MACH-X
I started this game on 9 October 2026. The working title was Wingstorm. The idea was small: a top-down plane shooter where every run is different, because you pick one card from three each time you level up.
That loop worked early. Fly, shoot, level up, choose. Lose the plane, start again. What I did not have was a world around it. The first planes were a Hornet biplane with twin machine guns and a few jets. The weapons were fantasy-flavoured. Some enemies looked like they came from a different game.
Within the first days I kept asking one question: what is this game about? The answer I kept coming back to was a night raid. Dark sky, searchlights, flak, a bomber stream going over a city that is already burning. That is a place with a mood, and moods are easy to build a game around.
So the game got a direction. Every plane has its own signature gun and handling. The Spitfire fires eight converging wing guns. The Corsair fires rockets. The Mosquito is a wooden twin-engine raider with four nose cannons. Prices in the hangar were tuned so that you earn the full roster over many runs, not in one weekend.
The game also needed a name that did not sound like every other shooter. On 10 October, day two, it was renamed. Wingstorm stayed in the code. If you ever dig through the save data you will still find the old name in a few keys. Mach-X went on the front: short, fast, and the X looks good in red on a dark sky.
I hold one rule: no ads and nothing you can buy that makes you stronger. I want to be able to put the game in front of someone and say, "this is all of it."
I also decided to build for a phone first. Portrait and landscape both fill the screen. Menus run lightly because a hangar that drains the battery is a bad hangar.
What I did not decide yet was how far the war theme should go. The roster has early jets and rotorcraft, so it is not a strict history game. But the weapons, the bosses and the worlds could be a lot more grounded than they were.
That came later. First, in the next post, a second kind of fight: gunship raids.