VEILENCE

A concept artist with 15 years' experience and zero coding built VEILENCE — a fully playable corporate-horror roguelike deckbuilder — in 10 weeks with Codex.

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Update — August 2026: VEILENCE is now SEVEIL, live on Steam with a free demo.

🎮 Play the free demo on Steam →

What it is

VEILENCE is a corporate-horror roguelike deckbuilder. You are Nate Marsh, newly hired at VEIL & CO. — a century-old textile company — chasing the truth behind your sister Amber's disappearance. Every workday is a card battle: performance reviews, reports, and overtime requests are your hand of cards. Plan your week on a living calendar, build a deck from 118 cards across 6+ archetypes (each anchored by a Keystone), defeat and recruit 8 coworkers, spend health and mind as resources, and face executives whose boss fights each run on their own system. The browser demo covers Chapter One — two archetypes (Rumor & Leader), three in-game weeks, and the first boss.

Inspiration

I'm a concept artist — fifteen years in the industry, and I can't write code. So I approached this differently: instead of learning to program, I directed AI agents. I started from a rough, creative demo and had Codex break it down, step by step, into executable files and real engineering. I commanded these agents to build the tools and the paths I needed, iterating through constant trial and error, until the game you're now playing existed. VEILENCE is my proof that an artist who can't code can still direct a real game into being.

How I built it — with Codex + GPT-5.6

VEILENCE is a pre-existing project; this submission covers the substantial extension I completed with OpenAI Codex (GPT-5.6) during Build Week. As a non-programmer, Codex was my entire engineering team. This week it drove:

  • Architecture & contracts — interface contracts for card effects, targeting and enemy skills; a seeded RNG; a versioned save schema with a cross-version replay gate and migration matrix.
  • Combat correctness — a settlement transaction boundary, a headless battle-replay harness, and a full-card regression matrix.
  • Boss system — multi-phase bosses with cinematic presentation.
  • UI & teaching — tutorial-lifecycle hardening, a multi-enemy view, a 4K-master resolution engine, and full ZH/EN localization.
  • Delivery — a Windows portable build and a password-gated Cloudflare Pages web deployment.

I made the product, design and art decisions; Codex turned them into working, tested systems.

How to try it

VEILENCE is now on Steam as SEVEIL — free demo, no password needed.

🎮 Play the free demo on Steam →

The browser build used during Build Week judging has been retired; the Steam demo is the current and much-improved version.

Assets

All art, music and text are original — created by me with AI tools and by hand. No third-party licensed material.

Please focus your evaluation on the features, refactors and demo hardening completed during Build Week.

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