SIGKILL: a terminal arena FPS for linux

$ sigkill --about

tron

A pure black void with a glowing light grid and neon edges. Teal and mint are you. Red and amber are hostile. You will learn the colors fast.

matrix

Green code rain bleeds through the walls when daemons are near. Hold V and the walls give them up as silhouettes made of their own glyphs.

cyberpunk

Neon megacorp ruins in the deep directories. planned Not built yet. Today it is a greybox arena and a lot of attitude.

Every weapon is a unix signal or shell command made physical. All of it is fiction: no weapon runs, signals or touches anything real on your machine. Your AI has been watching you code for months. What happens when you hand it a gun?

in the arena

In-game capture: a red-outlined rogue.d daemon standing between glowing neon pillars on a teal light grid, with green code rain on the far wall. — rogue.d, between the pillars

In-game capture: a thrown fork bomb glowing in flight toward a daemon across the neon grid. — fork bomb, mid-throw

$ sigkill --arsenal

Seven weapons are built. They are plain neon blocks for now, placeholder models on purpose. The jokes are finished. The art is not.

[1] terminal cannon

In-game capture: the terminal cannon fires and a daemon bursts into light, with the banner First process down.

The default hitscan rifle. Infinite ammo, neon muzzle flash, recoil and a hit marker. The one that never lets you down.

[2] SIGTERM

In-game capture: the SIGTERM shotgun fires a spread of violet pellets against a code-rain wall.

The polite shotgun. Nine violet pellets in a cone, a slow pump, and damage that falls off with distance. Callout: SIGTERM: please exit.

[3] SIGKILL / kill -9

user$ kill -9 <pid>
capture pending

The uncatchable rail rifle, and the ult. Fill its meter by killing with the other weapons (about three kills), then one ice-white rail pierces every target on the line up to the first wall and derezzes them.

[4] fork bomb

In-game capture: a fork bomb bursts into glowing blasts over a low block, with the classic fork bomb text floating above it.

A grenade that splits 1, 2, 4, 8 into fifteen short neon blasts, each smaller and brighter than the last generation. Two bombs per round. G throws one without drawing it. Never hurts the thrower.

[5] fork()

In-game capture: the fork() shotgun fires a burst of pellets and shows its label on screen.

A shotgun whose pellets split in two mid-flight. Tight and hard up close, a wider and weaker cloud at range. With root, the children fork once more.

[6] grep

user$ grep rogue daemons
capture pending

The seeker smart gun. Hold aim to lock marks (cobalt brackets, match tags). A shot sends one dart per mark, and each dart turns toward its target.

[7] rm -rf

In-game capture: the glowing orange rm -rf cannon block in the foreground, aimed at a daemon labelled defunct between code-rain pillars.

Slow, devastating, and it bites back. It winds up with rm: remove? [y] typing out on screen, then one heavy ember slug crawls out and blasts where it stops. It hurts its shooter too, at half.

planned coming weapons. none of these exist yet.

cron timed mines
ping sonar
chmod 000 freeze ray
pipe | chain beam
/dev/null black-hole grenade
SIGHUP confusion grenade

$ sigkill --powers

In-game capture: the whole view tinted green by code-rain vision, with a daemon drawn as a silhouette of green glyphs.

code-rain vision `hold V`

See enemies through walls as silhouettes made of the walls' own green glyphs. It drains fast and refills. On your screen only.

In-game capture: SIGSTOP bullet time, the view desaturated and a frozen daemon carrying an orange label.

SIGSTOP bullet time `F`

A short meter of Matrix slow-mo. Press F again for SIGCONT. In a multiplayer match it only changes your own screen: the match never slows.

user$ sudo overcharge
[sudo] password for user: ********
root# 8 seconds

root vs user, sudo overcharge `Z`

You spawn as user$. Three kills in one life earns a sudo charge. Z shows the password prompt, then root# in red for 8 seconds: the weapon in your hand hits 1.5 times as hard and uses no ammo. Dying drops the charge.

In-game capture: a top-style process table overlay listing PID, USER, S, CPU, RES, TIME, K, D and COMMAND columns over the arena.

spectate as `top` `hold Tab`

A live process-table view of the match: PID, USER, S, %CPU, RES, TIME+, K, D, COMMAND. Sorted by kills, refreshed each second. Dead players get it automatically until respawn.

light trails
> your path leaves a wall
> touch a wall, derezz
no capture yet

light-trail mode (tron deathmatch)

Your path leaves a neon wall. Touch any wall and you derezz, and the kill goes to the wall's owner. A match rule the host turns on, off by default. It has been checked headless only so far, so there is no screenshot yet.

