7 Seconds
Released
●9
Draw your squad's paths, then watch them fight. A tactical auto-battler with Horde, Gauntlet roguelite & CTF modes.
Changes
What's changed in 7 Seconds with each update.
🎁 Added
- Ranked ladder: climb 100 named ranks across 10 leagues by winning ranked Versus and Capture the Flag
- Every rank has its own emblem badge, accent colour and display typeface
- Barracks: manage your roster, spend command points across your units, and choose which ones you deploy
- Your deployed squad now stands on a 3D pedestal stage in the Barracks, walking on and off as you recruit or bench them
- Ranked matchmaking pairs you against opponents of a similar rank
- Each league you climb unlocks +1 squad slot and +1 Focus cap
- Demotion-proof checkpoint ranks at the top of every league, so a bad streak can't drop you below your belt
🧼 Improved
- Ranked PvP is normalized so only your skill and planning decide the match, not grinding stats
- Blade swings now leave a white-hot katana slash streak on every hit, not only on kills
- Your ranked rank, points and progress are shown on the main menu with a live emblem card
🪛 Fixed
- The ranked ladder card no longer overlaps the What's New panel
- Long rank names now scale to fit their card instead of getting clipped
🎁 Added
- Online multiplayer — press Multiplayer to drop into a live lobby
- A walkable lobby where you command your soldier by drawing its path, just like a battle
- Four matchmaking doors — walk your soldier into one to queue for that mode
- Versus 1v1 — plan your army against a real opponent's, then watch the 7 seconds play out
- Capture the Flag 1v1 against a real opponent
- Horde Co-op — two commanders share one army against 15 escalating waves
- Gauntlet Co-op — draft together and survive an escalating gauntlet, survivors carry on
- In-match talk — what you type comes out of one of your own soldiers' mouths (press Y to talk)
⚠️ Known Issues
- Multiplayer is brand new — please report any mismatch between players' screens
🎁 Added
- Pyro — a new flamethrower trooper you can recruit mid-run. Its flames set enemies ablaze, and it's the only class that walks through the Volcanic biome's heat unharmed.
- Wildfire — on jungle maps the grass, trees and vines now catch fire and spread it, torching anything caught in the flames.
- Weather — maps can now blow windy or roll into a rainstorm, and it changes the fight.
- Thunderstorms hurl lightning that can strike a unit dead, just like the snowfields' thundersnow.
- Inspect enemy units mid-battle — hover and click any enemy during the fight to read its stats, not just while planning.
- Side-by-side unit comparison — open a friendly and an enemy panel together and every stat shows a green or red arrow for who wins it.
- Your own units' voicelines now show in their info panel, the same chat log the enemies already had.
- Units trade short back-and-forth lines with a new generated-dialogue system.
🧼 Improved
- Snow maps now field more Teleporters, and Volcanic maps field more Jetpacks.
- Windy maps slow Jetpacks to half speed — it's hard to fly into a gale.
- Rainstorms short out your turrets and smother a Pyro's flames.
- Zombies now rally behind a nearby Brute, clumping into the horde's spearhead.
- Suicide Bombers detonate the instant they touch one of your units, not only when killed.
- Click empty ground to dismiss an open info panel — no need to hunt for the X.
- The in-game Index now documents the new units, weather and hazards.
🪛 Fixed
- Speech bubbles no longer jitter above units — they track as smoothly as the health bars now.
- Friendly voicelines are no longer styled with the enemy's red theme.
🎁 Added
- Explore mode: a real base is rebuilt as the battlefield — defend a starter squad against raider waves that close in from every edge, and loot the base to grow your army (the more you grab, the harder the raids).
- Per-unit leveling: your units now earn XP from kills and level up, banking skill points you spend into Power, Vitality, Precision and Focus.
- Unit inspector: click a portrait to open a unit's level, XP, live stats, gear and skills; enemies get a read-only inspector so you can size up what you're fighting.
- Auto-Spec: toggle a unit to auto-spend its own skill points for hands-off progression.
- Five new upgrade lanes in the between-round draft — Bleed (damage-scaling wounds), Frost (slows the horde), Storm (chain lightning), Ordnance (homing airburst missiles) and Reaper (kills heal and explode), each with a base, mid and capstone perk.
- Elite affixes on Brutes: milestone Brutes now arrive Blazing (shots ignite), Glacial (shots slow, ice nova on death) or Overloading (lightning nova on death), each colour-tinted.
