Clutch

Clutch is a round-based tactical shooter in the tradition of the games I grew up on: two teams, one bomb, and no second life until the next round. You play alongside four bots against five on Oasis, a sun-baked old town with two bombsites.

There's nothing to install: play with a keyboard and mouse, or on a phone turned sideways with touch controls.

What's in it#

• A full match: a buy phase, a round clock, a bomb to plant or defuse, a halftime side swap — first to the target score wins

• An economy that works like the classics: win and loss bonuses, kill rewards by weapon, saves and force-buys

• Ten guns with their own spray patterns and inspect animations, armor and helmets, frag, flash and smoke grenades, and a knife

• Bots that play like people: they read the map for places to hold, change their plans from round to round, trade their teammates, retake the sites and win without you — at four difficulties

• Thirteen cases that drop as you play: 221 gun finishes and fourteen kinds of knife in dozens of finishes, each with its own wear and pattern, shown on the gun in your hands; your collection is saved

How it's built#

Everything is made in code: the town and its textures, the characters, the guns and their finishes, and every sound, synthesized when the game loads — so it downloads no images or audio. The match runs as a simulation at 64 ticks a second with no graphics attached, which let me play thousands of bot-only rounds to balance the map and the bots before drawing anything. Three.js draws it; the Web Audio API makes the gunfire, the footsteps and the bomb's beeping.