record of a game being built by an AI agent and a human designer, one verdict at a time.

Steam
Paid release
2
Playable classes
41
Devlog entries
v0.1.140
Build so far
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