The first battle needs no signup

At the very start of the project I made a few decisions that were not about mechanics but about a player’s first minutes. The main one: the first battle has to open straight away — no install and no signup.

Why the browser

Terminal Leave is a browser game, and that is not a stopgap until a “real” client arrives — it is one of the strategic decisions behind the project. All you need to play is a link: nothing to download, no launcher, no wondering whether your machine can run it. You can open the link on a work laptop, drop it into a friend’s chat or hand it to a stream’s viewers — and half a minute later they are in a battle.

The game will get a full client in time, but playing in the browser will stay possible after that. I’ll explain how I see it and why I decided so in a separate post.

Why a battle without signup

Simultaneous-turn tactics is easier to show than to describe. Until you have planned a round yourself and watched two plans play out at once, the words “both move at the same time” mean little. A signup form before that moment would turn away most of the people who might have liked the game.

So the way in is: a link, a button, a battle. An email and a password come later, and only if you want to keep going.

How it works

To the server a guest is a full record, just without an email and a password. They get a starting squad and play their first battle under the same rules and on the same server as everyone else. There is no separate “demo version” with simplified logic: what you see in the first battle is the game.

After the battle the game offers to register. If you agree, the guest record becomes an ordinary account: the squad, the equipment and the battle results stay with you, and nothing has to be played again.

The opponent

In the first battle you face a bot, and I settled that from the start as well: the bot issues orders the same way a player does and receives exactly the same information from the server. It doesn’t know where soldiers stand that its squad can’t see, and it doesn’t read your plan.

This isn’t about fairness as such. A bot that sees through the fog of war teaches a newcomer the wrong game: hiding is useless, flanking is pointless. A bot with ordinary vision makes the same mistakes a human does, and can be outplayed with the same moves you will later need against a live opponent.

Where it stands now

The first battle without signup has remained the way into the game. Later a training mode, in which soldiers don’t die, appeared next to it.

Play the demo battle: /play/?screen=demo