In development · Android

Forge Castle

An endless tower defence where the crafting bench matters more than the battlefield. Your castle holds a line that never stops coming — and everything keeping it standing is something you made, rerolled, and very nearly ruined.

📱 Android 🔧 Godot 4 🆓 Free to play 📴 Plays offline 🚫 No ads
Follow development What's playable today
The loop

Hold the line. Take the loot. Make something better.

Waves come from the right. Your heroes stand on the castle and deal with them automatically, for as long as they can. There is no final wave — enemies scale on a curve that eventually outruns any build, and the run ends when the castle falls.

What you carry out is the point. Gold, ore, scrolls and orbs go back to the city, where the real game happens: deciding what to make, what to gamble, and what to level. Then you go back out and find how much further it gets you.

  • Runs as long as you let it — autobattle carries on while you do something else
  • Portrait or landscape, chosen before the fight and yours for the session
  • Every drop is deterministic from a run seed, so a ranked run can be verified
Forge Castle battle in landscape mode

Landscape mode — skills down the left, controls on the right

Hero detail card showing role, weapon type and equipment slots

Hero card — role, weapon, targeting pattern, status effects

The roster

Twenty-one heroes, none of them filler Live

Every hero has a skill nobody else has, three paths to take it down, and a specific set of status effects they can apply. No two are reskins of each other, and none are locked behind money.

The card tells you everything before you commit: role, weapon type, targeting pattern, which effects the hero can inflict, and what is currently plugged into their weapon and scroll slots.

Four roles that do genuinely different jobs

A team of five damage dealers loses to a team of three plus a crowd controller. That is the entire design intent.

⚔️

Attack

Raw output — single-target snipers, area nukes, and everything between. They end waves, as long as something else keeps the wave off them.

👥

Summoner

Puts bodies on the field. Golems, skeletons, archers, wolves — units that block, tank and buy time. They scale on health and duration, not damage.

✨

Utility

Makes everyone else better: cooldown reduction, attack speed, guaranteed crits, extra gold. Contributes little alone, changes everything in a team.

🛡️

Defence & crowd control

Stops things reaching you — freezes, stuns, slows, knockbacks, traps. Control is a role here, not a side effect: some heroes exist purely to stop a wave reaching your walls, and others to stop it fighting back.

Five stars, fifteen decisions, zero regret

Each star from ★1 to ★5 is a fork between three real options — a different skill, a different passive, a different upgrade to what you already picked. Fire, Earth or Wind golem. Burn, knockback or slow. They are not three tiers of the same bonus.

Respeccing is free, always. Change your mind about a star and simply pick the other one — no currency, no cooldown, no reset token to farm. A build you cannot experiment with is not a build, it is a wall.

We would rather you rebuild a hero five times chasing something fun than pick once and play it safe forever.

Star upgrade screen offering three options

★1 offers three different golems — each with its own status effect

A dozen of the twenty-one

Storm MageStorm Mage
NecromancerNecromancer
GuardianGuardian
OracleOracle
Meteor MageMeteor Mage
Shadow ArcherShadow Archer
Golem SummonerGolem Summoner
WitchWitch
CannoneerCannoneer
TrapperTrapper
AlchemistAlchemist
Forest ArcherForest Archer
Combat

Damage is not a hero stat

This is the part most tower defences skip, and the part we built the game around. A hero's level is only one of the things deciding what a hit does. The weapon supplies flat damage. The scroll bolted onto that weapon decides the element, the chances, and the multipliers.

Which means a level 400 hero with a bad scroll loses to a level 200 hero with a good one — and that is deliberate. Levels are bought with gold. Scrolls are earned at the bench.

Forge Castle battle in portrait mode

Wave 2079 · portrait mode · in-game screenshot

Weaponbase damage from its type and upgrade level
+
Scroll affixeselement, crit, attack speed, effect chances — the interesting half
×
Starsthe perks you chose, and the ones you gave up
×
Hero levela flat multiplier at the end — the part you can simply buy

Enemies then get their say: armour, dodge, and their own vulnerabilities. Elemental damage resolves as its own instance, so a fire scroll on a physical weapon is two hits, not one.

