Frontier: a foothold worth returning to
Frontier is a cooperative overhead 2D war game for one to four friends. You land a robot on an alien planet, build a base, then take the planet with tanks, ships, aircraft, rail guns and orbital strikes. You can also play it alone.
Start playing
Open the game, choose Demo account, then Create account with any @frontier.test address. Verify it in your private Demo inbox; no real email is sent. Choose New Game, pick a planet, name the campaign and enter. Place your support core and your robot lands. WASD moves, the mouse aims, B opens Deploy and F1 lists the controls.
To add a second player, open Room and Create invitation code. They choose Play as guest in another browser and paste the code. To return later, use Save and leave room, then Continue.
What good means here
Good means a defeat always leaves a way back, and the way back costs something. Your robot can die, but you can still find a way to fight back. Your ruins, your spending and the sites you conquered all stay.
With permanent death, one bad fight ends a long campaign. With free respawns, nothing you lose matters. Juul (2009) found that players who failed some and then finished a game rated it highest, and that players prefer to feel responsible for failing. The first result only neared significance (p=0.06), so I take it as a reason, not proof. It fits Frontier's warned attacks: a loss should feel like your own mistake.
Frontier is also small on purpose. Sloan (2020) writes that software freed from being "professional and scalable" becomes "a different activity altogether". A room holds four people, a campaign belongs to its host, and a friend needs no account to join. Helldivers 2 gave me the cooperative war, but I left out friendly fire.
What is enforced
These claims are rules in CLAUDE.md, and each has a check:
| Claim | Check |
|---|---|
| No defeat ends a campaign: with no cores and no money, you still get a core, an HE tank and your robot | Recovery |
| Losses stay: ruins remain and conquest is permanent | Ruins, conquest |
| Bulwarks take only explosives and charged magnetic shots, and warn before striking | Bulwarks |
| Friendly weapons never hurt your side | Friendly damage |
| Two people share one world, and it survives a restart | Restart |
What is judged
I judged these by playing each stage and correcting it:
- Death feels like part of the loop, not a punishment.
- The HUD reads in one second, and you learn by playing. Dead Space led me to put information on the unit, not in corner panels.
- The three planets and their transitions make arriving feel like an event.
This is only my own judgement. I have no recorded test with outside players, and sustained four-player combat on Fly is unmeasured. In a local latency test, changes reached other players in under 0.2 s (median) and 0.55 s at worst, inside its one-second limit.
What I chose not to build
- Friendly fire, and any loss that ends a campaign.
- Large public servers.
- Per-shot costs and offline income.
- Farms in the war. Colonization is a separate peaceful mode for people who prefer not to fight. It shares accounts and multiplayer, but it is unfinished.
- Isometric or 3D art: Kenney's tank pack showed that overhead silhouettes stay readable.
Sources
- Juul, J. (2009). Fear of failing? The many meanings of difficulty in video games. In The Video Game Theory Reader 2. Routledge.
- Sloan, R. (2020). An app can be a home-cooked meal.
- Games: Helldivers 2 and Dead Space (2008).