SALT LINE

▌ ARTILLERY ROGUELIKE  ·  FREE DEMO  ·  COMING TO STEAM

Salt Line

Read the wind. Break the ground. Make every shell count. An endless coastline of fragile structures, terrain that stays broken, and a draft every four screens that changes how you shoot.

  • Endless procedural runs
  • Destructible terrain
  • 24 modifiers
  • Local versus & map editor
Coming to Steam Free demo · coming soon Play free on iPhone (beta)

Windows · macOS · Linux · Android · iPhone. Offline, no account, no ads, no telemetry.

One shot can change the ground

Line up an arc, read the wind, and bring the tower down. The crater and the wreckage stay where they fell, so your next shot is aimed at a coast you broke yourself.

A shell impact brings a leaning water tower down, leaving its wreckage on the sand.
Captured from the game: one shot, one collapse.

How a run plays

Shells are your life

Every screen is a set of structures to bring down. Clear it cleanly and you earn shells back; waste them and the run ends. A one-shot clear pays best, so every arc is a small bet.

Draft every four screens

Pick one of three modifiers: heavier shells, airbursts, instruments that read the wind, economy tricks. Twenty-four in all, and they stack into builds that play very differently.

Never an unfair board

Before a screen appears, the game proves it can be cleared with the loadout you actually have. Hard, never impossible. The daily seed is the same for everyone.

Duels and your own maps

Pass the device to a friend or take on the AI at three levels. Sculpt terrain in the map editor, then share a code so a friend can fight on the same ground.

README.TXT■ ■ ■
              S A L T   L I N E   —   SHAREWARE
              =================================

  EPISODE ONE ..... Free. The first 12 screens of every
                    run, the daily seed, local versus.
                    Copy it, share it, play it forever.
  FULL GAME ....... The endless horizon, the challenge
                    course and the map editor.
                    Coming to Steam.
  REGISTRATION .... No key, no nag screen, no timer.
                    The demo is the real game, cut short.

  IF YOU LIKE IT: wishlist it on Steam when the page goes
  up, and tell one friend who likes Worms or Scorched Earth.

Shareware, the honest kind

Salt Line borrows the part of 1994 worth keeping: a free episode you can keep, copy and share, and a full game for the people who want more. The demo isn't a trial that expires. It's the same game, ending after twelve screens.

Salt Line is in alpha. It's playable end to end, balance still moves between builds, and some art is still placeholder.

Get Salt Line

Steam

The full game on Windows, macOS and Linux. The store page is on its way; wishlisting is the single most useful thing you can do for a small game.

Coming to Steam

Free demo

The shareware edition for Windows, macOS, Linux and Android: the first twelve screens of every run, the daily seed and local versus. It installs alongside the full game.

Free demo · coming soon

iPhone beta

The current alpha, free through Apple's TestFlight. Expect rough edges, and builds that expire after 90 days.

Join on TestFlight
Alpha testers: rolling dev builds

Rebuilt from main on every merge. These need access to the GitHub repository. Desktop builds are unsigned, so macOS and Windows may show a security warning; Android is a sideloaded APK.

Twenty-four ways to change a shot

Three offers every four screens, from four families. Each one is a rule change you can feel on the next shot, not a percentage on a stat sheet.

Shell

  • Ballast
  • Sabot
  • Airburst
  • Skipstone
  • Auger
  • Cluster
  • Thermal Lance
  • Featherweight

Instrument

  • Vernier
  • Anemometer
  • Rangefinder
  • Chalk Marks
  • Dead Reckoning
  • Plumb Line

Economy

  • Salvage
  • Quartermaster
  • Depot
  • Standing Orders
  • Scavenger Rites
  • Forced March

Structural

  • Enfilade
  • Sapper's Eye
  • Long Lens
  • Storm Front

Under the hood

01 Wind is an acceleration

Not a velocity offset. Lateral drift grows with the square of flight time, so a lofted shot is punished far harder than a flat one. Most of the difficulty curve falls straight out of that one decision.

vx += wind * dt

02 Every screen is proven solvable

Before a screen is drawn, the generator finds three or more surviving trajectories per target, checked against your current loadout with the same damage model the game runs. If it can't, it rolls again.

MIN_SOLUTIONS = 3

03 Determinism is a feature

Same seed plus same inputs gives a byte-identical result on every platform, enforced in CI. A run saves as a seed and a shot log, which is how replays and the daily seed stay fair.

DT = 1.0 / 120.0 · f64 throughout

A coast shaped by iron

Salt, weather, heavy machines, fragile structures. A 320×180 world in sixteen fixed colours, scaled by whole pixels only.

A game screen at 4x: dithered sky, layered sand and bedrock, a leaning water tower, a radio mast and a derrick on the horizon.
Terrain is layered sand, rock and bedrock, and each material takes damage differently.
Contact sheet of every sprite: three emplacement variants, water tower states, derrick, mast, silo, pylon, and the barrel angle strip.
Every silhouette in the game, plus the 19-frame barrel strip.
Structures remember: intact → leaning → collapsed
Water tower, intactINTACT
Water tower, leaning after partial damageLEANING
Water tower, collapsed into rubbleCOLLAPSED
Ranging: the barrel shows 5°, the instrument shows the truth

BARREL 0° · TRUE 0.0°

The sprite is quantized to 5°. The numeric field is not. That gap is why the Vernier modifier feels like an instrument instead of a stat.

Art direction

Concept boards for the world, not gameplay screenshots. Open any board at full resolution.

Salt Line Salt & Iron concept board with coastal artillery, structures and palette studies
Salt & Iron
Salt Line Storm Coast concept board with coastal artillery, structures and palette studies
Storm Coast
Salt Line Fieldwork concept board with coastal artillery, structures and palette studies
Fieldwork
Salt Line Sunbleached concept board with coastal artillery, structures and palette studies
Sunbleached
Salt Line Night Signal concept board with coastal artillery, structures and palette studies
Night Signal
Salt Line Iron & Chalk concept board with coastal artillery, structures and palette studies
Iron & Chalk

About the art: the shipped sprites and the title scene are cut from these concept boards, and some cleanup used AI image tools. The art is still alpha and gets a hand-drawn pass before release.

Press & creators

Title
Salt Line
Genre
Artillery roguelike, single player and local versus
Developer
Cascadia Collections
Platforms
Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iPhone
Status
Alpha. Free demo; full game coming to Steam
Price
To be announced
Engine
Deterministic Rust simulation, Godot 4 presentation

Covering roguelikes, artillery games or pixel art? Use anything on this page. Captures come straight from the game at whole-pixel scale.

Steam keys for creators will be available once the store page is up. Until then, the iPhone beta is open to everyone.

For contributors

Building from source needs access to the repository, Rust 1.99.0 (pinned in rust-toolchain.toml), Godot 4.7.2, uv 0.13.5 and Python 3.15.0 for asset tools. See the README quick start. Players don't need any of this.

git clone https://github.com/cascadiacollections/saltline
cd saltline
cargo test                       # sim + presentation, no engine needed
cargo build -p salt-line-godot   # the GDExtension
godot --path .                   # play

The design doc explains the rules in depth: DESIGN.md.