Six status effects, and builds that live off them

Effects come from scroll affixes and hero skills, each with its own chance to land. Stacking that chance is a build decision, not a stat check — a slow that fires constantly beats a big number that fires late.

🔥 Burndamage over time that keeps ticking after the hit
❄️ Freezestops a target dead — it neither moves nor attacks
⚡ Shockamplifies whatever lands next
💨 Knockbackpushes the wave back off your walls
🐌 Slowbuys your damage dealers more time
💫 Stunit keeps walking but cannot attack, and takes more damage from everything
The signature system

Crafting that can genuinely go wrong Live

A scroll goes on a weapon and decides what that weapon actually does. Rarity sets how many affixes it can hold — up to three prefixes and three suffixes on a Rare. The rolls decide whether those affixes are worth anything at all.

Affixes come in seven tiers, and which tiers you can hit depends on the item's level. A perfect roll on a low-level scroll is still a low-level scroll. Chasing the good version of an affix you already have is most of the endgame.

Scroll crafting bench

The scroll bench — rarity, affixes, and the orbs that change them

Rarity decides how much room you have

Affixes come in two kinds — prefixes and suffixes — and rarity caps how many a scroll can hold in total, not how they split.

White scrollWhiteblank · no affixes
Normal scrollNormal2 affixes
Magic scrollMagic4 affixes
Rare scrollRare6 affixes · 3 + 3

The split is yours to chase. A Normal scroll's two affixes can be two prefixes, two suffixes, or one of each — and on Magic you can run three of one side. Only Rare forces the even three-and-three, because that is its ceiling on both.

Orbs are how you argue with the result

Four families, each doing exactly one thing. Every one can improve a scroll, and every one can destroy an hour of work in a single tap. Each comes in tiers that must match the scroll's rarity.

Flux orbFluxraise rarity, add mods
Forge orbForgefull reroll
Rune orbRuneadd one mod
Void orbVoidremove one at random
Prefix chiselPrefixprefixes only
Suffix chiselSuffixsuffixes only
Honing chiselHoningnudge the tier

And then there is Erasure Endgame

Erasure orb Erasureremoves your worst affix

Every other orb is a gamble — Void included, which takes an affix at random and might well take the good one. Erasure is a scalpel: it removes the affix with the lowest tier on the scroll — your worst roll, specifically — and leaves everything else untouched.

The game shows you which affix is on the chopping block before you commit. If two are tied at the bottom, both light up and the orb picks between them at random — so the way to make Erasure deterministic is to break the tie yourself, with a Honing chisel.

That closes the loop the whole endgame runs on:

Honingpush the bad affix further down
→
Erasureit is now the lowest — cut it off
→
Runeadd a fresh one in its place

Which means a scroll with two great affixes and one dud is no longer a dead end. It is a project. Currently the most powerful orb in the game — and not the last one we intend to put at that end of the bench.

Merging and splitting orbs and scrolls

Merging — turn quantity into quality, or split it back down

Chisels change what the next orb does

A Prefix or Suffix chisel narrows the next operation to one side of the scroll, so a reroll stops destroying the half you liked. A Honing chisel turns a reroll into a nudge — keeping the affix and its element, shifting only its tier.

Merging turns piles of low-tier material into higher tiers, and splits them back when you need volume instead. Nothing you pick up is ever useless — it is just the wrong shape for now.

The city with its seven buildings

The city — every building level changes a number you will feel

Progression

The city is the other half of the game Live

Seven buildings, none of them decoration. The castle sets your health and how many heroes you can field. The well feeds the mana your skills burn. The market moves your exchange rates, the hunting grounds your gold, and the barracks decides how far your stars can climb.

They share one cost curve, so every upgrade is a real choice about what you need next — not a checklist to clear in order.

