Hellsworn — 3D Dark Fantasy Survivor

About the project

Hellsworn is CoreCode's own game IP. In a dark fantasy world ruled by the Ash King, five branded heroes who have sworn themselves against the demons hold the line against endless waves — a 3D survivor game in the vein of Vampire Survivors.

Because it's our product rather than client work, we run the entire pipeline ourselves: design, art, combat systems, performance, and the marketing channel. That makes it the proving ground for how CoreCode actually builds things.

Core design

Combat and progression

• Five branded heroes, each with a distinct skill tree and level-up card pool
• Brand board, draft and resonance — a skill-combination structure that shifts every run
• Persistent account progression — a three-branch meta tree unlocked with achievements and ash points
• Diablo-style mouse controls with health and ember orb HUD

Engineering

• Built on Godot 4. We stand the skeleton up with primitives first and only layer art onto a structure that has already been validated
• Mass-enemy performance is measured continuously in a dedicated stress-test scene. Numbers come first, presentation second
• Automated verification gates — collisions, animation transitions and VFX loops are checked in headless runs before anything merges

Our AI pipeline, in production

Hellsworn is where CoreCode's approach to AI is most visible.

• Art — characters, monsters and UI assets are generated, but the style rules (anime facial proportions over painterly materials) are written down and enforced. Anything that breaks the rules is not saved
• 3D and VFX — modelled and authored through our own tool chain. We measured our way to the limits too: single-mesh generation can't support destructible or opening parts, so we changed route
• Visual review — anything you can only judge by looking (animation, VFX, model posture) goes through a video-reading model before a human makes the final call. We added this step after shipping a build that passed every numeric gate and still looked wrong
• Dev-log videos — each day's work is automatically edited, narrated and published as English shorts (@hellsworngame)

What we learned

"The tools approved it" and "a person thinks it looks right" are two different events.

We once had four defects survive a build where every check was green. An arm bent backwards, a sword sat parallel to the forearm, a grip floated outside the fist — all of it visible only on screen.

Since then, every CoreCode project carries a human screen review as a gate. Hellsworn is where that rule was written.