The game
Dreadmark is a top-down action RPG in the old loot-driven tradition, and it is hard on purpose. A parish raised its own dead to fight a plague, and the dead stayed. Their master sits above the churchyard, and they call him the Mark. You fight your way from a refugee camp to his cathedral.
You fight in real time, pick up what drops, rebuild your character and go deeper. There are two classes so far, each with three skill trees and runes that change what skills do. There is a hardcore mode where a death is permanent, and a live online ladder. It is a paid game on Steam, with a free demo first.
Built in Unity
The game is built from scratch in Unity 6. It is real 3D seen from above, with a stylized dark look built on licensed low-poly art. The menace comes from light, fog and effects rather than detail. The whole game plays out over one long night, and torches mark the roads so the interface does not have to.
Fights you can read
The combat follows one rule: a telegraph never lies. A ranger's aim line follows you until it lets go, then the bolt flies to where you were, so a step to the side during the draw beats it. A heavy's red sector fills over exactly the time its swing takes, so stepping out of it always works. When you get hit, it should be because you misread the fight.
Each class has a resource it builds and spends. The Templar's Vigor comes from landing hits and blocking them. The Witch's Malice comes from the damage her afflictions do. A dodge roll with invulnerability frames gets you out of anything and cancels anything.
Loot and builds
Items roll prefixes and suffixes, each with tiers, and the place an item drops decides which tiers it can roll. Crafting orbs reroll, upgrade or wipe an item. The Dread Sigil brands an item with a corrupted modifier stronger than anything it could roll on its own, or ruins it, and every item takes the mark only once. All of the item numbers are in the wiki, which is generated from the game's own data, so it never drifts from what the game does.
A bot that plays every build
There is no QA department. Instead the game has a bot that plays it. It walks the roads, fights, kites, dodges, loots, goes back to camp and dies, with both classes, in the real demo areas. Every run, the bot's or a person's, writes a log of every swing, dodge, hit and death, and a set of tools reads those logs.
When the bots keep dying in the same place, that place usually needs fixing, and sometimes the bot does. They have played the demo all the way from the camp to the Dark Lord.
A designer and an AI agent
The code is written by an AI coding agent working with a human designer. The designer sets the vision, plays every build and decides what stays. The agent writes and tests the code, runs the bots, reads their logs and drafts the devlog. Anything that changes how the game feels waits for the designer's verdict.
Some of the 2D art, such as the key art, the story paintings and the icons, was made with generative AI tools, then picked and edited by hand. The 3D models and animations come from licensed asset packs.
We think a lot of games will be made this way, and Dreadmark is our attempt to show it can be done well. Every step is written up in the devlog, including the ones that went wrong.
What's next
The free demo arrives in Steam Next Fest, October 19 to 26, and Early Access follows in Q2 2027. The roadmap has the rest.