- Enemy combat barks: red units now shout in-character lines reacting to the moment — a kill, a flank, a downed ally, low health — flavoured by their class.
- Two new curses: Transcendence trades health for a recharging shield, Stone Flux grants far more health at the cost of speed and range.
- Island biome: a new jungle-island arena with a real coastline and animated sea, added to the map rotation.
- Two new global leaderboards: Most Damage in a single battle and Highest Rout Combo.
- Every achievement now has its own badge icon.
🧼 Improved
- Living skies and dressing: a drifting day/night sun, clouds, bird flocks, fireflies, scattered foliage and wind now bring the battlefields to life.
- The board now grows to fit its map, so Explore bases can be far larger than a normal arena — camera, panning and pathfinding all rescale to match.
- Refreshed prop art for bomber ordnance and metal/suit surfaces.
- Portrait click now opens the unit inspector; Shift-click still quick-cycles stance.
🪛 Fixed
- Hanging jungle vines and tree-canopy leaves now show their foliage in published builds — they previously appeared as flat grey untextured panels outside the editor.
🎁 Added
- Every battlefield now rolls a biome theme from its map seed — Verdant, Desert, Snow and Volcanic each get their own sky, sun, fog and terrain colours
- Weather effects per biome — drifting snowflakes in the cold maps and rolling tumbleweeds across the desert
- Living scenery — grass fields, snow fields, trees with a leafy canopy and hanging vines
- Ambient biome touches — glinting ice, flickering lava and pillar fires
- In-game wiki entries for units and items
🧼 Improved
- Reworked terrain and prism materials with new custom shaders so each biome reads at a glance
- Trees, ice and foliage now use dissolve and wind effects for a softer, more alive look
- HUD and health-bar polish
- Combat tuning pass
🎁 Added
- Full keyboard navigation in every menu — arrow keys move the selection, Space or Enter confirms
- Rotate turrets and barricades while placing them with Q and E
🧼 Improved
- Collected items and upgrades now wrap into tidy side-by-side columns instead of running off the screen, with color-coded tooltips
- Main-menu loading is cleaner — the live battle backdrop stays visible while the game loads
- Stealth units now cloak their whole silhouette, clothing and held weapon included
🪛 Fixed
- The menu's background skirmish no longer plays gunfire and impacts over the menu music
🚯 Removed
- The frosted-glass overlay that covered the menu buttons while loading
🎁 Added
- Engineer: a support trooper that automatically builds turrets, mines, and barricades
- Stealth: vanishes while standing still, then dashes in and knifes enemies from behind for an instant kill
- New enemy — Stealer: a fast, tiny raider that races to battlefield items and steals them for the red army
- New enemy — Breacher: a lumbering bruiser that smashes through your built barricades
- New enemy — Teleporter: opens portals that blink a pack of enemies forward, right over your walls
- New enemy — Jetpack: a flyer that soars over cover and barricades and lands on top of the map
- Shimmering cloak effect for the Stealth unit
🧼 Improved
- Massive battles stay watchable: under crushing unit counts the fight eases into smooth slow-motion instead of stuttering
- Reworked health bars and unit visuals
- Big fights use less memory by freeing up GPU resources from off-screen enemies
🪛 Fixed
- Round-start lag spike when large armies all picked their paths at the same instant
🎁 Added
- A celebration banner on the menu: We've made it to Up And Coming - thank you!