Account experience Designed

Beyond heroes and city, the account itself will level — and deliberately along two separate tracks.

⚔️

Gameplay experience

Earned by clearing waves, killing bosses and pushing your record. The obvious one.

⚒️

Crafting experience

Earned by consuming materials at the bench — orbs burned, ore spent, scrolls wrecked in the attempt. Progress for the player who spends an evening crafting and never starts a fight.

Splitting it in two is the whole point. The studio is called Fingerforge; someone who lives at the crafting bench should be levelling something, not standing still because they did not push waves this week.

⚠️ This one is specified and not yet built. It sits on the roadmap, not in the game.

How a session works

Push, or farm — decided per run Live

No mode select and no menu to commit to. One panel, one slider, changed whenever you like.

Push

See how far you get

Start where you left off and climb. Fail, and you get retries on the same wave — three attempts by default. When they run out the run ends, and you keep everything you earned.

Farm

Grind a wave you own

Drag back to any wave you have cleared and jump straight to it. Tick "on failed run, move me back" and the loop closes itself — a farming session that cannot get stuck and does not need watching.

Your highest wave is stored separately from your current one, so farming never costs you progress — the slider always reaches back up to your record.

Wave settings panel with retries and the farm loop

Wave Set — retries, target wave, and the farm loop toggle

Together

Guilds and shared challenges Planned

The social layer is fully designed and almost none of it is built. We would rather say that plainly than let a feature list imply otherwise.

The intent: cooperation that never turns into an attendance job. Nothing here will punish you for missing a day, and nothing will require a guild to stay competitive on your own.

🏛️

Guild hall & forge

A shared bench. Contribute materials, unlock crafting options the whole guild uses.

🐉

Boss raids

Tiered bosses no single player is meant to finish. Everyone who lands a hit shares the reward.

🗺️

Expeditions

Slow, asynchronous runs the guild sends out together — made to be checked once a day, not babysat.

🗿

Totem Wall

Eight personal totem slots plus four contributed by the guild — global buffs everyone benefits from.

⚔️

Guild wars

Scheduled competition between guilds, scored on what you actually did that week.

🏆

Leaderboards Live

All-time and weekly, per realm. The one piece of the online layer that already works.

How this gets paid for

Free to play — the boring version of that

The whole game is free. Every hero, every realm, every crafting system, every leaderboard. No premium currency, no energy bar, no loot boxes, and nothing that gets easier because you paid for it.

There are exactly two ways to support the studio, and both are deliberately dull:

⭐ A small subscription

Around two dollars a month. It buys inventory space, a separate leaderboard, a Discord role and our genuine thanks. It does not buy damage, drop rates or progression speed. Cancel and nothing you earned disappears — you keep every item, you simply stop adding to the extra slots.

🎨 Skins

Bought outright, at a fixed price, showing exactly what you get before you pay. Cosmetic only — a skin never changes a number. Buy one because you like how it looks, which is the only honest reason to sell one.

✕ What is never for sale

Power, stats, progression speed, randomised boxes, advertising, your attention, or your data. The full list of things we have committed never to do is in the manifesto.

No marketing gloss

Where the game actually is

Our manifesto says we will not call things finished when they are not. That applies to this page as much as to the game.

Playable today

  • The full loop — fight, loot, craft, upgrade, push further
  • One realm, Forest, with 21 enemy types and four bosses
  • All 21 heroes with working skills, three paths and five stars each
  • Scroll crafting, orbs, chisels, merging, and the weapon forge
  • The city, saves, both battle orientations, push and farm

Being built right now

  • Accounts, leaderboards and cloud saves
  • Enemy elemental resistances

Designed, not yet built

  • Realms 2–6 — Desert, Ice, Fire, Dungeon and Void
  • Guilds, raids, expeditions and the Totem Wall
  • Account experience, both tracks
  • The Ascendancy system and endgame crafting materials

The roadmap tracks all of it, and it gets updated when reality changes — not when it would look good.