Battle Brawlers

Strategy auto-battler — a per-game branch of the webdev-game-stack monorepo

Information

The stack is:

• Vibe for frontend (runtime-first reactive framework via @ape-egg/vibe)
• Stylecheat for styling (attribute-based CSS framework)
• Vite + vite-plugin-vibe for dev server / HMR
• Bun for backend (https://bun.sh)
• MongoDB for database (https://www.mongodb.com)

Run the client locally

bun install
bun dev

The dev server is reachable both at http://localhost:<port> (printed on start) and at https://webdev-game-stack.test via the local Caddy proxy.

Run the server locally

touch server/.env and add:

PORT=1337
CORS_ORIGIN=*
NODE_ENV=development
MONGO_CONNECT=mongodb://wsadmin:qwe123@localhost:27017
SUPPORT_EMAIL_PASSWORD=<password>
PASSWORD_RESET_HASH=<custom_hash>

cd server
bun install
bun run dev

Features

• ✅ Socket server to handle any request (https://github.com/kkortes/async-await-websockets)
• ✅ Account log in
• ✅ Account creation
• ✅ Account password recovery
• ✅ Render backend hosting setup (https://render.com)
• ✅ Vercel frontend hosting setup (https://vercel.com)
• ✅ Vibe + Stylecheat front-end (formerly Svelte + Tailwind)

Combat stats budget

Source of truth for balancing races, equipment, racial bonuses, and (eventually) player-allocable specs. Pricing is linear — no diminishing returns, no soft caps.

Baseline anchor: 1 spec point = 2 damage = 4 health

Flat stats — what 1 spec point buys

Armor in this table assumes the flat-reduction model: each point of armor subtracts 1 damage from every incoming hit (clamped at 0). It does not deplete.

Stat	1 spec point =
Health (maxHealth)	+4 HP
Armor (maxArmor)	+1 armor (flat reduction per hit)
Damage (damage)	+2 damage
Critical Chance (criticalChance)	+1%
Critical Damage (criticalDamage)	+10%
Block Chance (blockChance)	+1%
Dodge Chance (dodgeChance)	+1%
Magic Chance (magicChance)	TBD — mechanic pending

Modifier stats — what 1 spec point buys

Modifiers are % multipliers in combatStats.modifiers. Rates below are pegged to default base values so the EV roughly matches the flat-stat table.

Modifier	1 spec point =
modifiers.maxHealth	+15%
modifiers.maxArmor	+10%
modifiers.damage	+25%
modifiers.resistance	+2% (scales wounded/concussed/exposed thresholds)

Rules

• Linear pricing only. Stats must be honest and easy for the player to calculate.
• Unimplemented stats (currently magicChance) don't render in any UI until they have gameplay.
• When adding a new stat, give it a row here before it ships. If it can't be priced linearly, it doesn't ship.
• Racial bonuses, equipment rolls, and spec choices all draw from the same currency — this table is the contract.

Cost & the coin economy

Because stat scaling is linear, equipment doesn't differentiate by stat shape — a higher-level piece is simply more of the same (e.g. armor = its level, so a higher-level armor is a strict upgrade of a lower one). The differentiator is coin cost, spent against a deliberately scarce economy: a player has roughly 25 coins total by level 25, shared across all 6 characters. You can't gear everyone in top equipment — every purchase is a trade-off.

So when pricing current and future equipment:

• Cost is the balancing lever, not stats. A strictly-better item must cost proportionally more coins; price is what gates power, not stat complexity.
• Cheap, low-level gear stays relevant as the affordable pick when coins are tight.
• The only stat-shape trade-off we currently make is heavy armor (+10 armor for −40% hit chance). Everything else competes purely on cost-vs-power along the linear curve.

Code base quirks

• Routing is currently MPA-flavored: a Vite middleware in vite.config.js maps URLs to pages/*.html (including dynamic routes like /brawlers/:i → pages/brawler-detail.html). Subject to change — could become an SPA later, so feature code shouldn't lean on MPA assumptions.
• Vibe is symlinked from /Users/kortes/Projects/webdev/vibe for live editing during development. Production builds resolve normally from npm.
• Global reactive state lives on $ (no window. prefix). Component-local state goes through component(state) + $[id].