🎁 Added
- A second main-menu theme that plays when you return to the menu after a match
🧼 Improved
- Large battles run smoother — combat audio no longer piles up into hundreds of overlapping sounds
- Massed gunfire now reads as one punchy volley instead of a wall of noise
🧼 Improved
- The main-menu subtitle now bounces letter-by-letter in a rainbow wave
🪛 Fixed
- Hold Shift and scroll the wheel to change battle speed mid-fight — now works in the live game
🪛 Fixed
- The What's New panel icons now show up in the live game (they only appeared in development before)
- Battle-speed scrolling works again — hold Shift and scroll the wheel mid-fight to change speed
- Turrets placed side by side now build in parallel — a unit that finishes one no longer hogs the adjacent turret and blocks a free builder
🎁 Added
- Pause the battle — opening the menu now freezes the fight with a big PAUSED banner while you decide whether to quit
- Place structures with hotkeys — A for Turret, S for Mine, D for Barricade
- C cycles your whole army's stance, F toggles auto mode
- Scavenger upgrade — your units roam farther to grab battlefield items
🧼 Improved
- Redesigned top bar — the PLAN/FIGHT banner is centred and every button is the same size and evenly spaced Kill feed now stacks repeated deaths into one line (e.g. zombie x3) instead of spamming a row each
- The Kite stance reads consistently everywhere — the stance button used to say "Retreat" while the cards said "Kite"
- Clearer deploy costs (shown in points) and a roomier controls hint that lists every hotkey
🪛 Fixed
- You can now reliably build more than one turret — a builder getting briefly bumped no longer abandons the structure for good or wastes your deploy budget
- Your units obey their drawn orders instead of being pulled away to build, unless no one else is free
- Bomber blasts now show one clean explosion — fixed missing, duplicated and misplaced explosion effects
🎁 Added
- Hold Shift and the arrow keys to orbit the camera (plain arrows still pan)
🧼 Improved
- Auto mode no longer auto-starts the army draft you open from the menu — set up your squad first; the in-game auto-loop still runs itself
- Slimmed and tidied the controls hint shown during planning
🎁 Added
- HUD-styled health bars with the unit's class name shown right on the bar
- Crowded enemies of the same type stack into one bar tagged with a count
- Arrow keys pan the camera
- Hold or press Space to confirm — blow through planning, result and upgrade screens
- Quit to the main menu mid-match without leaving the game (top left corner)
🧼 Improved
- Brute elites get a bigger, gold-labelled health bar so they stand out
- Advance-stance units now detour to grab nearby items, even around cover
- Health bars match the menu's angled HUD style and stay readable at any zoom
🪛 Fixed
- Fixed a freeze and crash when starting a round on a map with paths walled off
- Fixed a soft-lock where banishing every upgrade left you stuck on the screen
- Big explosion-heavy waves run much smoother (blasts merge and are capped)
- Battlefield items now cast shadows; medic heals no longer show a debug wireframe
🎁 Added
- Doom-style enemy sprite impostors keep huge battles smooth — once a fight gets crowded, the most-hidden enemies swap to lightweight camera-facing sprites so the frame rate holds up
- New reviewer thank-you item: grodbert's Hug — a warm peach pickup that grants your whole squad +10% damage reduction per pickup (stacks up to 60%, never invulnerable)
- Menu announcements bar — a home on the main menu for news and notices
- Build version watermark in the lower-left corner so you always know which build you're on
🧼 Improved
- Enemy impostors are colour- and lighting-matched to the 3D citizens, with per-unit animation timing so packs no longer march in lockstep
- Menu shows a frosted-glass loading gate over the mode buttons while sprites bake on first load — and a failed bake can never lock you out of the menu
🪛 Fixed
- Long editor play/stop sessions no longer exhaust texture allocations — baked sprite textures are reused and released cleanly
- Audio clip length now loads reliably instead of reading as zero
🎁 Added
- Build-your-army screen now shows a live 3D portrait of each unit, with eyes that follow your cursor
- A run-modifiers panel in battle: see your active synergies, curses and upgrades at a glance
- New Banana battlefield item — an army-wide attack-speed boost (a thank-you for ypdubai)
- Units now automatically walk over and collect nearby battlefield items
- Toggle Stance button under the portraits: set one standing order for your whole army at once, applied to new units too
- New global Achievements leaderboard
- Hover tooltips for the Brute, Surge and Endless wave indicators
- Auto mode now picks an upgrade for you after each wave, and auto-replays after a defeat
🧼 Improved
- Planning no longer freezes the game during big, mortar-heavy fights
- The Wave, Brute and Surge indicators are combined into one, so the PLAN/FIGHT text no longer overlaps the unit counts
- The playfund bar shifts through rainbow colours as it fills and blooms green at 50/50
- Cancel a placed turret, mine or barricade by right-clicking it during planning
- The defeat screen now tells you what made the wave deadly — Brute reinforcements or a catch-up surge
- Blades rebalanced: a little slower, with less momentum damage
- The damage feed no longer climbs over the top bar
🪛 Fixed
- Units getting stuck on corners and against walls — including when shoved from behind — now reliably free themselves