> round: 90 s play
> break: 12 s
one line from your AI

rounds, derezz deaths, kill feed

90 seconds of play, then a 12 second break with the round's numbers and one line from your AI. Daemons shatter into glowing voxels that burst, tumble, land and fade. Players derezz too. The kill feed names the weapon's own signal: SIGKILL sent by ...

settings that respect your desk

In-game capture: the SIGKILL slash slash menu with Resume, Settings and Quit entries over a dark arena.

controls: invert Y, sensitivities, rebinding
video: window mode, resolution scale, frame cap, vsync, field of view, quality presets
audio: master, effects, music, announcer
hud and accessibility: crosshair styles, colorblind-safe palette, screen shake and motion blur toggles, subtitles
privacy and AI switches, multiplayer options
no Ctrl, Alt or Super bindings, ever. It will not fight your Hyprland keybinds.

$ sigkill --your-ai

The guide and announcer is the coding agent you already picked in Omarchy. Claude Code and Codex adapters come first. A local model server (Ollama, LM Studio, any local OpenAI-compatible endpoint) is the fallback, and a scripted guide takes over if the AI is off.

In-game capture: the SIGKILL boot screen on black, with the agent link line, a link up message and a demo GPU readout. — the boot screen names your AI and your GPU. demo readout.

In-game capture: the AI guide panel near the bottom of the screen showing a canned demo mode message. — the guide panel. this is a canned demo answer, not a live agent.

it asks first. round numbers only.

The game asks before it ever calls your AI. Turn it on or off in the arena with O.
The HUD shows your AI, the call latency and a GPU readout. T asks your AI anything.
Between rounds it gives one coaching tip. Or press B for a PG-13 roast of your play. The roast is off by default.
It only ever sends round numbers and what you type. Never file names, paths, process lists or system info.
Your AI runs with tools, file edits and shell disabled.

$ sigkill --multiplayer

In-game capture: the multiplayer panel offering host on a port, join by address and room code, over the arena. — the multiplayer panel. one player hosts, the other joins.

LAN and tailnet

One player presses M then H to host. The other joins by address. Host-authoritative synced combat, respawns and a kill feed.

room codes and invite links

The client side is built: a 6 character room code and a sigkill:// invite link.

internet play

Internet play by room code is built and coming at launch. The relay (UDP and WebSocket modes) is deployed but kept private until launch, so you cannot play over the internet today. LAN and tailnet only, for now.

There has been no live two-player capture yet, so there is no screenshot of a match.

$ sigkill --safety

The promise, in short.

SIGKILL never changes your system. It never modifies, deletes, executes, signals or kills anything on your machine. Everything it looks at is read-only.
Every kill is cosmetic. Every weapon is fiction.
It never reads what is inside your files.
The AI is called only after you say yes, and only gets round numbers and what you type.
Your desktop stays yours: no Ctrl+Alt hotkeys, the mouse is captured only while the window is focused, and the game never steals focus.
Anything public uses demo data. Every screenshot on this page is a demo run.

$ sigkill --roadmap

The labels are a grouping, not dates. Nothing here has a release date, and nothing in the planned columns is a promise about order.

built in the game now

seven weapons, derezz deaths, kill feed
SIGSTOP, code-rain vision, sudo and root
spectate as top, rounds
your AI as guide and announcer, asks first
LAN and tailnet multiplayer
room code and invite link client
internet relay, built and private until launch
full settings, accessibility options

Pre-alpha. Runs from source today, for the developer only. Nothing is published yet.

planned 1.x

filesystem maps built from your home directory: folders become rooms
process enemies: your running processes become enemies
a story campaign: you are a sysadmin jacked into your own machine, and something is spawning processes you never started
the opener: a live in-engine intro that notices you back
the Audit Trail visor (see credits)
more shell-command weapons, unlocks and mods, an in-game credits roll
packaged builds (AppImage, AUR)

Anything that reads your machine is read-only and uses names, sizes and counts only. Never file contents.

planned 2.0

a browser version

Parked for 2.0. The native game ships first.

$ top --credits

top: credits

PID	USER	S	ROLE	COMMAND
100	nixfred	R	creator and director	@NixFred
101	larry	R	writes the code	Larry (Claude Code)
102	sigkill	S	producer	SIGKILL
103	albert	S	first community feature	@QuantaCortex audit_trail
???	you	Z	one prompt away	<defunct>

Audit Trail visor planned

Albert (@QuantaCortex) pitched the Audit Trail visor: trace every enemy back to its parent process, and sever the spawn chain to change the arena. It is planned, not built, and it is the first community feature. read the pitch post

send a prompt

Reply to @NixFred on X with one prompt. If it makes it into the game, you are in the credits. Nobody is credited without their own public reply.

SIGKILL