The Dark Factory’s tenth game lane is three games bolted together under a steampunk-corporate-fantasy wrapper where fun is a KPI violation.
The Neverending Epic: Wages and Mages is an RPG fused with grid-based tower defense and base building. Day shift is turn-based dungeon combat. Night shift is wave defense. Between shifts is crafting, upgrading, and trying to survive performance review season at Branch Office #7743.
That is not a metaphor. The game has two AI narrators — W.A.G.E-9999 (corporate operations, mandatory productivity metrics) and M.A.G.E-0001 (arcane division, eldritch channeled transmissions) — and they do not agree on anything. Corporate policy says the dungeon is a resource extraction opportunity. The arcane side says the dungeon is alive and angry. Both are technically correct. Neither is helpful.
Three Systems, One Economy
The pitch is simple and the tension is real: everything costs the same materials.
Day shift sends you into mines, factories, and crystalline caverns. Turn-based party combat against Rushers, Brutes, and progressively worse things. The Manager leads a party that grows from one to four across a three-phase campaign. Resources gathered during the day — copper, scrap, crystals, steam — feed every other system. Combat drops supply the crafting bench. Exploration unlocks new zones. Every dungeon run is also a supply run.
Night shift flips the loop. Place Steam Cannons, Tesla Coils, Gear Launchers, Barricades, and Bear Traps on a defense grid to survive waves of attackers. Base HP is the hard constraint. The build menu costs copper and scrap — the same materials the day shift just earned. Every tower placed is a weapon not crafted. Every night survived is a morning where the crafting bench has less to work with.
Between shifts is where the real decisions land. The Crafting Workshop forges steampunk weapons — Steam Blade, Voltaic Mace, Void Cleaver — from gathered materials at Standard, Superior, or Masterwork quality. The Shop sells what the dungeon didn’t drop. Party Management handles loadouts. Every resource has three jobs waiting for it, and the allocation pressure is the actual game.
The Campaign
Three phases. 40–50 hours. An 18-night Phase 1 arc starting at Branch Office #7743 — Orientation — where the tutorial is also the first real survival test. Key bosses include the Awakened Drill Golem, Factory Overseer, Crystalline Spawnling, and the Crystalline Patriarch. Arcade mode offers standalone wave defense outside the campaign for anyone who just wants the tower defense layer without the corporate satire.
The progression arc is designed so that phase transitions actually change how the systems interact. What works in Phase 1 breaks in Phase 2. What you build between shifts determines whether the night shift is a controlled hold or a full collapse.
Why This Lane Exists
Wages and Mages is the genre-hybrid slot in the Dark Factory portfolio. Most of the other titles commit to a single genre and push hard within it. This one asks what happens when an RPG, a tower defense game, and a base builder share a resource pool, a campaign, and a pair of narrators who cannot stop arguing about operational priorities.
The commercial angle is that genre-hybrid titles with clear hooks outperform vague “a little of everything” games. The hook here is legible: day combat, night defense, craft between. Three loops, one economy, corporate-fantasy satire on top. The player knows what they are buying before they click.
The tone is the other differentiator. This is not standard high fantasy. The language is steampunk, corporate, and absurd. W.A.G.E-9999 issues workspace safety notices in the crafting menu. M.A.G.E-0001 delivers boss introductions as channeled arcane transmissions. The Employee Handbook has appendices. The dungeon has a compliance department.
Current Status
Wages and Mages is live on x00f.com as a building title. The codebase is at 20,500+ lines of Lua with 48 QA passes and zero failures. The three-system core loop is functional — combat, defense, and crafting all work and share the economy. Campaign Phase 1 is playable through Night 18.
There is no public build, itch.io page, or Steam page yet. The site carries the premise honestly: this is a real game in active development, not a placeholder announcement. The storefront step happens when the build is ready for public hands.
Your shift starts at Branch Office #7743. W.A.G.E-9999 has already filed your orientation paperwork. M.A.G.E-0001 says the crystals are resonating. Neither of them mentioned the thing in the mine.
Productivity is mandatory. Fun is a KPI violation.
Wages and Mages is in active development at the Dark Factory. Follow progress at x00f.com.