- Builders no longer get stuck forever trying to reach a build site behind a wall; they give up and fight instead
- Recruited units no longer linger in the modifiers list after they die
- Various tooltip colours and item visuals
🪛 Fixed
- Battlefield items now show as their proper icons again instead of plain round shapes
🎁 Added
- Reviews now show which thank-you item a bug reporter earned, right on their review (icon + name)
🧼 Improved
- Hover a review's reward badge to read what that item does
- Review badges now sit on their own line under the reviewer's name
🎁 Added
- Thank-you items for players who reported bugs — collect them on the battlefield for a permanent army buff: Surge's Spark (speed), WillX3D's Wrench (HP), Lag_Spike's Toolkit (damage), ubre's Mark (damage + range)
- Battlefield items now appear as little voxel models of their actual emoji
🧼 Improved
- Items now rest on top of raised terrain instead of sinking into it
- Rewrote item descriptions with proper flavour
🪛 Fixed
- You can now cancel a turret or other equipment from any earlier round (right-click it while placing) — it frees the unit that was assigned to build it and refunds the cost
- Units sent to build now walk around walls instead of jamming on terrain, and give up if a spot can't be reached
- You can no longer place equipment somewhere your units can't actually get to
- Horde waves no longer drag on forever when an enemy gets stuck on terrain — unreachable stragglers are cleared so the wave can end
- Fixed a layout glitch on the menu's reviews panel
⚠️ Known Issues
- Multiplayer is still coming soon
🎁 Added
- Battlefield items: collectibles now spawn on the map during battles
- Reviewer's Cookie: leave a review and a cookie appears on every map — collect it for a permanent boost to your whole army's max HP
- Items inventory in the top-right that lists what you've collected, with a hover tooltip explaining each item
- Auto mode: a toggle beside the speed control that auto-advances for you — DONE, the draft's BATTLE, and PLAY AGAIN each run a countdown and continue automatically (it switches off if you lose)
- Fortifications upgrade: raises your deploy budget so you can field more turrets, mines and barricades
- Steam avatars now show next to player names in the reviews and on the leaderboards
- Multiplayer button on the main menu (coming soon)
🧼 Improved
- Player reviews are now pulled live and stay up to date, each shown with the reviewer's Steam avatar
- The playfund bar fills up with an animation when you open the menu and shows the live player count
- Menu polish: battle unit counts are centered and the mode reads "Versus AI"
🪛 Fixed
- Tidied the spacing on the curse offer text and the leaderboard rank line
- Restyled the curse ACCEPT button to match the angled menu buttons
⚠️ Known Issues
- Multiplayer isn't playable yet
🎁 Added
- Global leaderboards now live right on the main menu — page through Horde score, best wave, Gauntlet streak, vs-AI wins, CTF wins and total enemies routed.
- A "What's New" panel on the menu shows the latest patch notes, with page-through history of past updates.
- Every achievement now scrolls across the menu in a moving showcase — hover one to see its badge, point value, prestige tier and unlock state.
- A live damage feed streams up the left of the screen as your army lands hits — bigger, hotter numbers for harder hits, with gold pops for crits.
- Hold Shift and scroll to change battle speed on the fly, alongside the speed button.
- The menu tagline now rotates each time you return, with a few colourful surprises.
🧼 Improved
- Battle speed is now yours to keep — it persists across rounds, waves and fights instead of snapping back to 1x.
- Lasso selection now matches exactly what you box on screen at any camera angle; drag over your own units to deselect them, with live rings previewing who's added or removed.
- Placing a turret or structure now drops you back to normal control instead of leaving you stuck in placement mode.
- Hard difficulty is now marked with a red accent so your setting reads at a glance.
- A styling pass across the menus: themed leaderboard, changelog, draft and upgrade panels, reworked plus and minus buttons, and upgrade card labels that fit on one line.
🪛 Fixed
- Units no longer get stuck on walls and corners — both your army and the enemy reliably route around cover and out of one-door rooms instead of jamming in place.
- The camera no longer locks into panning after you place a structure.
- The Brute Wave warning tooltip no longer spills its text outside the box.
🎁 Added
- 19 unlockable achievements spanning Horde, Gauntlet, vs-AI and CTF, each with its own badge.
- Brute Wave warning now has a hover tooltip showing exactly how the elite Brutes are buffed.
🧼 Improved
- Enemy threat zones and turret coverage now merge into clean blobs instead of a web of overlapping rings.
- The end-of-match leaderboard now sits beside the run summary instead of running off the bottom of the screen.
- The battlefield now opens on a low, angled view instead of a flat top-down one.
- Smoother performance in big fights and during planning.
🪛 Fixed
- Units now reliably set off when given a path, instead of getting stuck at the spawn or refusing to move.
- Units route around walls and corners instead of jamming into them.
- Advance and Retreat stances now path around cover instead of walking straight into walls.
- Fixed late-game Horde hitching when moving units or ending a round, worst with lots of enemies or heavy barricading.