Chaos Lab the paperwork is armed

Where this project actually is

Stated plainly, because everything below reads better once it is out of the way. Chaos Lab is an early greybox prototype by one developer. There is no store listing, no publisher, and no audience yet. The characters are boxes with deliberately wrong proportions; drawn art has not been made.

What you actually do

You walk into an endless municipal town with a shotgun, a crowbar, a nailer and a flare gun. Clerks, technicians and inspectors come to meet you. Every level-up offers three perks, and the interesting ones do not make you stronger — they make your bullets behave strangely, often at your own expense. Pellets that come back. Blasts that catch their owner. Children that split again.

Then you die, usually to something you built yourself, and the Incident Report names the cause, prints an award for whatever you did most stupidly, and lists the perks you were carrying. Restarting is immediate.

Colour is the mechanic

A projectile's colour comes from what it is currently doing, never from the perk that made it do that. Stack four perks and you get a colour you have not seen before, which is the point: the screen has to stay readable while a hundred enemies are on it.

• Player, ivory with a cyan visor
• Enemies, brick red
• Ordinary and homing pellets
• Explosions and hazard markings
• Burning and recursive children
• Anything that can hurt you
• Aged concrete infrastructure
• Dirty olive municipal fittings

The game renders at a logical 640 × 360 through a fixed isometric camera — about twenty pixels to a world unit — so legibility is a matter of pixels rather than polygons.

The season cycle

Four weeks, repeating. The order is the whole design: perks are played before they are voted on, never pitched and then built.

1. Week 1 — Trial. Three gated candidate perks are live in the game, playable and temporary.
2. Week 2 — Vote. The three switch off. A week of absence is what makes the vote a decision rather than a formality.
3. Weeks 3–4 — Settled. The winner joins the permanent rotation, and the next three candidates are generated and gated during the quiet stretch.

The build carries the schedule as data and derives the phase from the date, so a season turns over without shipping two builds a week. A copy that is never updated can still tell it has run out of season — the schedule knows the date its own cycle ends, offline.

The vote page lists Season 1's candidates and says exactly what state the round is in.

How a perk gets in

1. Propose. A locally run language model turns a one-line idea into a candidate resource. Generation is offline and batched; the project runs no paid API and the model writes data, never code — a perk has no field in which code could go.
2. Import. A whitelist, not a reader. An unknown lever name is refused rather than mapped to zero, an out-of-range value fails in a second, and duplicate identifiers are checked against the shipped catalog.
3. Gate. Schema, values, then a headless run with the perk stacked to its limit. The verdict rests on counted work — projectiles requested, pool occupancy, the share the safety layer refused — so it is the same on any machine.
4. Trial, then vote. Survivors ship, live for a week, and switch off before anyone votes on them.

Two rules that will not change

A third rule is the developer's rather than the community's: content added by vote is still content the developer is responsible for, and a perk that wins and then proves broken must be removable.

What the game and this site send

The game can ask a server once at startup whether a newer build exists. It is a plain GET of a small static file: no identifiers, no query string, nothing about you. It never blocks startup, fails silently when there is no network, and downloads and installs nothing — at most it shows a button on the title screen that opens a link in your browser. In the 0.3.0 build no server is configured, so it does not go online at all, and it can be switched off permanently in your settings file.

This site is static files. No scripts, no cookies, no analytics, no accounts, no embedded third-party anything. The manifest endpoint the game reads is documented on the build page.