Dark Veil
Free · play online in your browser, no download
A dark fantasy first-person roguelite with N64-style looks: fight monster waves, then spend the gold on equipment cards in the House.
Official site playdarkveil.com, verified Nov 3, 2026. The developer's X article links the game at dark-veil.dimillian.chatgpt.site, which gives playdarkveil.com as its canonical address; the site credits Dimillian (Thomas Ricouard).
Where to play
Every platform this game is on. Links are checked against official sources; we never host or mirror games.
- Play free — official siteBrowserEarly access · Version 0.80.0 (7 Nov 2026); still in developmentFree
Runs in a desktop browser. No download.
Browser (no download) · Official link verified Nov 3, 2026.
- View on GitHubGitHubEarly access · Download builds only; the game's source is not publicFree
Download from the GitHub releases page.
Desktop · Official link verified Nov 3, 2026.
About Dark Veil
A dark fantasy first-person shooter roguelite that the developer describes as somewhere between Doom, Diablo and Balatro, with the look of an N64 game, “a bit janky, but with modern lighting”. You fight waves of monsters and bosses with guns, melee weapons and elemental spells (lightning, fire and cold) across 25 maps in five biomes, collecting XP and gold. Between rounds you visit the House, a shop where you buy equipment cards, try a weapon draw or open Armory packs, replace cards in your hand of five slots (gun, melee weapon, armour, a spell-giving artifact and an accessory) and inscribe Sigils, upgrade cards with effects such as burning, piercing shots and knockback, within each card's power limit. Cards come in rarities and foil finishes and stay in your Collection after a run; round scores become permanent XP for a Legacy skill tree, so progress survives death. Hits cut real holes into enemies and sever limbs with physics. The developer, Thomas Ricouard, built it with Codex and the Astra model: per the article, Codex built the game from the developer's prompts and feedback, including a custom Rust engine with a wgpu renderer, the geometry recipes behind the procedural weapon models and the foil card shaders, and ran the balance simulations, while the developer made the design calls. The site credits the game to “Dimillian (Thomas Ricouard) and Codex”. It plays free in WebGPU browsers, with a download for Apple Silicon Macs and keyboard and mouse, controller and touch controls; an iPhone and iPad version is pending release, Steam is listed as coming soon, and the site says the game makes no AI requests.
How it was built
Partially verifiedIn an X article titled “How to build a game with Codex and a custom engine” (14 Oct 2026) the developer walks through building the game with Codex and the Astra model: the first prompt had Codex use image generation for four concept screens, then the developer asked Codex to “Build a playable vertical slice from these concepts using Rust and a custom wgpu renderer”. Per the article, “The models are built from geometry recipes in Rust. Codex writes and changes those recipes”; Codex built the shared GPU foil card shader (“I didn't tell Codex how to write the shader”), ran 14,000 simulated campaigns for balance, wrote and ran the local music-generation script, added test launch modes, recording and frame-time measurement, and commits each finished piece of work under rules kept in AGENTS.md. The developer writes: “I still make the design calls.” The article opens with a disclosure that the game was built on the developer's personal OpenAI account with a $200 Pro subscription.
- OfficialThe official site's footer reads “Made with love by Dimillian (Thomas Ricouard) and Codex.” — playdarkveil.com (Dimillian)
- DeveloperAnnouncement post: “You can now read how I'm building Dark Veil + its custom engine with Codex”. — X (@Dimillian)
A custom engine in Rust with wgpu for rendering (Metal on Apple platforms, WebGPU in the browser through WebAssembly), winit for windowing and input, Rapier for physics and egui for UI; the shared Rust game is compiled into a native library inside a small UIKit host for iOS. Weapons and other equipment are procedural models built from geometry recipes in Rust that share parts and materials, the same geometry is used on the cards and in first person, and a runtime mesh-carving system cuts holes into enemies with the cut pieces simulated as debris. The shop table, card stock and booster wrappers use generated artwork, and the first concept screens came from Codex image generation. The music is generated locally with ACE-Step 1.5 and MLX by a script Codex writes and runs, then normalised with FFmpeg; the game only plays the tracks. At the time of the article the repository had more than 470 commits and about 154,000 lines across 320 source and script files. The site says the game does not make AI requests.
- Engine / framework
- Custom (Rust, wgpu)
- Languages
- Rust
- Team size
- Not disclosed
- Development time
- Not disclosed
- Development cost
- Not disclosed
- AI-written code
- Not disclosed
“I didn't tell Codex how to write the shader. I asked for Foil, Holofoil, and Reverse Foil that could work on any card, and told it to make them look incredible. My part was deciding what I liked and pointing out what wasn't working.”Verification notes: AI use, engine and workflow from the developer's X article (14 Oct 2026, 14:17 UTC) and announcement post by @Dimillian, read through the FxTwitter API on 8 Nov 2026; the article links the game. Features, platforms, the FAQ (“The game does not make AI requests or use your ChatGPT plan allowance”), the credit line and downloads from the official site (playdarkveil.com, also served at dark-veil.dimillian.chatgpt.site) and its changelog, read on 8 Nov 2026: version 0.80.0 on 7 Nov 2026; the oldest changelog entries (0.2.1 to 0.4.0) are dated 5 Oct 2026, and the article says the game had been built over “the past few weeks”, so no release date is recorded. The article describes Codex writing the engine, models, shaders and tools from the developer's prompts but gives no share of AI-written code, so none is recorded. The developer object is shared with Void Explorer, which OpenAI's showcase credits to “Thomas Ricouard, OpenAI”; this article's disclosure says Dark Veil was built on the developer's personal OpenAI account. The site also offers an Android download (not recorded, per the site's platform rules); the App Store button says “Release pending” and Apple's lookup returned no app for its ID; Steam is “Coming soon” and no Steam page was found; Windows and Linux versions are in development. The article says the game is not open source yet. The game was not played.
Development history
The oldest entries in the public changelog (versions 0.2.1 to 0.4.0) add the Collection, ChatGPT sign-in for syncing, shop checkpoints and touch controls.
Observedplaydarkveil.com (Dimillian)The developer publishes an article on building the game and its custom engine with Codex.
Version 0.80.0 adds fifteen new biome monsters.
Observedplaydarkveil.com (Dimillian)
Game performance
Each figure measures something different — concurrent players, owners, downloads and sales are never interchangeable and are never added together. Labels show where each number comes from.
Browser (official site)
Free in a WebGPU-capable browser with no download; an optional ChatGPT sign-in syncs progress across devices and publishes scores to the leaderboards, and the site says it gives no access to chats or the ChatGPT plan.
No public metrics recorded for this listing.
Not publicly available: Concurrent players (site), Monthly revenue, Gross revenue.
GitHub
Free download for Apple Silicon Macs (macOS 13 or later) that plays offline with progress saved on the device.
Not publicly available: GitHub stars.
Reviews & rankings
Not yet reviewed by our editors.
Not currently ranked.
Sources
| Source | Type | Published | Accessed |
|---|---|---|---|
| How to build a game with Codex and a custom engine X (Thomas Ricouard) | Devlog | Oct 14, 2026 | Nov 3, 2026 |
| It's out! You can now read how I'm building Dark Veil + its custom engine with Codex X (@Dimillian) | Social post | Oct 14, 2026 | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Dark Veil — Dark fantasy FPS roguelite playdarkveil.com (Dimillian) | Official site | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Dark Veil — Changelog playdarkveil.com (Dimillian) | Official site | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Official game page (language check) Thomas Ricouard | Official site | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
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